Cinema Papers No.129 January 1999

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3D c h a r a c te r an im atio n digital visual effects In Post Production

Stills courtesy Becker Films Limited, The Real Macaw © 1997

In a Savage Land Siam Sunset

Credits The Real Macaw The Quiet Room Diana and Me Dance Me to My Song Sally Marshall is Not an Alien Driven Crazy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

rising sun pictures

I believe that CGI is the most important new tool for cinema since the invention of sound. Rising Sun Pictures have shown to be real masters of that new tool, comparable to anyone in the world.

Mario Andreacchio, Director an extremely challenging brief..with the finest results and a dedication to perfection of an international standard.

Margot McDonald, Producer 40 high street kensington south australia 5068 telephone: +61 8 8364 6074 facsimile: +61 8 8364 6075 email: info@rsp.com.au www: http://www.rsp.com.au For further information or a showreel please contact Tony Clark or Gail Fuller.

CINEMA

contents NUMBER 123

P A P E R S • JANUARY 1999

IN SIG HTS mbits

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festivals

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SCOTT MURRAY

The P an dan ü s Film Festival

M U S E U M OF THE RARE W alerian B o row czy k w as a critical d arlin g o f the early 1970s, bu t c ru ­ elly ign ored since. S C O T T M U R ­ R A Y continues his re ap p raisal o f the overlooked d irector's w ork

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P a rt 2 o f the lost trea su res o f G au m on t B ritish.

BARRIE PATTISON

THE M O M E N T U M THEORY B ra d H ay w ard is the latest film ­ m aker to get a feature on the screen w ith little m ore than a script, a few acto rs and a lot o f p erseveren ce. H e talk s to P A U L K A L I N A ab ou t Occasionai Conroe Language

dirty dozen

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25TH AN NI V E R S A R Y SPECIAL

J e f f e r y K atzen b erg

Cinema Papers celebrates its 25th y e a r o f publication with a collec­

h as found a creative

tion o f articles specially w ritten for this issue. W e ’ve roun ded up the u su al (an d som e unu su al) su sp ects and ask ed them to w rite ab o u t their p assion for cinem a. A nd w e ’ve raid ed the unique collection o f stills to rem em ber som e g re at m om ents from the h ead y d ay s o f the A u stralian film renaissan ce.

A N E W FILM B Y ROBERTO BENIGNI

m> WINNER GRAND <«S ^ JURY PRIZE ^

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1998 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

A unforgettable fable that proves love, family and imagination conquer all.

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an d spiritual hom e at D ream w o rk s S K G . H e talks to S C O T T M U R R A Y ab o u t The Prince o f Egypt

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SEEKI NG RAPTURE

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inbits NEWS,

VIEWS,

AND

MORE

NATIONAL PRODUCTION SURVEY 1997-98

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he value of Australian film and television productions in 1997-98

was the highest on record at $421 mil­ lion. Ninety feature films and independent television dramas worth $551 million were made during this period, compared to $561 million the previous year.

These findings and more are con­ tained in the Australian Film Commission’s National Production Sun/ey released on 3 November.

Spending on production and post­ production in NSW rose markedly, boosted by the high-budget features, Babe: Pig in the City and The Matrix.

Independent television drama pro­ duction sustained the significant rise in 1996-97. The total value of series and serials ($213 million) was up on the previous year, while mini-series fell ($52 million), and TV drama was just under the 1996-97 figure of $312 million with $306 million.

Cathy Robinson, AFC CEO, wel­ comed the growth in the value of Australian feature film and indepen­ dent television drama, but noted that the figures for feature films had been swelled by a single overseas-backed film: Australian independent production is cyclical by nature and it’s impor­ tant that we don’t become complacent because of the major contribution of one project to the local production industry.

The total number of features was up from 39 in 1996-97 to 41 this year, reflecting a continuing trend towards budgets of less than $1 million.

Foreign investment in Australian product doubled the previous year’s result, bringing in $185 million across 45 titles. Babe: Pig in the City is responsible in part for this increase, but investment in TV drama was also up, from $52 million to $76 million.

Government financial contribution to feature films was less than 1996-97, due again to the low-budget nature of many of the projects completed, while TV drama was up from $47 million to $58 million. Australian commercial broadcasters and private investors also contributed less in 1997-98: $144 million across 62 features and TV dramas, compared with $173 million across 61 productions the previous year.

2

NEWS,

116 Argyle St, Fitzroy, VIC, Australia 3065 PO Box 2 2 2 1, Fitzroy MDC, V IC 3065 Tel: (61.3) 9416 2644 Fax: (61.3) 9416 4088 em ail: s_murray@ eis.net.au

ETC.

RAMBUNCTIOUS WINNERS

T

Editor: Scott Murray

he Rambunctious Vidi-Digi Festi­

Deputy Editor: Paul Kalina

val, held on 17 October at the

Forest Lodge Hotel in Sydney, gave plenty of cause to celebrate new video-digital filmmaking technology.

Fifteen finalists were chosen from a field of 50 video-generated short films, and winners were chosen by a judging panel that included: actors Tony M ar­ tin and Sonia Todd; producers Jonathan Shteinman, Anita Jorgenson

and Jenny Collins; cinematographer Kathryn Milliss; AFTRS’s George W ha­ ley; casting director Egil Kipste; and editor Keith Lynch. And those winners are: Best Movie

AH in a Day’s Work, producer Angela Barbour Best Direction

David Barbour, All in a Days Work Best Script

David Barbour, All in a Day’s Work Best Performance

Kieran Darcy-Smith {All in a Day’s Work and Still Wind) Best Cinematography

Daniel Askill, Static Garden Street Editing Award

Static and Parking Patrol Officer 808 Metro Screen Encouragement Award

Life in the City (Bryan Moses and Craig Anderson)

Editorial Assistance: Tim Hunter Advertising: John Adler Subscriptions: Mina Carattoli

Cate Blanche«.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Marco Del Grande.

IMAGE MANIPULATION: Parkhouse.

COVER:

film ratings, titles, session times and cinema locations, and purchase their tickets over the phone if desired. Fur­ ther plans for 1999 include purchasing tickets on the Internet and a preview fax service

Accounts: Peter Lademann Proofreading: Arthur Salton Office Cat: Oddspot Legal: Dan Pearce (Holding Redlich) M TV Board o f Directors: Ross Dimsey (Chairman), Natalie Miller, Matthew Learmonth, Michael Dolphin Founding Publishers:

FINANCIAL RECOUP he Australian Film Finance Cor­ poration (FFC) has announced that it invested $68.3 million in 58 new projects during 1997-98 , and has recouped $24.3 million on its invest­ ments during that time. It’s the second highest result the FFC has recorded since 1988, beaten only by the 1994-95 result of $25.6 million. The 1997-98 production slate comprised 13 feature films, totalling $57.8 million; 4 adult television drama projects ($19.9 mil­ lion); 6 children’s television drama projects ($37.9 million); and 35 docu­ mentaries ($11.7 million). The contracting international marketplace, and the apparent absence o f‘break­ out’ feature films is expected to dampen this success in the following

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Peter Beilby, Scott Murray, Philippe Mora Design & Production: Parkhouse Pty Ltd Tel: (6 1.3)96 506 211 Printing: Printgraphics Pty Ltd Film: Condor Group Distribution: Network Distribution © COPYRIGHT 1998 MTV PUBLISHING LIMITED

Signed articles represent the views o f the authors and not neces­ sarily those of the editor and publisher. W hile every care is taken with m anuscripts and m aterials supplied to the magazine, neither the editor nor the publisher can accept liability for any loss or damage which may arise. This magazine m ay not be reproduced in whole or part without the express perm ission of the copyright owners. Cinema Papers is published by MTV Publishing Umited, 116 Argyle St, fitzroy. VIC, A ustralia 3065, and is indexed by F1AF.

CINEMA PAPERS IS PUBLISHED WITH FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FROM THE AUSTRALIAN FILM COMMISSION AND CINEMEDIA

Pictured at Rambunctious: Joanna Cohen (Fes­ tival Co-ordinator), Angela Barbour (producer.

A ll in a Day's Work), David Barbour (writerdirector, A ll in a Day's Work) and Whitney Fitzsimmons (Festival Co-Ordinator).

STREAMLINE MOVIE-GOING new automated film information and ticketing service, Movieline, has commenced operations in Victo­ ria. This new joint-venture between Hoyts, Greater Union and Village Cine­ mas, and installed in 87 cinemas across the state, will enable cus­ tomers to access information, such as

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year, with only $18.3 million pro­ jected as the recoupment for 1998-99, supplemented by the appropriation of over $48 million.

FILM AUSTRALIA BEEFS IT UP n other annual report news, Film Australia recently confirmed the organization’s continuing growth. It

I

As this is a special 25th Anniversary celebration issue, several normal features and columns will not run ’till the next issue.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

THINK GLOBAL

NOW LOCATED AT

jpETEEN AMORE ECTOR MAURICE Ml

MR ACCIDENT

FACE/OFF 1 DIRECTOR JOHN WOO

I f c fetch I IRECTO^LYNNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;- MA Rl

MOUSEHUNT DIRECTOR GORE VERBINSKI

THE MATRIX DIRECTORS ANDY AND LARRY WACHOWSKI

THE THIN RED LINE DIRECTOR TERRENCE MALICK

Fox Studios Australia, Driver Ave, Moore Park NSW 1363 Ph 61 2 9383 4800 Fx 61 29383 4801

Australian and New Zealand queer

has approved $2 million new project investment, included in that are pro­ grammes such as Lies, Spies and Olympics, a documentary about Mel­ bourne’s forgotten struggle to stage the 1956 Olympic Games, to be produced

by Rob McAuley and directed by Peter Butt. Other projects underway include The Post, Sadness and Once Were Monks (see “Inproduction”, Cinema Papers, 127).

FILM SCHOOL SILVER he Victorian College of the Arts recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, with a season of its Rim and Television School graduates’ films at the Longford Cinema in South Yarra.

“From Blackboard to Big Screen” screened from 25 October to 4 Novem­ ber, and featured feature films from such alumni as Gillian Armstrong (Star Struck), Lawrence Johnston (Life), John

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short films. With prizes worth more than $2,000 in cash and facilities pro­ vided by the Stephen Cummins Film Trust and Metro Screen, the competi­ tion will be presented by Queer Screen as part of the Mardi Gras Film Festival in February. All entries are eligible for the Judges Screening, the Celluloid

CINEMAS WITH STYLE ~

hile film editor Nicholas Beauman was near Victor Harbour in South Australia recently, he came across this wonderful testimony to country cinemas, “if it’s true that television killed the drive-ins,” he says, “then the owner of this outdoor picture palace certainly went down fighting.”

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Ruane (Death in Brunswick), EmmaKate Croghan (Love and Other Catastrophes), Aleksi Vellis (Nirvana Street Murder), Richard Lowenstein (Dogs in Space), Ana Kokkinos (Only the Brave) and Geoffrey Wright (RomperStomper). Each feature was accompanied by a student film from each of the directors. The Film and

THOM FITZGERALD

C

anadian director Thom Fitzger­

ald, whose début film, The Hanging Garden, opens in Australia during December, talks about the films that really changed his life:

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979); scary as all get-out; scared me shitless. My friend’s mother took eight of us when we were ten to Alien, and I was the only one who had the courage to watch the alien; the rest of my friends hid their eyes. But the next day at school, they told a tale that I had been the one who was afraid; I got really mad and bent out of shape, and went home and cried a bunch.

That’s how brave I was in the end.

I loved The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein, 1984). I beat up my couch while I was watching that. 1 got so pissed off at the world, and it actu­ ally must have changed my politic somehow. It’s amazing how a film can change your way of thinking; it doesn’t happen very often, but that one did.

1 like all kinds of movies. I watched Welcome to Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1998) because Kerry [Fox, who appears in The Hanging Garden] was in it, and I was completely blown away. It just sucked me in, like in the first 11 seconds. Which is dumb, because it was just a shot of them driving down the road, but they were driving so fast. There were bullets in the background, people crying, that kind of stuff, and you could hear it. It

was horrifying, the truth of it all.

The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972). Gripping. The best soundtrack use ever - “There’s Got to Be a Morning After” - 1mean, come on. How poetically pointed can you get? It’s a gorgeous thing.

Other big influences include Peter Greenaway and his rigid, structural approach to things. I actually love watching his films, and then by the end hate them, because I always love his structure and art department and hate the story. Terence Davies’ Dis­ tant Voices, Still Lives (1988), a fabulous film. A brilliant, fantastic depiction of what memory is; I’m so interested in how different people represent what a memory is. It’s amazing for the way that memories blend into each other. It’s like a stream-of-consciousness movie, the way it unfolds. Fabulous and brave.

Television School, originally based at Swinburne University, transferred to VCA in 1992 and relocated to the VCA’s current site in Grant Street, South Mel­ bourne, in 1994.

SPRUCE UP YOUR QUEER SHORTS ntries are now open for the 1999 M y Queer Career Competition for

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Salon session, and for selection for the Mardi Gras Film festival. Entry forms are available from Queer Screen. Ph: (61.2) 9332 4938. Email: info@queerscreen.com.au or download from the website: www.queerscreen.com.au IN OTHER FILM NEWS...

S

outhern Star Film Sales has con­

firmed that Ana Kokkinos’

feature Head On has been picked up for North American distribution by Strand Releasing. It has already been sold to The Netherlands, Israel, Tai­ wan, Brazil, Greece, South Africa, Spain and France.

Rolf De Heer’s Dance Me To My Song has won the Australian Catholic

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«bits Film Office Award, for the Australian film that best dramatizes positive human values.

Murray Fahey’s new no-budget, short-shoot feature (nine-and-a-half days), Dags, has premiered in Adelaide, with other states, surely, to follow.

Director of photography John Brock ACS, and Franc Biffone (2nd Unit DOP) recently won the Gold Award in the Features-Cinema category at the 1998 Australian Cinematographers Society New South Wales Branch Awards for their work on Fifteen Amore. They are now eligible for the national ACS Awards, to be held in early 1999.

THE ULTIMATE FILM FESTIVALS W EBSITE ndependent filmmaker and lawyer Tim Richards has spent a year and a half putting together a website that contains detailed international film

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and video festival entry forms for the convenience of filmmakers all over the world. Sponsored by Vodicka Lawyers, the website evolved from a service they have been providing since May last year, and contains information about genre, deadlines, entry fees, restrictions and awards. It was after the AFC withdrew its entry-form supply service that Richards first thought of taking on that mantle, and from there, a website seemed the next logical step. The website should prove a god­ send to many an independent filmmaker keen on sendingtheir work into international festival land. Check it out at www.filmfests.com.au WESTERN FILM FEAST he Festival of Perth Lotteries Film Festival, four months of first-

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NOT FALLING SHORT hort films don’t always get the royal treatment, but the Pacific Film and Television Commission in Queensland pulled out the stops for the pre­ mière of Brad Walton’s new short film, Last Laugh, at the Hoyts Regent Showcase Cinema in Brisbane recently.

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release arthouse films screened at the Outdoor Somerville Auditorium, is now in full swing, with a different pro­ gramme every week. Look forward to Gadjo Dilo, If Only, Hana-bi, The Hang­

ing Garden, Love is the Devil, Le Mépris, Artemisia, and a Taviani Brothers retro­ spective. Screenings commenced 30 November, and will continue through to the first week of April 1999.

PANDANUS FILM FESTIVAL i»*, Scoff Murra«« In almost every way, the first Pandanus Rim Festi­ val in Noosa Heads was an extraordinary success.

Short film festivals are multiplying like bug anima­ tions all over the place, but this has a freshness and specificity which singles it out. It also had more than 600 people turn up to the open-air screening in the Cooroy Botanical Gardens amphitheatre overlooking Lake MacDonald. There can hardly be a pleasanter and more enchanting spot to watch short movies in Australia.

The Festival was divided into two categories: up to five minutes in length and mentioning “Noosa” in some way; up to 15 minutes with the theme, “Character of Landscape”. The judges were Peter Castaldi OJJ-FM), Gary Ellis (Manager of Screen Cul­ ture, PFTC), Robbie Hoven (Noosa Film Society), Tim Lennon (ditto), Eve Mumewa D. Fesi, OAM (the first indigenous Australian to gain a PhD from an Australian university) and Brendon Williams (DOP).

Hosting the event was actor Tony Bonner, who also held an actors’ workshop and, in his own time, helped hopeful NIDA applicants on their presenta­ tions. Bonner’s open-hearted commitment to the Festival and its patrons would probably go unno­ ticed in most places, but not in Noosa. When he signed off his MCing at the end of the night, the audience called out their thanks and cheered his contribution.

All the Festival entries were on VHS, sourced from all manner of formats, some looking like job applications for television commercials, others like a dupe of a dupe off the home-video system. All were amateurish in some way (especially in terms of acting and editing), but many were strikingly successful in quite individual ways.

Video has been a major breakthrough in allow­ ing almost anybody to make a short project, to try out visual ideas and stories. Afterwards, the long process of applying to government agencies for money to shoot on 16mm can begin. In the past,

6

government assessors had to take a deep breath and select from what looked best on paper; now they have self-funded videos on which to make hopefully more informed judgements.

Home-video activity is occurring all over Aus­ tralia, but it is festivals like Pandanus which reveal what is otherwise hidden and give filmmakers the chance to see how their work is reacted to and appreciated by an audience.

This is more important than at first appears. At the judging panel session on 13 November, Journey toA-Bay: With a Bush Tucca Lychee (Glenn Weychardt) failed to impress, appearing a rather childlike comedy about a gauchei country boy (Weychardt) leading the viewer along several nature trails. Not one laugh was heard.

The next night, at the amphitheatre, the audi­ ence rocked with laughterthe whole time. What had appeared lame was, in a different context, a witty and.inventive film by someone with real tal­

ent. Weychardt is a young-teen Yahoo Serious and agents ought to track his progress carefully.

A particularly hilarious moment (second time around) is when the normally-garrulous Weychardt mumbles incoherently at Alexander Bay, as naked people wander in the far distance. A subtitle comes up: “Overcome by Nudists”!

This author has for many years largely aban­ doned going to preview screenings in preference to watching films with an audience. This was just one more example of how a fuller understanding of a film can come from being in a social situation with a paying public. This is especially true for any would-be director of comedies.

The first film on view was Crush (jenny Fraser), about a bear who walks on to the beach and stomps on a sandcastie every time an Aboriginal girl (Georgia Matache-Johnson) builds one. A fight ensues, until the girl notices what the bear has

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BACK SEE TEAR-OUT

A Guide to W hat’s in Sto ck TO ORDER

Number 1 (January 1974) David Williamson, Ray

law and insurance, Far East Number 39 (August

(November 1988) Film Australia, Gillian Armstrong,

Harryhausen, Peter Weir, Antony Ginnane, Gillian Armstrong, Ken G. Hall, The Cars that Ate Paris Number 2 (April 1974) Censorship, Frank Moorhouse, Nicolas Roeg, Sandy Harbutt, Film under Allende, Between the Wars, Alvin Purple Number 3 (July 1974) Richard Brennan, John Papadopolous, W illis O'Brien, William Friedkin, The True Story of Eskimo N ell Number 4 (December 1974) Bill Shepherd, Cliff Green, Werner Herzog, Between Wars, Petersen, A Salute to the Great MacArthy Number 5 (M arch -A pril 1975) Albie Thoms on surf movies, Charles Chauvel filmogra­ phy, Ross Wood, Byron Haskin, Brian Probyn, Inn of the Damned Number 6 SOLD OUT Number 7 SOLD OUT Number 8 (M arch-A pril 1976) Pat Lovell, Richard Zanuck, Sydney Pollack, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Phillip Adams, Don McAlpine, Don's Party Number 9 (June-July 1976) Milos Forman, Max Lemon, Miklos Jancso, Luchino Visconti, Caddie, The Devil's Playground Number 10 (Sept-Oct 1976) Nagisa Oshima, Philippe Mora, Krzysztof Zanussi, Marco Ferreri, Marco Bellocchio, gay cinema Number 11 (January 1977) Emile De Antonio, Jill Robb, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roman Polanski, Saul Bass, The Picture Show Man Number 12 (April 1977) Ken Loach, Tom Haydon, Donald Sutherland, Bert Deling, Piero Tosi, John Dankworth, John Scot, Days of Hope, The Getting of Wisdom Number 13 (July 1977) Louis Malle, Paul Cox, John Power, Jeanine Seawell, Peter Sykes, Bernardo Bertolucci, In Search of Anna Number 14 (October 1977) Phil Noyce, Matt Carroll, Eric Rohmer, Terry Jackman, John Huston, Luke's Kingdom, The Last Wave, Blue Fire Lady Number 15 (January 1978) Tom Cowan, Truffaut, John Faulkner, Stephen Wallace, the Taviani brothers, Sri Lankan film, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith Number 16 (AprilJune 1978) Gunnel Lindblom, John Duigan, Steven Spielberg, Tom Jeffrey, The Africa Project, Swedish cinema, Dawn!, Patrick Number 17 (AugSept 1978) Bill Bain, Isabelle Huppert, Brian May, Polish cinema, Newsfront, The Night the Prowler Number 18 (Oct-Nov 1978) John Lamond, Sonia Borg, Alain Tanner, Indian cinema, Dimboola, Cathy's Child Number 19 (Jan-Feb 1979) Antony Ginnane, Stanley Hawes, Jeremy Thomas, Andrew Sarris, sponsored documentaries, Blue Fin Number 20 (M arch -A pril 1979) Ken Cameron, Claude Lelouch, Jim Sharman, French film. My Brilliant Career Number 21 (M ay-June 1979) Vietnam on Film, the Cantrills, French cinema, Mad Max, Snapshot, The Odd Angry Shot, Franklin on Hitchcock Number 22 (July-Aug 1979) Bruce Petty, Luciana Arrighi, Albie Thoms, Stax, Alison's Birthday Number 23 SOLD OUT Number 24 (DecJan 1980) Brian Trenchard-Smith, Ian Holmes, Arthur Hiller, Jerzy Toeplitz, Brazilian cinema, Harlequin Number 25 (Feb-March 1980) David Puttnam, Janet Strickland, Everett de Roche, Peter Faiman, Chain Reaction, Stir Number 26 (AprilM ay 1980) Charles H. Joffe, Jerome Heilman, Malcolm Smith, Australian nationalism, Japanese cinema, Peter Weir, Water Under the Bridge Number 27 (June-July 1980) Randal Kleiser, Peter Yeldham, Donald Richie, obituary of Hitchcock, NZ film industry, Grendel Grendel Grendel Number 28 (Aug-Sept 1980) Bob Godfrey, Diane Kurys, Tim Burns, John O'Shea, Bruce Beresford, Bad Timing, Roadgames Number 29 (Oct-Nov 1980) Bob Ellis, Uri Windt, Edward Woodward, Lino Brocka, Stephen Wallace, Philippine cinema, Cruising, The Last Outlaw Number 30 (Dec 1980-Jan 1981) Sam Fuller, 'Breaker' Morant rethought, Richard Lester, Canada supplement, The Chain Reaction, Blood Money Number 31 (M arch-A pril 1981) Bryan Brown, looking in on Dressed to Kill, The Last Outlaw, Fatty Finn, Windows', lesbian as villain, the new generation Number 32 (M ay-June 1981) Judy David, David Williamson, Richard Rush, Swinburne, Cuban cinema, Public Enemy Number One, The Alternative Number 33 (June-July 1976) John Duigan, the new tax concessions, Robert Altman, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Edward Fox, Gallipoli, Roadgames Numbers 34 and 35 SOLD OUT Number 36 (February 1982) Kevin Dobson, Brian Kearney, Sonia Hofmann, Michael Rubbo, Blow Out, 'Breaker' Morant, Body Heat, The Man from Snowy River Number 37 (April 1982) Stephen MacLean, Jacki Weaver, Carlos Saura, Peter Ustinov, women in drama, Monkey Grip Number 38 (June 1982) Geoff Burrowes, George Miller, James Ivory, Phil Noyce, Joan Fontaine, Tony Williams,

1982) Helen Morse, Richard Mason, Anja Breien,

Fred Schepisi, Wes Craven, John Waters, Al Clark, Shame screenplay part 1 Number 71 (January 1989) Yahoo Serious, David Cronenberg, 1988 in retrospect, film sound, Last Temptation of Christ, Philip Brophy Number 72 (M arch 1989) Little Dorrit, Australian sci-fi movies, 1988 mini-series, Aromarama, Celia, La dolce Vita, women and Westerns Number 73 (M ay 1989) Cannes '89, Dead Calm, Franco Nero, Jane Campion, The Prisoner of St. Petersburg, Frank Pierson, Pay TV Number 74 (July 1989) The Delinquents, Australians in Hollywood, Chinese cinema, Philippe Mora, Yuri Sokol, Twins, G hosts... of the Civil Dead, Shame screenplay Number 75 (September 1989) Sally Bongers, the teen movie, animated, Edens Lost, PetSematary, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, Ed Pressman Number 76 (November 1989) Simon Wincer, Quigley Down Under, Kennedy Miller, Terry Hayes, Bangkok Hilton, John Duigan, Flirting, Romero, Dennis Hopper, Frank Howson, Ron Cobb Number 77 (January 1990) John Farrow mono­ graph, Blood Oath, Dennis Whitburn, Brian Williams, Don McLennan, Breakaway, "Crocodile" Dundee overseas Number 78 (M arch 1990) The Crossing, Ray Argali, Return Home, Peter Greenaway and The Cook..., Michel Ciment, Bangkok Hilton, Barlow and Chambers Number 79 SOLD OUT Number 80 (August 1990) Cannes report, Fred Schepisi career interview, Peter Weir and Greencard, Pauline Chan, Gus Van Sant and Drugstore Cowboy, German stories Number 81 (December 1990) Ian Pringle Isabelle Eberhardt, Jane Campion, An Angel At M y Table, Martin Scorsese and Goodfellas, Presumed Innocent Number 82 (M arch 1991) The Godfather Part III, Barbet Schroeder, Reversal of Fortune, Black Robe, Raymond Hollis Longford, Backsliding Number 83 (M ay 1991) Australia at Cannes, Gillian Armstrong, The Last Days at Chez Nous, The Silence of the Lambs, Flynn, Dead to the World, Anthony Hopkins, Spotswood Number 84 (August 1991) James Cameron and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Dennis O'Rourke, Good Woman of Bangkok, Susan Dermody, Breathing Under Water, Cannes report, FFC Number 85 (November 1991) Jocelyn Moorhouse, Proof, Blake Edwards, Switch', Callie Khouri: Thelma & Louise', indepen­ dent exhibition and distribution, FFC part 2 Number 86 (January 1992) Romper Stomper, The Nostradamus Kid, Greenkeeping, Eightball, Kathryn Bigelow, HDTV and Super 16 Number 87 (March 1992) Multi-cultural cinema, Steven Spielberg, Hook, George Negus and The Red Unknown, Richard Lowenstein, Say a Little Prayer, Jewish cinema Number 88 (M ay-June 1992) Strictly Ballroom, Hammers Over the Anvil, Daydream Believer, Wim Wender's Until The End of the World, Satyajit Ray Number 89 (August 1992) Cannes '92, David Lynch, Vitali Kanievski, Gianni Amelio, Fortress, film-literature connections, teen movies debate Number 90 (October 1992) The Last Days of Chez Nous, Ridley Scott: 1492, Stephen Elliott: Frauds, Giorgio Mangiamele, Cultural Differences and Ethnicity in Australian Cinema, John Frankenheimer's Year of the Gun Number 91 (January 1993) Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven', Raul Ruiz, George Miller and Gross Misconduct, David Elfick's Love in Limbo, On the Beach, Australia's first films: part 1 Number 92 (April 1993) Reckless Kelly, George Miller and Lorenzo's Oil, Megan Simpson, Alex, The Lover, women in film and television, Australia's first films: part 2 Number 93 (M ay 1993) Jane Campion and The Piano, Laurie Mclnnes and Broken Highway, Tracey Moffatt and Bedevil, Lightworks and Avid, Australia's first films: part 3 Number 94 (August 1993) Cannes '94, Steve Buscemi and Reservoir Dogs, Paul Cox, Michael Jenkin's The Heartbreak Kid, 'Coming of Age' films, Australia's first films: part 4 Number 95 (October I993) Lynn-Marie Milburn's Memories & Dreams, Franklin on the science of previews, The Custodian, documentary supple­ ment, Tom Zubricki, John Hughes, Australia's first films: part 5 Number 96 (December 1993) Queensland issue: overview of film in Queensland, early Queensland cinema, Jason Donovan and Donald Crombie, Rough Diamonds, Australia's first films: part 6 Number 97-8 (April 1994) 20th Anniversary double issue with New Zealand sup­ plement, Simon Wincer and Lightning Jack, Richard Franklin on leaving America, Australia's first films: part 7 Number 99 (June 1994) Krzysztof

8

David Millilkan, Derek Granger, Norwegian cine­ ma, National Film Archive, We of the Never Never Number 40 (October 1982) Henri Safran, Michael Ritchie, Pauline Kael, Wendy Hughes, Ray Barrett, M y Dinner with Andre, The Return of Captain Invincible Number 41 (Decem ber 1982) Igor Auzins, Paul Schrader, Peter Tammer, Liliana Cavani, Colin Higgins, The Year of Living Dangerously Number 42 (M arch 1983) Mel Gibson, John Waters, Ian Pringle, Agnes Varda, copyright, Strikebound, The Man from Snowy River Number 43 (M ay-June 1983) Sydney Pollack, Denny Lawrence, Graeme Clifford, The Dismissal, Sumner Locke Elliott's Careful He Might Hear You Number 44-45 (April 1984) David Stevens, Simon Wincer, Susan Lambert, a personal history of Cinema Papers, Street Kids Number 46 (July 1984) Paul Cox, Russell Mulcahy, Alan J. Pakula, Robert Duvall, Jeremy Irons, Eureka Stockade, Waterfront, The Boy in the Bush, A Woman Suffers, Street Hero Number 47 (August 1984) Richard Lowenstein, Wim Wenders, David Bradbury, Sophia Turkiewicz, Hugh Hudson, Robbery Under Arms Number 48 (Oct-Nov 1984) Ken Cameron, Michael Pattinson, Jan Sardi, Yoram Gross, Bodyline, The Slim Dusty Movie Number 49 (December 1984) Alain Resnais, Brian McKenzie, Angela Punch McGregor, Ennio Morricone, Jane Campion, horror films. Nie! Lynne Number 50 (FebM arch 1985) Stephen Wallace, Ian Pringle, Walerian Borowczyk, Peter Schreck, Bill Conti, Brian May, The Last Bastion, B liss Number 51 (M ay 1985) Lino Brocka, Harrison Ford, Noni Hazlehurst, Dusan Makavejev, Emoh Ruo, Winners, Morris West's The Naked Country, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Robbery Under Arms Number 52 (July 1985) John Schlesinger, Gillian Armstrong, Alan Parker, soap operas, TV news, film advertising. Don't Call Me Girlie, For Love Alone, Double Sculls Number 53 (September 1985) Brian Brown, Nicolas Roeg, Vincent Ward, Hector Crawford, Emir Kusturica, NZ film and TV, Return to Eden Number 54 (November 1985) Graeme Clifford, Bob Weis, John Boorman, Menahem Golan, rock videos. Wills and Burke, The Great Bookie Robbery, The Lancaster Miller Affair Number 55 (January 1986) James Stewart, Debbie Byrne, Brian Thompson, Paul Verhoeven, Derek Meddings, tie-in marketing, The Right Hand Man, Birdsville Number 56 (M arch 1986) Fred Schepisi, Dennis O'Rourke, Brian Trenchard-Smith, John Hargreaves, Dead-end Drive-in, The More Things Chan ge..., Kangaroo, Tracy Number 57 SOLD OUT Number 58 (July 1986) Woody Allen, Reinhard Hauff, Orson Welles, the Cinémathèque Française, The Fringe Dwellers, Great Expectations: The Untold Story, The Last Frontier Number 59 (September 1986) Robert Altman, Paul Cox, Lino Brocka, Agnes Varda, the AFI Awards, The Movers Number 60 (November 1986) Australian television, Franco Zeffirelli, Nadia Tass, Bill Bennett, Dutch cinema, movies by microchip, Otello Number 61 (January 1987) Alex Cox, Roman Polanski, Philippe Mora, Martin Arminger, film in South Australia, Dogs in Space, Howling III Number 62 (M arch 1987) Screen violence, David Lynch, Cary Grant, ASSA conference, production barometer, film finance, The Story of the Kelly Gang Number 63 (M ay 1987) Gillian Armstrong, Antony Ginnane, Chris Haywood, Elmore Leonard, Troy Kennedy Martin, The Sacrifice, Landslides, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Jilted Number 64 (July 1987) Nostalgia, Dennis Hopper, Mel Gibson, Vladimir Osherov, Brian Trenchard Smith, chartbusters, Insatiable Number 65 (September 1987) Angela Carter, Wim Wenders, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Derek Jarman, Gerald L'Ecuyer, Gustav Hasford, AFI Awards, Poor M an’s Orange Number 66 (November 1987) Australian screenwriters, cinema and China, James Bond: part 1, James Clayden, Video, De Laurentiis, New World, The Navigator, Who's That Girl Number 67 (January 1988) John Duigan, James Bond: part 2, George Miller, Jim Jarmusch, Soviet cinema, women in film, 70mm, filmmaking in Ghana, The Year M y Voice Broke, Send A Gorilla Number 68 (M arch 1988) Martha Ansara, Channel 4, Soviet cinema: part 2, Jim McBride, Glamour, Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, Feathers, Ocean, Ocean Number 69 (M ay 1988) Sex, death and family films, Cannes '88, film composers, Vincent Ward, David Parker, Ian Bradley, Pleasure Domes Number 70

Kieslowski, Ken G. Hall Tribute, cinematography supplement, Geoffrey Burton, Pauline Chan and Traps, Australia's first films: Part 8 Number 100 (August 1994) Cannes '94, NSW supplement, Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddah, The Sum of Us, Spider & Rose, film and the digital world, Australia's first films: part 9 Number 101 (October 1994) Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Victorian sup­ plement, P. J. Hogan and Muriel's Wedding, Ben Lewin and Lucky Break, Australia's first films: Part 9 Number 102 (Decem ber 1994) Once Were Warriors, films we love. Back of Beyond, Cecil Holmes, Lindsay Anderson, Body Melt, AFC supple­ ment, Spider & Rose, Australia's First Films: Part 10 Number 103 (M arch 1995) Little Women, Gillian Armstrong, Queensland supplement, Geoffrey Simpson, Heavenly Creatures, Eternity, Australia's First Films Number 104 (June 1995) Cannes Mania, Billy's Holiday, Angel Baby, Epsilon, Vacant Possession, Richard Franklin, Australia's First Films: Part 12 Number 105 (August 1995) Mark Joffe’s Cosi, Jacqueline McKenzie, Slawomir Idziak, Cannes Review, Gaumont Retrospective, Marie Craven, Dad & Dave Number 106 (October 1995) Gerard Lee and John Maynard on A ll Men Are Liars, Sam Neil, The Small Man, Under the Gun, AFC low budget seminar Number 107 (December 1995) George Miller and Chris Noonan talk about Babe, New trends in criticism, The rise of boutique cinema Number 108 (February 1996) Conjuring John Hughes' What I Have Written, Cthulu, The Top 100 Australian Films, Nicole Kidman in To Die For Number 109 (April 1996) Rachel Griffiths runs the gamut, Toni Collette and Cosi, Sundance Film Festival, Michael Tolkin, Morals and the Mutoscope Number 110 (June 1996) Rolf de Heer travels to Cannes, Clara Law’s new home, Shirley Barrett's Love Serenade, Richard Franklin Number 111 (August 1996) Scott Hicks and Shine, The Three Chinas, Trusting Christopher Doyle, Love and Other Catastrophes Number 112 (October 1996) Lawrence Johnston's Life, Return of the Mavericks, Queensland Supplement Part 1, Sighting the Unseen, Richard Lowenstein Number 113 (Decem ber 1996) Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, SPAA-AFI supplement, Lee Robinson, Sunday Too Far Away, Hotel de Love, Children of the Revolution Number 114 (February 1997) Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Dean Cundey, SPAA: The Aftermath, Idiot Box, Zone 39 Number 115 (April 1997) John Seale and The English Patient, Newsfront, The Castle, Ian Baker, Robert Krasker Number 116 (M ay 1997) Cannes '97 Preview, Samantha Lang's The Well, Kiss or Kill, Phillip Noyce and The Saint, Heaven's Burning.

Number 117 (June 1997) Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz talk to James Sherlock, Monica Pellizzari, Aleka dosen't live here anymore, The Man from Kangaroo Number 118 (July 1997) Terry Rawlings, Frans Vandenburg and Ken Sallows, Low-budget independent filmmaking, Stephen Amis' Alive Tribe, SMPTE '97 Number 119 (August 1997) Ben Mendelsohn: Home Town Boy, Cannes 50th International du Film asks Is Cinema Dead?, Gregor Nicholas' Broken English Number 120 (October 1997) Miranda Otto, Frank Moorhouse, Two Studios and a World of Difference Inbetween, Hawks and Ford Retrospective Number 121 (November 1997) LA Confidential's Demon Dogs, Stephan Elliot at Cannes, Exile in Sarajevo, Japanese independent film Number 122 (Decem ber 1997) Score! Cezary Skubiszewski, David Hirshfelder and Eric Serra, Mandy Walker: All in a Days Work, New Zealand film Number 123 (M arch 1998) Matt Day, A Six-Pack of Talent, Michael Winterbottom's Exile in Sarajevo, Young filmmakers get Loud Number 124 (M ay 1998) Alex Proyas' Dark City, Peter Jackson's nightmare, Kerry Fox, Festival of Australian Film Number 125 (June 1998) Cannes '98 Preview, Head On, Rolf de Heer's Dance Me to M y Song, John Ruane's senti­ mental comedies, SBSI, Crakers Number 126 (August 1998) Craig Monahan's The Interview, Trawling the Net, Olivier Assayas, Cannes '98 Number 127 (October 1998) Peter Weir and The Truman Show, Louis Nowra: Images on a Wall, Gaumont British retrospective Number 128 (Decem ber 1998) Walerian Borowczyk: Museum of the Rare, Radha Mitchell: Playing Ball, Saving Private Ryan

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

m

m

bits

üü

APPOINTMENTS

S

creenrights has announced the

appointment of Virginia Gordon as its Public Affairs Manager. Gordon comes from a marketing and communi­ cations background within the arts-cultural sector. She has formerly worked as the marketing director of ABC Radio National and as a marketing consultant to the Australia Television satellite service. She will be instru­

mental in strengthening Screenrights’ technological position.

The Melbourne International Film Festival has announced the appoint­

Cefn Ridout has been appointed as

ment of David Pearce as the Festival’s General Manager. Pearce has many

Programs Promotions Manager in the Sales and Marketing Department, and Bethwyn Serow has been appointed as Manager of Film Australia Site and Facilities.

The Australian Film Commission has announced that Sara Cousins has joined the Indigenous Branch for three months to work in the policy area, on secondment from Parliament House in Canberra.

years of experience in diplomatic man­ agement, and has worked in Nigeria, South Africa and Canada. More recently he was based in Singapore, where he was Deputy High Commissioner and helped organize the first ever Australian film festival in Singapore.

The Pacific Film and Television Commission has appointed Casey O’Hare as its new Marketing and Com­ munications Manager. O’Hare was

Film Australia has announced that

previously a Public Relations Manager with Brisbane Tourism.

CORRIGENDUM A gremlin or two crept into the “Dirty Dozen” scores last issue. They’re obviously not Brian De Palma fans, because they got Stan James’ and Tom Ryan’s scores wrong for his film, Snake Eyes.

The scores should read: Stan James - 5; Tom Ryan - 7; which of course changes the average score from 4.5 to 5.3. Apologies to all those involved in this mishap.

PANDANUS FILM FESTIVAL confirmed written in the sand: “No developers”. It is funny, light-hearted take on one of Noosa Heads’ two key social issues.

The other is teen suicide (the Sunshine Coast has the highest rate in Australia) and this was reflected in many films; in fact, it seemed as if every video made by a teenager was about suicide or death.

One gently touching film, though this reviewer seemed more impressed than anyone else, was Tomorrow Never Com es... (various directors), a 12minute documentary which mixes interviews with the parents who have lost a child and a social worker, with footage of a funeral service. The film is simplistic, but a fine attempt at dealing with the loss of a friend through communal filmmaking.

Many of the audience responded well to Breath­ ing Exile (Venus Robertson), about death, graveyards and roses (images common to many Queensland shorts, according to Gary Ellis), and Screw You (Lana Locke). The latter starts with a dis­ tressed girl huddled in the kitchen after having killed her husband. After wandering the streets, she meets on a train a boy who claims to have dreamt of her. Through their discussion about the useless­ ness of existence and the agonies of the past, they slowly fall in love.

Despite an infuriating desire to constantly repo­ sition the camera into weird angles and perspectives, it is an effective story of hope in a claustrophobic setting. While the dialogue totters and falls into pretentiousness often, this is an astonishingly-brave attempt by a 16-year-old to move into territory that has challenged even a mature masters like Kryzstof Kieslowski.

Screw You isn’t a film to be enjoyed, but a year later it is sure to be still remembered.

I am Doll Eyes (Ben and Megan) is a spooky tale of sibling rivalry tinctured by witchcraft, which is not always narratively clear but eerie nonetheless, with one of the Festival’s most haunting images: a face reflected in broken glass. This shot is almost a cliché, but the filmmakers here come up with their own evocative version.

Another favourite image is a home-movie-like shot of a little girl running across a backyard during a black-and-white flashback in The Seeds are Sown (Briony Ingleton).

A teenage girl (Johanna Wallace), living in a lux­ urious, parentless house, remembers back to her childhood and life on a farm, whose borders she has never been allowed to cross. One day she C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

does, her parents screaming, “Noosa, Noosa!”, as she flees into the bush. Reaching cliffs overlooking the beach, she witnesses construction overtake and destroy a once-perfect idyll.

It is an amusing and risky idea to personalize the town of Noosa as a repressed girl, whose natural desire to explore life leads to destruction. (The tale works equally well, of course, in terms of other social issues on the coast.)

The environment was dealt with in many interest­ ing ways. Sequoia (Maureen Price) has an alien searching the back roads for a missing red crystal, but stops just as the film has successfully got one intrigued. Horse Play is an unhurried day on an Arab horse stud (with a horse castration scene that had many yelping in protest). Squash (Giovanna) opts for quirky comedy with a cucumber that pops up in odd bush settings and meets its fate under a boot. It Was Here (Matthias Cerwen) records a teenage boy break down in tears during a mock interview about the destruction of his favourite walking spot: a pine plantation. Given the views of many environmental­ ists, though, the destruction of a non-indigenous pine plantation ought not to be something which induces tears!

Betty’s Surf Burgers (Mark Shea) is a sweet, funny documentary about a remarkable woman who has

PRIZES Under 18

I am Doll Eyes Age Group Winner It Was Here Highly Commended Screw You Encouragement 18-25

Jack’s Been Stalking Age Group Winner Girl Boy Green Highly Commended 25 and over

Will Age Group Winner Betty’s Surf Burgers Highly Commended Sequoia Encouragement Tony Bonner Award for Visual Excellence

Breathing Exile People’s Choice

Journey to A-Bay: With a Bush Tucca Lychee The Golden Pandanus

Jack’s Been Stalking

been making burgers from dawn to dusk every day for 20 odd years, and still only charges $1. Needless to say, her shop is now about to be pulled down for a new development and Betty will soon no longer afford to make burgers at a price that has long meant a good cheap meal for the poor. The audi­ ence loved it and so did the judges.

Will (Kent Sherlock), which many also admired, is a near wordless tale of a young man (Tim McPhee) who departs hectic Brisbane and, from a bar in Port Douglas, is led by a girl (Sofia Dunn) on a mystical journey to her tribe, a group of grooving hippies. While not clear in all intents, the film is hypnotic and shows a visual flair not all that appar­ ent elsewhere.

Jack’s Been Stalking (Nick Russell) got the most vocal response of any film (save perhaps the poor horse!). A young woman, working at the Pacific Blue Resort, is harassed by phone and note by a stalker. She tracks him down and stalks him, lead­ ing to a fight and, then, a kiss (!), which is photographed by yet another perve. The embrace brought a hardly-surprising and deafening cascade of boos.

Girl Boy Green (Caroline Campbell) also looks at relationships, with a high-gloss edge.

In summing up, one could say these are budget­ less home videos which shouldn’t be compared to serious 16mm short filmmaking. But, while noting that nothing here is in the same class as, say, Tears (Ivan Sen), the films are so much better than any­ one would have expected them to be.

Their faults are easy to detail, especially the puzzling lack of any semblance of editing craft. Indi­ vidual shots may be arresting, but rarely do they coherently or effectively cut together. One doesn’t need money or training at a film school to under­ stand montage; just a passion to do so and a few good movies to watch. The lack of craft here seems almost wilful.

The reliance on ‘haunting’ flute and guitar music is also infuriating. But these are films from the Byron-Nimbin-Noosa coast and why should they not reflect that culture?

Ultimately, that was the strongest impression: these films are very much of the place. Even if some story interests parallel those of city filmmakers, the style and tone of most of these videos was unique and specific to a different consciousness and world­ view. In an increasingly-homogenized era, the very otherness of these films was exciting. The best were something more.

9

ity-seven

WEIR'S FIRST TIME

is the film critic for L ’Humanité (Paris), direc­ tor of La Semaine de la Critique (Critics’ Week) and, since seeing an unnamed Australian film at Cannes, car­ ries a hip-flask full o f whisky.

Jean R o V

... and Cinema Papers’. This gjjfotograph of director Peter Weir (filmmg The Cars that Ate Paris in Sofala, N S ® ! in late 1973) featured in Cinemajmfi^ r s ’ f i r s t « ever "Production Report§HK|||pe. tim eil Weir made his eleventh feature, The Truman Show, Cinema Papers had published 129 issues.

So, Cinema Papers is celebrating its 25th anniversary issue and would like to have a few words from a dedi­ cated friend living so far away. What do you really want to know? My favourite 25 Australian movies of all time? No way. I would make too many enemies. The complete list of the sixty or so Australian feature films released in France in the past 25 years? Sobering. An anniversary is not the proper time to be serious. It’s a love letter you send to a friend. i don’t remember the first Australian movie I ever saw but I still remember, within these 25 years, the first one I fell in love with. It was Sunday Too Far Away, by Ken Hannam. I saw it in the spring of 1975 and I still feel the smell of the sheep while the workers are taking off their wool. I also remember the first time I attended an Australian Film Week. It was in Paris in April 1979 and we had Caddie, The Devil’s Playground, The Getting of Wisdom, The Last Wave, The Picture Show Man, Storm Boy and Summerfield.1 What a glorious year.

It was also in 1979 that I had a chance to read Scott Murray for the first time. He was interviewing John Lamond about Felicity and he had published these beautiful pictures of Glory Annen and Jody Hansen in the nude playing with each other under the shower in their convent dormitory (Cinema Papers, Cannes Special, p. 88). On the spot, I was convinced that Scott was one of the best film critics of all time and I still believe it, even if the pictures are not so attractive these days. (By the way, I still not have seen Felicity. Could you send me a cassette?)

Last but not least, it was in 1979 that I was elected as a member of the selection committee of the Critics’ Week in Cannes. I can’t remem­ ber if there was any Australian money in the first film which was ever submitted to me, but I do remember it was Skin Deep, from New Zealander Geoff Steven. We had this screening in the most elegant club one can imagine, followed by a lavish dinner by the pool, all of that one block from the Champs Elysees on 12 January, and it was just the first of a series of one hundred movies we had to watch for Cannes.

I loved it. Twenty years and a couple of thousand films later, it’s still the last time I’ve been to this club and the last time I’ve been invited to lunch or dinner after a screening. Beginner’s tuck, as they say.

Since that day, a lot of water has been passing under the bridge and a lot of ice cubes in my whiskies. I remember really learning about Australian cinema, seeing everything from the turn of the twentieth century in a series at the Australian Embassy (great lunches, too, with the most fantastic view on the Eiffel Tower one can have), to the most contemporary stuff.

We had Devil in the Flesh at the Semaine in 1986, with the director’s cut that Scott Murray was pushing to impose while some foolish French distributor wanted to mild it.2 What a fight...

Then, in 1993, the divine surprise showed up. After having already been in one hundred countries or so, I was invited for the first time in my life to Australia. I had a chance to check that people there don’t live with their feet above their head, even if they drive on the left, and, as a matter of consequence, female kangaroos don’t need a zipper on their pocket to protect their babies from falling down.

I met wonderful movie reviewers (hi Paul, this one for you), great girls (hi, Vicky, give me a call some day), great female movie reviewers (hi Mary, give Paul a call some day). That’s where i definitely fell in love with you.

Happy 25th, Cinema Papers.

IT STARTED WITH ...

The photo that sparked Jean Roy’s interest in Cinema Papers and Aus­ tralian film (see article, left). Jenny (Jody Hansen) and Felicity Robinson (Glory Annen) in John D. Lamond’s Felicity (1978).

... A PHOTO OF JACK THOMPSON The cover of the first Cinema Papers (in its magazine format). The images are frame enlargements of Jack Thompson and Debbie Nankervis from David Baker’s “The Family Man” episode of Libido (1973).

CINEMA PAPERS DAVID WILLIAMSON INTERVIEWED/ PRODUCTION PROFILE— THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS/ FRANCIS B1RTLES— KODAKER/ TARIFF BOARD REPORT/ PERFORMANCE SCRIPT EXTRACTS/ RAY HARRYHAUSEN- CREATOR OF SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS/ DIRECTED BY KEN G. HALL/ GILLIAN ARMSTRONG— ONE HUNDRED A DAY.

1 Caddie (Don Crombie, 1976), The D evil’s Playground (Fred Schepisi, 1976), The Get­ ting o f Wisdom (Bruce Beresford, 1977), The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977), The Picture Show M an Oohn Power, 1977), Storm B oy (Henri Safran, 1976) and Summerfield (Ken Hannam, 1977). 2 Ed.: When the French distributor recut the film, producer John B. Murray and director Scott Murray sought protection under France’s Moral Rights legisla­ tion. The distributor intending releasing the film prior to Cannes, which by the rules of the Festival should have meant it was ineligible for screening in Critics’ Week (or any. other section of the event). However, Roy and Critics’ Week took a bold stand and pub­ licly announced they would show the original film (billed as a “director’s cut”) if the case were tost and the recut film commercially released. This is just another example of the magnificent respect Cannes has shown for Australian film.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

L indsay A mos is a cameraman currently based in New Zealand.

GO AHEAD, SHOW ME WHAT TO DO WITH THE ROUGH END OF A PINEAPPLE

Aunt Edna (Barry Humphries) and Bazza (Barry Crocker) in Bruce Beresford’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), which spawned what was to become a prolific cycle of “ocker” comedies.

Twenty-five years later, one thing’s clear: almost all Australia’s export hits have been raucous comedies.

LAST SEEN WORKING AT A GOVERNMENT FILM AGENCY?

This unimpressed viewer was at odds with Australia’s filmgoing public, who happily went to bed with Alvin.

The government may never have approved a project like Alvin Purple (Tim Burstall, 1973), but this pri­ vately-funded film went on to become one of the most domestically-successful Australian films of all time.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

Imagine: you’ve given a stunning performance in a key rôle in a recent internationally-acclaimed, prize­ winning film. Not only that, you’ve appeared in a dozen other films, you’re just 19 years old - and vir­ tually unknown. This is the fate of Canadian actress Sarah Polley. Remember, she’s the one in the wheel­ chair who pulls the rug out from under class-action lawyer Ian Holm in The Sweet Hereafter {Atom Egoyan, 1997). What a scene! What a casually preco­ cious performance!

Polley has many equally-talented contempo­ raries. I’m nominating another eight, all of whom have made (movie) life worth living over the past few years. They are: Alicia Witt, Parker Posey, Joey Lau­ ren Adams, Renée Zellweger, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron, Judith Godrèche and Radha Mitchell. This bunch leapfrogged over their individ­ ual cinematic epiphanies - to what? Some have gone on to mainstream films in unrewarding rôles. A cou­ ple work mainly in television. Most get very little coverage, even in specialist magazines. They are cover girls who rarely appear on covers. Yes, they have it all - except recognition. Call them unsung heroines. Call them not the usual suspects.

Radha Mitchell? Isn’t she the one in Love and Other Catastrophes (Emma-Kate Croghan, 1996)?

Yes, she’s the “forgotten one” in a film which rightly haunted its frontline of talented youngsters. I can’t have been the only one who noticed the way she wit­ tily fleshed out a thinly-written rôle. Perhaps her classy beauty worked against the dazed and con­ fused character she was portraying. No matter, Mitchell emerges triumphant from a larger, similarly ambiguous rôle in her first American film, High Art, opposite Ally Sheedy.

Alicia Witt was a heavenly creature well before Kate Winslet. She was one of the teenage thrill killers in Fun (Ratal Zielinski, 1993). Seeing this delicate, wispy, hyperactive (and unfamiliar) actress literally dancing her way through the film was to witness the creation of a truly frightening character - a natural born killer. But this was a performance only hinted at in Witt’s previous rôles in Twin Peaks and Bodies, Rest & Motion. (Michael Steinberg, 1993). Yet, sub­ sequent to Fun, Witt appeared in lacklustre films and the backwater of television’s Cybill.

Parker Posey is a scene-stealer from way back.

This “queen of the indies” is a refugee from the tele­ vision series As the World Turns, not to mention one of the token women in Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993), and has appeared in nine (count ’em) movies in the past couple of years alone. There were three Hal Hartleys -Am ateur (1994), Flirt (1995) and Henry Fool (1998) - plus Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach, 1995), The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995), Waiting for Guffman (Christo­ pher Guest, 1997), The Daytrippers (Greg Mottoloa, 1996), Basquiat (Julian Schnabel, 1996) and Subur­ bia (Richard Linklater, 1996). She covers a range of characters who are sullen, flaky, acerbic, comic, audacious and, sometimes, all of these. Ironically, Posey’s only starring rôle to date, as a would-be librarian in Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995), seems to have been consigned to videoland.

Meanwhile, she’s back to “also starring” with Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.

When Reese Witherspoon first appeared (in Diane Keaton’s television movie Wildftowef), she had to

play second fiddle to Patricia Arquette. There were no such constraints in Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996), a performance which capped a year which had already seen her in James Foley’s Fear. But Freeway’s variation on Little Red Riding Hood gave Wither­ spoon the opportunity for a performance which was quite literally sensational. Rarely has such unsophis­ ticated, sweet-faced innocence concealed latent violence so completely. Her minor part in Twilight (Robert Benton, 1998) has led to the “ultra-hip, totally popular” twin sister rôle in Pleasantville.

Joey Lauren Adams needed only one great rôle to enter my hall of fame. Sure, everyone noticed her in Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997). No wonder. In a film which helped redefine movie sexual politics for the ’90s, Adams attacks her sexually-ambiguous character with an intensity which is disarming. Again, there is not a hint of this potential in her previous small parts in Dazed and Confused, S.F.W. Qefery Levy, 1995), Mallrats (Kevin Smith, 1995) and Michael (Nora Ephron, 1996). Keep your fingers crossed for her upcoming A Cool, Dry Place.

Anyone who has leapt from Texas Chainsaw Mas­ sacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel, 1997) to Jerry MaGuire (Cameron Crowe, 1996) opposite Tom Cruise has to be doing okay, right? But Renée Zell­ weger first stood up to be counted in Love and a .45 (C. M. Talkington, 1994). Her southern, white-trash girl-on-the-run is still her most exciting early rôle.

(She’s another Dazed and Confused alumnus, too.)

Playing the bland, nice girl in Jerry MaGuire gave her wide exposure, but she seems to be alternating interesting independents, like The Whole Wide World (Dan Ireland, 1996) and A Price Above Rubies (Boaz Yakin, 1997), with big studio pic One True Thing.

Charlize Theron’s first release was the underrated Two Days in the Valley (John Herzfeld, 1996). Despite the cast of seasoned players, the naïve Theron blitzed the competition. Talk about a calling-card film! Theron takes the clichéd rôle of “seductive hit woman” and forges it into something truly memo­ rable. Somebody who matters must have noticed, too, though her part in The Devil’s Advocate (Taylor Hackford, 1997) was disappointing. She has two more chances to carry through the early momentum, with The Astronaut’s Wife and Woody Allen’s Celebrity. Somebody get this South African import a Green Card, quick!

Remember the girl in The Man in the Iron Mask (Randall Wallace, 1998), Christine, played by Judith Godrèche. I wonder if Americans, trooping off to see (the recently-released in New York) La Désenchantée (1990), realize that the sullen philosophy student who is the central character is the same person. This is one of my favourite recent French films (thank you SBS-TV); Godrèche has since blossomed into the Julia Roberts look-alike seen in Beaumarchais (Edouard Molinari, 1996) and Ridicule (Patrice Leconte, 1996).

There are dozens of others, languishing in obscu­ rity. To think about the films we don’t get to see, many perhaps full of people who are better than they need to be, is depressing. Much better to admire the performers who seem to have missed the publicity train, discover them in films that are accessible, and be exhilarated. Even as I write I think about others: Amy Locane, Hope Davis, Theresa Randle, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Helen Baxendale, Penelope Crus and Stacey Edwards. Oh, you’ve noticed - they’re all women. No apologies. The guys can look after them­ selves.

R od B ishop is the Director of the Australian Film Televi­

sion & Radio School.

Last summer, three events brought back the pathos of Jean-Luc Godard’s sun-drenched world in Le Mépris (Con­ tempt,, 1963). The first was the arrival of a new Cinemascope print, courtesy of Martin Scorsese. The sec­ ond and third events were books: Robert Fagles’ exhilarating translation of The Odyssey1 and Patrick McGilligan’s Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast.2 In Godard’s film, Fritz Lang gives the only screen per­ formance of his career. He plays the illustrious German filmmaker Fritz Lang, working at Cinecittà on a version of Homer’s Odyssey. In Lang’s first scene, he screens rushes for The Odyssey’s marvellously-crass American producer, Jeremy Prokosch (jack Palance), and for Paul Javel (Michel Piccoli), the French screenwriter assigned for some “rewrites”.

During the screening, Prokosch gleefully salivates over a nude mermaid and is quickly angered by the widescreen images of Greek gods - mostly statues photographed against azure Mediterranean skies. Even in his anger, Prokosch manages to exclaim: “Oh, gods! I like gods... I like them very much ... I know just how they feel!”

Poetic, beautiful and transcendent as these Odyssey rushes are, they are clearly not the work of the director of the silent classics Dr Mabuse, der Spider (1921 and ’22)3, Die Nibelungen (1922)4 and Metropolis (1927) or Ameri­ can noir thrillers such as The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). A brief, but informative account of Lang’s involvement in Contempt by Patrick McGilligan suggests that Jean Cocteau was Godard’s first choice for the Fritz Lang rôle.

In a film distinguished by its decisive precision, why would the French director include images that appear more Cocteau than Lang? The reason may lie in the often sublime nature of Godard’s approach to this film. His films and videos have an undeniably “authorial voice”, and his work is so distinctive, a few minutes with an unseen Godard film is usually enough to pick the director.

Jump cuts, deconstructed soundtracks and elliptical narratives are his trademarks. There are distinctive Godardian passages throughout Contempt, including a 30-minute domestic exchange between Paul and his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot). But, for most of the film’s length, the prolonged use of conventional principles such as “continuous action”, “seamless continuity” and “invisi­ ble editing” have given Contempt a reputation as Godard’s most “unGodardian” work, a reputation that has grown so significantly during the past 35 years, Colin McCabe now bravely claims it as “the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe”5.

Adapted from an Alberto Moravia novel5, the dominant narrative in Contempt concerns Camille’s unsalvagable contempt for her husband, Paul. Beneath this plot lies the swirling classical text of The Odyssey, driven by Homer’s opaquely-sketched but heroic Odysseus and his ten-year journey through strange lands and strange seas populated by monsters, magic and gods.

The dramatic tension during the production of The Odyssey in Contempt arises from a continuing dialogue between the German director, the French scriptwriter and the American producer (the film is spoken in four lan­ guages). They focus on the nature of the relationship between Odysseus and his “dutiful” wife, Penelope, who waits for him at their Ithaca palace, holding at bay the scores of suitors who are eating his swine, drinking his booze and sleeping on his fleece.

The American producer believes Penelope has been unfaithful to Odysseus. The French writer, Paul, has his own theory. Strolling through the chalk hills of Capri with

14

Lang (where the crew are shooting the Cyclops episode), he suggests Odysseus’ ten-year voyage is evidence of his reluctance to return home to Penelope. Before leaving for the Trojan War, perhaps things had not been so rosy for Odysseus. Paul suggests the hero knew Penelope would be faithful to him and therefore encouraged her to enter­ tain the suitors. But Penelope slowly developed contempt for Odysseus and, when he finally returns to Ithaca, he slaughters the suitors to prove his love for his wife. Lang graciously sneers at the scriptwriter’s attempt to make Odysseus a “modern-day neurotic”.

The classicism of Godard’s Contempt is so astonish­ ingly assured for a 33-year-old, it seems more like the work of a mature Bertolucci, or Visconti or Antonioni. Peal off the sensibilities of the French New Wave and you find an Italian cinematic aesthetic. Peel off that aesthetic and you find the ancient Greeks and their quest for knowledge of the human condition.

If the passing of 35 years shows us that Contempt is easily the most conventional work of Godard’s career, what then caused this great deconstructor of cinema to inexplicably embrace the cinema of formalism? Some might be tempted to suggest the “international” nature of the film (it was Godard’s first big break into the “main­ stream”) is reason enough for his restraint. Anybody who has seen his other “international” and “commercial” effort, the dismal adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1987) with Woody Allen, Peter Sellars, Molly Ringwald and Burgess Meredith, would realize this explains very little.

Perhaps the answer lies in the text, particularly his use of “the Cocteau images” from The Odyssey. For some, the regal and civilized presence of Fritz Lang in Contempt is seen as another typical, nouvelle vague “in-joke”. But is this as frivolous as it appears, particularly when little else in this film even comes close to frivolous?

Noel Burch has persuasively argued that Lang’s Dr Mabuse (1922) is the origin of “a literary genre in the cin­ ema”7. Burch believes this silent two-part crime thriller represents the first successful attempt to link “sequencesto-sequences” in the minds of the audience, rather than “shots-to-shots”. If Dr Mabuse was the first crime drama to make this breakthrough, then Metropolis and Die Nibelungen are the first visionary, epic narratives to create this “literary genre within the cinema”.

In Contempt, Godard places Lang in charge of The Odyssey — an epic, visionary poem that lies at the wellspring of Western literature. The illiterate and blind Homer recited or sang his work, using poetry to produce a seam­ less, flowing narrative. By linking the innovations of the art of Homeric narrative with Lang’s first attempts at seamless, flowing narratives in the cinema, Godard has drawn a believable line between Lang’s life’s work, the poetry of The Odyssey and the poetry of Jean Cocteau.

Some scholars remain dismissive of The Odyssey, find­ ing its “domesticity” a major disappointment after the war heroics of The Iliad. Godard has made a virtue of this “domesticity”, fusing it with his hip, existential, nouvelle vague narrative. Contempt is Parisian youth culture dumped into the searing Mediterranean sunlight, with Camille, Paul and Odysseus gazing wistfully out to sea in search of their personal Ithacas - their own, apparently, unreachable homecomings.

TIMES A R E A fffifN G IN G

the 197(^n llrsn m les mushroomed across Australia and the world. Cinema Papers joined in the growing controversy over violence in the cinema. Author Patricia Edgar is now the Executive Director of the Australian Children’s

PATRICIA EDGAR EXAM INES THE U.S. SURGEON

BRIGHT LIGHT

Russell Boyd seemed to shoot almost every major fearure of the early renaissance, and was one of the first Australian DOPs to be keenly sought by directors and producers in the USA. Boyd, John Seale, Dean Semler and Don McAlpine (among others) con­ tinued the great tradition started

by Robert Krasker.

1 Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, Viking, New York, 1996. 2 Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: the Nature o f the Beast, Faber and Faber, London, 1997. 3 Dr Mabuse, der Spider was made in two parts: Ein Bild d e rzeit and Inferno-Menschen der Zeit. (Ed.) 4 Die Nibelungen was made in two parts: Siegfried’s Tod and Kriem hild’s Rache. (Ed.) 5 Colin McCabe, “Contempt”, Sight and Sound, September 1996. 6 Alberto Moravia, llsesp rezzo, translated as The Ghost at Noon by Angus David­ son, Seeker & Warburg, London, 1955. (Ed.) 7 Noel Burch, “Fritz Lang: German Period”, in Richard Roud (Ed.), Cinem a: A Critical Dictionary, Martin, Seeker & Warburg, 1980.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

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WHO'S TALKING? On th ^ e t of Caddte^-f (1 976), c m tiS S ^ fc ^ ld Crombie and producer Anthony Buckley chat with the legendary Ken G. Hall and his wife, Irene. The renaissance did not bestow upon Hall the critical favour reserved for others, such as Raymond Long­ ford, but Cinema Papers devoted nearly half its first issue to interviewing him.

FORMAT FASHIONS 1

One of the first ads for video. Love the typeface!

MS. REPRESENTED

This article on the representation of women in American cinema was titled, “Raped, Slapped and Ignored”.

cobrfilm sskkss»«»«.

§SEffSsstS-*-“"

GOOD ONE, JACK

M arianne C ollopy is the person one must treat with great rever­ ence to be invited to previews of films distributed by UIP, where she has set a new standard for charm for film publicists.

Recently, I came across the ‘defini­ tive’ list of the greatest 100 films of all time. Scanning the list, I had seen around 70 of them, and, white I would agree that they were mem­ orable and at times brilliant films, there was only a handful which had, not so much changed my life, as formed it.

For me, the joy of cinema is the finding of a soul mate and there are films which make my heart soar with familiarity.

As a child, when all films were good, the big movies were re­ enacted in my grandparents’ house. A rambling Victorian home with fascinating hidden doors and staircases that ascended into ter­ ror, the house could be the setting for anything. I skipped across the overgrown tennis court into Oz, fought Morlocks in the stables and sashayed from behind the windowbox curtains in a flat-chested tribute to Gilda.

Cinemas were cold and old and huge and Victorian: heavy curtains, daunting Aladdin caves with ush­ ers who wielded their torches like sabres. In this setting I wept as the beautiful, evil queen fell over the cliff while the simpering do-gooder bagged the prince, and I marvelled at the first grown-up movie my brothers and I were allowed to see, The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972). Incredible stuff!

How did they get the toilets upside down?

Without that house and sur­ rounded by the comfort of the megaplex, I am constantly seeking the utter escapism that cinema gave to me as a child. Occasionally 1 wilt find it, and I delight in my son discovering films and in turn becoming a Power Ranger or a hip­ swivelling Danny or one of the many varieties of Batman.

The charm of cinema is that the same magic is at work even now that I’m an adult. A great film still makes me forget I am watching it.

A great film makes me imagine even more was in it than actually was and has me bewildered on subsequent viewings. Did they cut it? Is this a different version?

And a great film doesn’t need to be a Great Film to make it wonder-

Perhaps the greatest performance in Australian film: Jack Thompson is Jack Foley, here with Peter Cummins’ Arthur Black in Ken Hannam’s Sunday Too Far Away (1975). Despite the film’s well-earned place in the hearts of audiences the world over, controversy still dogs the making of the film.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

17

B ill C ollins is a legendary film buff, who currently presents classic movies on Foxtel’s F X movie channel.

C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism writes about reading and the pleasures of literature: Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk to an unliterary friend.

Consider how this can be applied to movies. Those of us who have been true movie lovers all our lives seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to movies and moviemakers.

We realize it best when we talk with those who are not movie lovers. 1 have in mind, regarding the last few words, that many people who claim they are movie lovers are not true movie lovers. They use movies as a means of “killing time”, of keeping bore­ dom and loneliness at bay, and they are easily distracted by alternatives.

I hope that I am able to reach my viewers when I present my FX Movies on Foxtel. 1am trying to say: Open your eyes, listen attentively, explore this movie. Perhaps you will make a discovery - about life, the arts, yourself. This movie could change your life. Give it a chance to be loved, to enthrall you, maybe even confront you.

I suddenly remember a wonderful line spoken by Claude Rains in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942): “Round up the usual suspects!” Why is it that televi­ sion and video personnel, and movie distributors as well, always seem to be releasing again or showing again the usual movie classic? Always go for the known rather than the unknown?

One of the greatest advantages of working with Foxtel and FX Movies is that we are covering an enormous range of movies, movies which were rarely and sometimes never seen on free-to-air tele­ vision. Here are a few: Zoo in Budapest; Blood Money; M y Name is Julia Ross; No Sad Songs for Me; Sunday Dinner for a Soldier; the uncut Lloyds of London; I’ve Always Loved You; Moonrise; Diary of a Chambermaid; Chad Hanna; the complete Kipps; Night Train to Munich; letter-boxed copies of such Cinemascope films as The Revolt of Mamie Stover; Three for the Show; Warlock; Forty Guns; House of Bamboo; The Virgin Queen; Woman’s World; Desk Set and The Egyptian 7 1 just hope that viewers will not turn away from movies they have not seen before or have not read or heard about. I know of some people who are only interested in seeing movies they have seen!

Movies of the past, vintage or not in that special sense, are neither better nor worse than contempo­ rary movies. They’re different. Remember the words from The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1971): “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” I like the way movies were made in the 1930s and 1940s. It is analogous to my attitude to painting.

I tend to prefer the Impressionists to the PostImpressionist. In music, I go for the 19th and 20th century Romantics rather than the music of the 18th century. Mind you, closing one’s mind to other peri­ ods, other styles, is anathema to me.

I love movies, then and now, even if l keep return­ ing to those of the period when movies became such a major part of my life.

Movies meant a lot to me many years ago at a time when one felt that loving movies was a terrible thing to admit. One was made to fee! that “going to the pictures” was an inferior pastime. My parents were frequently told by other adults that I was going to the movies too much. 1 always felt otherwise, one reason being that movies provided me with an

entrée to a larger world than the one in which I lived in a Sydney suburb, and I preferred seeing suppos­ edly adult movies to going to children’s matinees.

Some people have the persistent hunger for something new. New is good, old is not as good, as interesting, as wonderful, as moving, as exhilarating.

Nonsense! Have the movie palates of many today been numbed by television and movies? Having a penchant for movies involving prehistoric monsters, I was keen to see Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla. I enjoyed it ... with reservations. The first reservation involved the actors unable to bring to life interesting characters I could care for; Matthew Broderick was likable enough, but there was no one else in the film to feel anything for. Secondly, after a while I felt quite numb about the havoc and the series of cata­ strophes, one after the other.

In a few words, I was not involved. True, there was amusement, impressive spectacle created one way or another and a truly, awesomely predictable script, geared for a movie audience seeking sensa­ tion and not much else. And what then do you take away from Godzilla? What a clever film? What fabu­ lous special effects? And I felt quite detached. I had the same reaction regarding James Cameron’s Titanic (1997). Strangely, 1really loved Dante’s Peak (Roger Donaldson, 1997).

Ken Anderson says it well: Contemporary films seem to be mired in an ado­ lescent preoccupation with technology and special effects (films now possess the ability to realistically create any effect imaginable except the ones they have always needed the most, plot and character).

Sure I love vintage movies, but that is not my full story. I love film. I have loved film from the first movie memory I have: of being taken to see W. S. Van Dyke’s Naughty Marietta (1935) with Jeanette Mac­ Donald and Nelson Eddy, and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Ben Sharpsteen, 1937).

When I was a little older, I began appreciating film more. I was very young when I saw, for the first time, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard ofO z (1939). Judy Garland and her co-stars, especially Margaret Hamil­ ton as the Wicked Witch, and the visuals, including the film beginning and ending in black and white and magically turning into Technicolor when Dorothy arrives in Munchkinland, and the music of Harold Aden and lyrics of E. Y. Harburg. I didn’t realize it then, but I was learning to love and appreciate more than film: music, words, ideas, feelings.

An increasing intensity of desire for film was developed by such experiences as Henry King’s Chad Hanna, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), Michael Curtiz’ The Sea Hawk (1940), Alexander Korda’s produc­ tions of The Thief of Bagdad (Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, Michael Powell, 1940), The Four Feathers (Zoltán Korda, 1939) and Lady Hamilton (Alexander Korda, 1941).

Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) was a major event. My mother and an aunt took me with them to Gone with the Wind at the St James Theatre in Sydney when it was first shown. At Popular Prices.

I believe that occasion turned my movie love-desire into movie obsession.

For true movie lovers, the first viewing of a film may be momentous, unforgettable, even traumatic experience as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard ofOz, The Razor’s Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946) and Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946) were for me. We talk about the movies, we discuss them with our friends and make plans to make sure that we can share the experience of some movies with others who, we feel, will appreciate them.

I dare say that we movie lovers tend to enjoy talk­

ing about movies with special friends and prefer not to talk about them with others. There are none so blind as those who will not or cannot see and hear what the rest of us see and hear in the movies we love.

Of course, some movie watchers have very little to say about the movies they see. I wonder if they really value the films they see. They readily take on alterna­ tive behaviours which set them apart from us dyed-in-the-wool movie lovers. The screening of a John Ford movie, a Samuel Fuller, a Budd Boetticher or a Joseph H. Lewis may be a major event. If we cannot see it, we make sure to have the videotape and the VCR ready to go. And we may even check with likeminded friends to make sure that we get the picture.

A lady in one of my film classes for the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Sydney asked me if Michael Curtiz’ controversial Mission to Moscow (1943) was available on videocassette. I said no. Her husband had incorrectly set the VCR when it played on television. I suggested to her that she should ask around their friends to see if some­ one had taped it. Her reply: “Our friends are not interested in what we’re interested in.” I replied: “I suggest you should acquire some friends who have similar interests. If 1needed a copy of Mission to Moscow, I know at least 8-10 of my friends would have a copy.”

Yes, movies mean a lot to me and to many of you.

And they have provided me with some of the great­ est experiences of my life, many of which i have shared with my wife, Joan, and dear friends. Here are some of them, many adaptations of novels included: Rashomon; Gate Of Hell; Greed; Paisan; Harp of Burma; The Fountainhead; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Band Wagon; Brief Encounter; Random Harvest; The Paradine Case; Written on the Wind; All That Heaven Allows; The Crowd; Comanche Station; House of Bamboo; Love Letters; His Butler’s Sister; Gun Crazy; Western Union; Shadow o f a Doubt; Keeper of the Flame; and Now, Voyager.2 Have you seen them? Have you a list? And most of the above did not make the American Film Insti­ tute list of the 100 greatest movies of the century!

And I forgot to mention: Christmas Holiday (Robert Siodmak, 1944); The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955); The Ghost and Mrs. Muir Qoseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947); Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949); Give a Girl a Break (Stanley Donen, 1953); Where Do We Go From Here? (Gregory Ratoff, 1 9 45)

-

1 Zoo in Budapest (Rowland V. Lee, 1933); Blood M oney (Row­ land Brown, 1933); M y Name is Julia Ross Qoseph H. Lewis, 1945); No Sa d Songs for M e (Rudolph Maté, 1950); Sunday Dinner for a So ld ie r(Lloyd Bacon, 1944); Lloyds o f London (Henry King, 1936); I ’ve Always Loved You (Frank Borzage, 1946): M oonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948); Diary o f a Chamberm aid Qean Renoir, 1946); Chad Hanna (Henry King, 1940); Kipps (Carol Reed, 1941); Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed, 1940); The Revolt o f Mam ie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956); Three for the Show (H. C. Poter, 1955); Warlock (Edward Dmytryk, 1959); Forty Guns (Sam Fuller, 1957); House o f Bamboo (Sam Fuller, 1955); The Virgin Queen (Henry Koster, 1955); Woman’s World Qean Negulesco, 1954): Desk Set (Walter Lang, 1957); The Egyptian (Michael Curtiz, 1954). 2 Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950); Gate O f H ell (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953); Greed (Erich Von Stroheim, 1925); Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)

; Harp o f Burma (Kon Ichikawa, 1956); The Fountainhead

(King Vidor, 1949): The Picture o f Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945); The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953); Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945); Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942); The Paradine Case (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948); Written on the Wind (Dou­ glas Sirk, 1957); A ll That Heaven Allow s (Douglas Sirk, 1955); The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928); Com anche Station (Budd Boetticher, i960); House o f Bam boo; Love Letters (William Dieterle, 1945); His Butler’s Sister (Frank Borzage, 1943); Gun Crazy Qoseph H. Lewis, 1949): Western Union (Fritz Lang, 1941); Shadow o f a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943); Keeper o f the Flame (George Cukor, 1943); and Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942).

IT'S DAVID WILLIAMSON S PARTY

IF YOU BUILD IT ...

When Australia started making movies (again!), foreign stars were lured to local shores. Dennis Hopper was one of the more eccentric breed, appearing in Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Mor­ gan (1976) and freaking out the locals

¡^Everybody who was anybody is in Don’s Party \ (Bruce Beresford, 1976), the first in the long tradi­ tion of filmed David Williamson plays. It is also one of the rare adaptations that doesn’t K&h carry the words David Williamson's in the film’s title. (In what would S r a l H prove to be a gesture to acknowledging Government support for the H i emerging film industry, ex-Primelp&, Minister |ohn Gorton was cast in a small rôle.)

PRODUCTION REPORT

in downtown Hol­ brook (NSW).

Twenty years later, the casting of foreign ‘ele­ ments’ continues to stir debate within the industry.

DON’S PARTY

BUTT WHICH ONE?

The double-page open­ ing of one of the many serious articles about the work of major inter­ national filmmakers.

1970s feminists regu­ larly attacked Cinema Papers for its use of images of female nudity (merely reflecting the films of the time), but were stumped by this pic - one of the butts is male.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

OF COURSE, THEY HADN'T YET SEEN BODY OF EVIDENCE AND DIDN'T KNOW WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH CANDLES

Ik ^B ^B

Tom Allen (Simon Burke), tight, and friend discuss the merits of sprinkling holy water on one’s member to curb the onanistic urge in Fred Schepisi’s brilliant début feature, The Devil’s Playground (1976).

D avid H annay is the venerable producer of numerous Australian films, including Stone (1974) and Gross Mis­ conduct (1993).

It’s 1974. Stone (Sandy Harbutt) is playing at the Forum in the Haymarket. Len Fancourt is the cinema manager.

Every night, despite the sleeting winter rain, he stands out front like the welcoming host at an exclusive dinner party.

Three gleaming, rain-speckled Harleys slide to a stop.

“Good evening, Earring. Flow are you tonight, Guitar?

Saw you giving blood on television the other night, Mac. Good to see you all again. Enjoy the movie”, he laughs.

“Good to see you too, Mr Fancourt”, they respond.

I wander over from where I have been standing in the shadows.

“That’s the twelfth time they’ve been”, he says.

“Going in?”

“Yes.” I go back to my place watching the crowd in the foyer.

It certainly isn’t your standard bikie crowd. There are as many women as men, and most of them don’t look like they’ve ever been on the back of a bike.

We’re well into our second month of full houses, bro­ ken box-office records all around the country, and I’m here for what must be the umpteenth time. I’m certainly here every Saturday night. I just like to be with and part of that big animal in the dark, the audience, enjoyingthe picture. It’s the audience I watch now. I sit up the back, so I can get up and move around, and feel the reactions.

This Saturday is just like any other. It’s cold, wet and windy, with the expectant audience now in the warmth, ready to enjoy the evening’s entertainment. This night I sit behind a large and extremely beautiful woman. She’s laughing and talking animatedly to her friend. I think I’ve found the right spot.

The picture starts with Jeannie Lewis’ amazing voice, and the close-up of the Captain Cook monument at Botany Bay, and moves through to the opening sequence of the demonstration in Sydney’s Domain. She’s into it within seconds. She laughs, breathes, moves, chuckles, full of good humour and enjoyment. I have definitely found the right spot. But it’s the funeral sequence and Vinnie Gil’s Dr Death that really gets her. She’s in love.

This is her character.

Not that she doesn’t enjoy everybody else. But when­ ever The Doctor’s there, she leans forward, the old Forum seat creaking under her not-insignificant weight. I’m really having a good time now.

The thing I really enjoy about coming as often as I do is that everybody gets off on different characters. It’s a big ensemble so there are a lot of different movies. But nobody before has ‘got off so totally.

As the picture progresses, she becomes completely caught up, to the point where she is oblivious that I am not the only person in the audience aware of her involve­ ment. She gasps, she giggles, she sighs, she shouts, she’s ultra vocal.

But it’s the climactic scene in the graveyard where she really kicks in. When Dr. Death is shot, she leaps to her feet, with a terrible scream, so loud I am absolutely sure she could be heard in George Street.

“Noooooooooooo.”

She falls back into her seat, her body literally racked with sobs. I’m stunned. Everybody’s stunned. The hair stands up on the back of my neck.

I am completely stoked. This is what it’s all about.

This is what makes it so worthwhile: being part of some­ thing that has involved another human being to the exclusion of all else. What a privilege.

19

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D ominic C ase , a former “Technicalities” Edi­ tor of Cinema Papers, works at Atlab’s DFilm.

Imagine, for a moment, an alternative version of the 20th century which started with the inven­ tion not of cinema, but of television. It’s plausible: most of the technological advances of the late 19th century were in the field of electro­ magnetism, and some astonishingly early work had been done in transmitting images from one place to another.

GIRLS' OWN INDUSTRY 1 In the great tradition of Australian women producers: Pat Lovell, seen here on location for Break of Day (Ken Hannam, 1976). Lovell was featured in the pioneering series of articles tracing the history of women in Australian film production.

I

Australia joins the big league w ith

ACADEMY AWARD W INNER 'LEISURE’ Leisure *s an important aspect of life today. The

He poses the question: Have humans lost the a Petty vividly illustrates how leisure rr

WHAT CULTURAL CRINGE? Bruce Petty won an Academy Award for his animated short, Leisure. Australians always make a big noise when a local wins an Academy (“joins the big league”, indeed!), but seem to forget five minutes later. This has led to the odd Aussie claiming he/she is the first to score in a cate­ gory, with the actual débutant being long-forgotten.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

The Kinetoscope, which was the first device for taking and viewing ‘motion pictures’, was developed by William Dickson, an electrical engineer (not a photo-chemist) working for Thomas Edison, and as a camera-viewer. It bore more in common with today’s handycams than with modern film cameras.

As this alternative century progresses, let us assume, as was the case in our own twentieth century, that recording (i.e., videotape) only came some twenty years or more after television itself. And let us propose that at some later stage in the century, the concept of using pho­ tographs — hitherto the technique for capturing an instant in time — in rapid sequence to record moving images is finally realized, so that today, as the century concludes, our alternative history converges once again, and we have both cinema and television at the same state of technological advancement in both scenarios.

How would things have been different — in the context of a century of television and only fifty years of film?

The magic of television is in the viewing of images from somewhere else; with film, it is the viewing of images from another time. Even so, the early history of cinema is the history of an ephemeral art form: there seems to have been little thought of the long-term preservation of images. It seems likely, therefore, that a televi­ sion-based industry in the early decades of the century would have developed in much the same way. Whether viewed in public on large screens, or at home on small screens, live televi­ sion would have flourished. So by the time videotape was available for recording, it would have been developed for repeat screenings and then later for editing. Preservation for posterity would only have been an afterthought.

What of the programmes? In our present world, despite 50 years of television, we do not find the medium has become a natural home for the great visual artists. There have been great and significant events in television, from the Kennedy-Nixon debates to the Gulf War cover­ age to the Olympics: but these are quite different from the significant events in cinema history — from The Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) to Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). Cinema and television are, and will always remain, quite different, despite the so-called convergence of technologies. Would the visual grandeur of a late-developing cinema have evolved by now?

Or would it have been influenced by the prece­ dent of a more naturally content-based television culture?

My point is this: that the art of the cinema, and its history, sociology and cultural signifi-

canee, have been entirely determined by the technology of film.

It’s become a cliché for film partisans to pro­ pose the scenario I have described: suppose we already had video, and someone invented film.

Look at the information density-resolution (1.5 Terabytes per spool); look at the simplicity of viewing; look at the longevity; look at the interna­ tional compatibility. We would fall upon film as a brilliant advance, and throw videotape out overnight. But it’s not that simple. If television were the dominant medium, information density wouldn’t be needed for sharper, brighter pictures.

As it is, bandwidth on television means more channels, not sharper pictures. Ease of viewing is arguable: sure, you can hold film up to the light and look at it, but who does, except in publicity shots of film editors? And there’s no doubt that a videotape is easier to play than a reel of film, assuming you have the right equipment.

It’s not clear whether early filmmakers con­ sidered the future as much as we consider the past: but the fabulous inheritance we have in the film archives as a result of film’s relative sta­ bility cannot be overstated. Clive James made a television series some years ago called Fame in the Twentieth Century. It was noticeable that, in the first half of the century, his subjects were all politicians, statesmen, public figures: they were all there in the newsreels. In the second half, most of the figures were film stars or musicians.

Arguably, showbiz has overtaken world politics as the controlling influence on our society; but I suspect his selections were influenced by what footage was available and, as film newsreels have gone, so has our moving image record of world events. Videotape has not been stored well, nor can it be: a recent article in Image Technology magazine compared archival him life estimates of 100 years, with most video at 25 years, and CD-ROMs at 20 years.

Finally, the much-vaunted international com­ patibility of a reel of film raises an interesting point: when film started this century, it was immediately transportable, and became a world medium very quickly. Technical standards were naturally compatible, allowing the Hollywood phenomenon to cover the world very quickly with no natural barriers. Television was estab­ lished as several incompatible local technologies at first, with film as the only inter­ change medium (which is why we can still watch I Love Lucy.) Suppose television had started 100 years ago in the absence of film and at first with no videotape, and then with incompatible recording systems? I doubt if a pre-war Burbank in this alternative century could have reached the predominant world position that pre-war Hollywood in our own century did. It’s possible that an Australian television industry could have become established in 1900, and survived the middle of the century, unassailed by foreign product. But the present thriving Australian film industry, gestated as it was until the 1970s renaissance by newsreels and documentaries, may never have become established in the alter­ native television century.

And we may never have had the stimulation of a quarter of a century of reading Cinema Papers. Food for thought.

21

Anne D émy-G eroe is artistic director of the Brisbane International Film Festival.

Memories of my attendance at Le Giomate del Cinema Muto, the famous Pordenone Silent Film Festival, in 1996, linger not only as one of my most enjoyable holidays, but also as a vivid and unexpected experience of the power of film. Russian cinema between 1919 and 1924 provided one of the major programme strands.

These previously-unknown films differ radically from those refined bourgeois works of the Czarist régime, but are also much rougher and more primitive than the familiar classics of the late ’20s. At first, I found the films not so inter­ esting though quite demanding. Although one film screened with the reels in the wrong order, resulting in the corrupt but fascinating bearded and wild-eyed priest rising from the dead, this did not account for my problems with the oth­ ers. The coding was all wrong. The women with the gorgeous hats who ate in exotic restaurants were all bad, and I was expected to identify with the unwashed and hysterical peasants. But within a few days, I knew the cues. And when someone attended the opera or theatre or looked as if they’d washed that week, I knew they were villainous and found myself booing as the filmmakers intended! I found it quite extraordinary.

A starting point for my interest in silent film was in 1988: the presentation of an Australian silent by Ron West at the opening of the Audio­ visual Unit at the State Library of Queensland, which l was then managing. Ron has been accompanying The Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice, 1926) on his mighty Wurlitzer organ at the Majestic Cinema, Pomona, for more than twelve years now. With some 1,400 performances under his belt, he must be eligi­ ble for the Guinness Book of Records.

More exciting is his annual silent film festi­ val. Over the years, he has provided some memorable occasions with a programme that combines classics and popular silents with the bizarre and the odd forgotten gem. The tragic conclusion of Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919), accompanied by a sentimental violin solo and pink petals gently falling down either side of the screen (courtesy of an ancient brenograph machine), had the audience openly weeping.

At Pomona, I first saw The Dragon Painter (1919), one of a small bevy of Hollywood films made by Chinese and Japanese in the teens and ’20s to combat racism, and starring the young Sessue Hakayama (who played the prison com­ mandant many years later in David Lean’s 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai). A glorious tinted print of this fascinating film restored by the Museum of Modern Art is in the National Lend­ ing Collection. It has become something of a personal favourite. After converting many friends not interested in silent film with a screening at my fortieth birthday, I’m looking forward to its reception when accompanied by a shakuhachi and koto quartet at the next Aus­ tralian and New Zealand History and Film Conference.

For many people, silents equals Buster Keaton and his colleagues or the peculiar sen­ sation of melodrama projected too fast. Not

22

that there’s anything wrong with Keaton, as those who’ve been introduced to him in the past two years by the fabulous Blue Grassy Knoll will testify. But the interesting thing about silents is their diversity. It’s discovering curiosities. I remember my amazement at my first silent stag film, the sailor, his boy, his stowaway girl and the captain in every possi­ ble, quite graphic, combination. And my excitement at experimentation by filmmakers such as Germaine Dulac. The sheer force of melodramas such as those mentioned earlier.

The charm of Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (1919), the daring of silent feminist filmmakers such as Lois Weber - working before the production code! And the quaint representation of the exotic in North Queensland by Haddon so early in the history of film.

So, how about a bit more daring from pro­ grammers? Even for smaller films, once the audience is there, good films with careful pre­ sentation can win out. To my astonishment, Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924) and A Kiss for Cinderella (1922) topped the audience polls at the Brisbane International Film Festival last year. The National Cinematheque has a good record with silents. The beautiful print of Die Nibelungen (1924), brought out from the Munich Filmmuseum as part of the recent Fritz Lang season, will long remain with me as a great experience despite reading out transla­ tions of the German intertitles for four hours!

Most international film festivals seem to pre­ sent at least one large silent event. For me, Berlin has been the most consistently interest­ ing with its comprehensive director retrospectives mounted by the Deutsche Kinemathek and other special screenings where international archives vie with each other to present restored prints (oh, envy!). This year, a small treasure was seeing People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, Edgar Ulmer, 1924) come to life under a chamber orchestra. Pando­ ra’s Box (Die Buchse der Pandora, 1928), part of a Pabst retrospective, closed the Berlinale last year accompanied by an orchestral score.

Unfortunately, even tears didn’t score me a ticket. Of course, the film toured Australia a few years ago, but, although I loved the music, I felt it overwhelmed the film.

Which brings us to the first of the presenta­ tion problems. Live music is crucial to so-called silent cinema. The combination of moving image and live performance makes each pre­ sentation unique. But ensuring a synthesis of film and music is difficult. I was somewhat dis­ appointed with the presentation of The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford, 1919) when it opened the Melbourne Film Festival a few years ago. The music was very lively and the audience enjoyed the performance, but for me the film became wallpaper. I found Graham Koehne’s scoring for the same film as played by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at the Bris­ bane Biennial five nights earlier more sympathetic. Thank goodness they decided to screen film rather than video as first planned!

There are other problems of presentation. As that silent cinema guru, Kevin Brownlow, so eloquently puts it, Poor silent films! Can any art have been treated so shabbily? Even those who respect

the films often treat them with such reverence - projecting them too slowly without music that the life is squeezed out of them.

BIFF’s presentation in August of the delightful The Kid Stakes (Tal Ordell, 1927), with a new score and twelve-piece orchestra, attracted some 800 people. When I came onto the pro­ ject, 1 was horrified to find the composer had been working for months off a telecine of the film at i6fps. He was delighted when we sliced about ten minutes off the duration by deciding on 2ofps! But I would have preferred it at the standard 24 than the agonizing suspense of the cricket ball going through the window at 16!

Silent blockbusters - with these problems overcome - seem to do well. The British Film Institute has re-released Battleship Potemkin (1925) for the Sergei Eisenstein centenary.

Judging by my wistfully-declined invitations to gala performances from San Francisco to Argentina, it’s travelling the world as a prestige event. The huge productions of classics by Thames Television Silents with orchestral scores by Carl Davis have paved the way for the interest these special events are now able to generate. But the interest does seem to be in the calibre of the orchestras accompanying the works.

One of my own more memorable opportuni­ ties to present silent films involved the 1938 Chinese silent, Eight Hundred Heroes, about the fall of Shanghai (sound had been sus­ pended because of the war) at the 1995 BIFF. The accompaniment by the twelve-piece Chi­ nese orchestra included a Chinese opera singer.

Unfortunately, the audience didn’t seem much bigger than the orchestra but those who were present stilt talk about it! Another Pordenone find, which was a hit at BIFF this year, was the enchanting Legong (Dance of the Virgins): A Story of the South Seas (Henry de Falaise and Gaston Glass), an ethnographic travelogue about Bali in 1922. Released in 1935, it was amongst the last of the two-colour Technicol­ ors, “where suntanned bodies and emerald scarves are not restricted by reduced spectrum reproduction”. Although it was released with a contemporary music-track, the film used spec­ tacularly designed intertitles.

But my biggest event to date has been a recreation of Frank Hurley’s travelogue enter­ tainment, Pearls and Savages (1921). This absorbing project was kick-started when film­ maker Frances Calvert alerted my co-producer, Sally jackson, and me to the existence of a dif­ ferent version of the film in a German anthropological museum. Further material was unearthed in the UK and the USA, along with various Australian institutions. The combination of hand-tinted print, hand-coloured lantern slides, copies of the original field recordings, Michael Pate “lecturing” on stage surrounded by artefacts, and Ron West playing an accompa­ niment developed from the original musical themes was an enormous challenge. However, the interest of a diverse audience has been more than rewarding.

So, what is it about silent cinema? For me, to quote Brownlow again, it’s “the potent capacity [of silent cinema] to make the imagination work” more profoundly and more intensely than many of the easily-accessible pictures of today.

C I N E M A P A P E R S * J A N U A R Y 1999

THE THREE MUSKETEERS

One of the great producer-director teams - the Broth­ ers McElroy (Jim and Hal) and Peter Weir, centre - during post­ production on The Last Wave (1977). While still working together, the Brothers McElroy made, with Weir, The Cars that Ate Paris, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)and The Last Wave. Jim McElroy also produced Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982).

NEXT SEEN IN W 0 0 P W 0 0 P

Rod Taylor during the filming of one of his rare Australian films, The Picture Show Man (1977). Long based in Hollywood, his most recent Australian film is Stephan Elliott’s underappreciated 1998 satire of a Pauline Hansenite Australia, in which he gives an awesomely ‘true’ performance.

WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING?

Because he knows the real names of the directors of Fantasm (‘Richard Bruce’, 1976) and Fantasm Comes Again (‘Eric Ram’, 1977)! Auteur producer Antony I. Ginane poses with some of his stars.

IS THIS MAN SMILING?

Well, he should be. Not because he got a call from Joe Eszterhas (some years later), but because here Phil Noyce contemplates starting production on the much-loved and -admired Newsfront (1979).

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

B arrie S mith is Cinema Papers' “Techni­ calities” writer, as well as being a director and photographer based in Sydney.

Supreme Sound Studios in Sydney’s Paddington was like many other production houses of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s: a ‘school of hard knocks’ and experience arena for many filmmakers.

Its operators, Gwen Oatley and the late Merv Murphy, gave many a young career a kick up the ladder in the business. There was one young man who, in fact, appeared in his first feature film, thanks to Supreme and was then seen never again on the cin­ ema screen. But, he’s done reasonably well in another sphere...

Journey Out of Darkness Games Trainor, 1967) was a Northern Territory story based on an incident in 1900, where a uniformed black policeman was set on the trail to track and capture another, errant Aborigine.

The casting (for the time) was immacu­ late: Ed Devereaux played the role of the police black tracker and Kamahl starred as the runaway. Ed managed to get into the part with the help of some Egyptian No. 7 make-up to darken his skin and some short lengths of conduit stuck up his nose to deEuropeanize his nasal passages.

Kamahl, unfortunately, was garbed in a spotless white loincloth, brief enough to brilliantly display the golden skin of his Tamil forebears. A fairly unlikely pair of Abo­ rigines the pair presented.

After the film was shot and went into post-production, wags at the Studios quickly christened the feature “Journey Into Disaster”. The 11-minute trailer cut by editor Ian Maitland was acclaimed ‘brilliant’. In contrast, the full-length feature world-pre­ miered at the State Theatre, complete with marching girls, ranked as a fizzer.

The budget for the film was minimal, but sufficient to cover laundry costs and ensure that Ed Devereaux’s immaculate white uni­ form and Kamahl’s modesty-wrap remained Rinso-white throughout the three months’ story frame. Costs were pared so low, how­ ever, that (now well-known DOP) David Gribble recalls his role as camera assistant was not eased by a continuing absence of carbon paper, in spite of repeated pleas to the Sydney office for those desirable slivers of black tissues. Each night he was obliged to write out his daily camera report seven times: one for the lab, one for the editor, etc.

At one point, Kamahl’s character was required to point the bone at the copper. As often happens, time was never found on location to shoot the actual finger/bone/twine assembly close-up on Kamahl’s forefinger. So, this writer had the diverting experience of directing a pick-up shot for the movie, back in the Paddington studios, as Kamahl accommodatingly popped in for a poke or two to enliven a reel or two.

23

G eoff G ardner is Deputy Executive Director of the M otor Trades Association. He is still recover­ ing from the angst of the ’Roos loss of the 1998 AFL Premiership (and running the Melbourne Film Festival for several years).

The first issue of Sight and Sound that I ever bought was a 1962 edition which listed the results of a poll of 70 critics who had been asked to nomi­ nate the 10 best films of all time. The list included nine films I’d never seen. It provided a handy thumb-guide as to what I should be looking for. I had seen Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), but only in the version where some clown had short­ ened it to fit a two-hour time slot on Australian television and had thoughtfully removed all the references to Rosebud! And that was it.

I quickly caught up with L’Avventura (Michelan­ gelo Antonioni, i960), which left me perplexed because nothing seemed to happen, and La Règle du Jeu Oean Renoir, 1939), which left me per­ plexed because the film seemed to be shoddy technically; you couldn’t hear it, you couldn’t read it and it jumped about a bit like some home movie.

It took me another 25 years before I finally completed the list by seeing what was left of Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924). But in the main, by the time the 1972 list came along — we’re almost getting into Cinema Papers’ era now — I’d caught up. By then, Federico Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo (8 1/2, 1963) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstallet, 1957) were in, Orson Welles also had a second entry with The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne D ’Arc (1928) had reappeared from the 1952 list, and Buster Keaton’s The General (1926) had made it. The selection seemed to be getting older.

The 1982 list was published in an edition which contained the individual lists as well as the poll. It saw the entry of Shichinin No Samurai (The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954), Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), Ver­ tigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo had become the youngest film on the list following the exit of Bergman and Persona.

The feature of having one Japanese film was continued in 1992, when Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story, Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) had made it along with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) which, at 24 years old, was the youngest film on the list. Father Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1956) also made it that year, Satyajit Ray’s first appearance. As well, in the comeback of all time, jean Vigo’s L ’Atalante (1934) made its sec­ ond appearance and its first since the 1962 list. Off the list went those apparent oncers, Shichinin No Samurai and Singin’ in the Rain, as well anything from Italy, namely Otto e Mezzo and L’Avventura.

Out, as well, were The Magnificent Ambersons and The General.

The 1982 edition had one memorable Aus­ tralian contribution to the composition of the final table when The Age in Melbourne, having been invited to join its illustrious press peers around the world, decided that its list often had to be compiled by not one person, I hesitate to use the word “critic” in this context, but two! Neither are writing about film for The Age or any other paper any longer!

24

Lists are fascinating but seem to be the domain of the movies. Do art magazines or literary maga­ zines run ten bests each year? Do they publish monthly grids where critics get to put numbers or stars or dots in columns in appreciation of works recently brought to attention? Do the book shows or the theatre shows feel the need to end their notices with ratings? It doesn’t seem so. Is there anywhere else bar the movies where an institution like the Museum of the Moving Image in London can publish a list of 360 films and announce that it plans to screen one each day, so that in a year of dedicated filmgoing a person will be able to see what is allegedly, by international consensus, the cinema’s canon. The accompanying catalogue contains much agonizing about the selection, what’s in and what’s out.

It’s only the movies that do this and only the movies that cause people to publish the array of dictionaries, guides, catalogues, directories, regis­ ters, compilations, collections, records and reference books with such endless facility. And why are they published? Because film buffs, film fans, filmniks, filmees, aficionados, enthusiasts and collectors buy them. Everyone has Leonard Maltin. It is the biggest selling film title at Electric Shadows Bookshop in Canberra. Andrew Sards’ The American Cinema was a bible. Bertrand Tav­ ernier’s 50 Ans du Cinéma Américain proved that my French had slipped too far to be really useful.

But it has lists throughout.

Sards’ latest book, You Aint Heard Nothin’ Yet, has just, out of nostalgia, become compulsive reading and, of course, the first thing I dipped into was its Appendix of “Best Directors”. I have almost memorized the latest edition of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Of all the things that set the movies apart, one of its most distinguishing features is the fascina­ tion with lists. In the last Sight and Sound poll, the critics’ lists were accompanied by directors’ lists, a revelation in themselves. It’s not just the meretri­ cious observers who love to play the game. Martin Scorsese listed only five films that he “continues to live by”. John Woo listed films by Welles, Kubrick, Jean-Pierre Melville, David Lean, Scors­ ese, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, Kurosawa and West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961). Monika Treut included Russ Meyer and John Waters. Chen Kaige listed his own début feature alongside films by Welles, Coppola, François Truf­ faut, D. W. Griffith, Lean, Kurosawa and Scorsese.

It’s endlessly fascinating and the bug bit me early, and I can’t say that the virus shows any sign of being cured. Somewhere in my records are diaries listing the day and date of every film I’ve seen since 1963. So let me set a hare running by nominating my ten best list of lists, the latter being broadly defined.

1. Sight and Sound. List of the ten best films of all time, 19 52,19 6 2,19 72,19 8 2,19 9 2, a contin­ uum of slowly-evolving tastes. Only Battleship Potemkin and La Règle du Jeu have appeared on all five. Renoir’s greatest film, La Crime de M. Lange, has never appeared! Dreyer’s Pas­ sion of Joan of Arc oddly appeared on the 1952, 1972 and 1992 lists.

2. Andrew Sards: The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968; Directorial Chronol­ ogy 1915-1967. Re-worked, revised and

renamed “Best Directors” in Andrew Sards’ You Aint Heard Nothin’ Yet, covering 1927-1949.

3. Cahiers du Cinéma Annual Best Film Listings 1950-68, contained in Cahiers du Cinéma, Volurnes 1 & 2, The 1950s and The 1960s, edited

by Jim Hillier 4. David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, three editions, 1975,1980,1997. There is a need to own all three editions in order to make one’s own lists of shifting tastes as reflected in the choice of new entrants. The latest edition includes the first entries on Australian filmmak­ ers Bruce Beresford, Paul Cox, George Miller, Fred Schepisi and Peter Weir, as well as the New Zealand director Jane Campion.

5. Cahiers du Cinéma, edition of March 1965, contains a list of 40 French films made since World War II under the heading “Vingt Ans de Cinéma Français Palmares”. The top ten were Pick­ pocket (Robert Bresson, 1959), Lola Montés (Max Ophüls, 1955), Le Carrosse d ’Or(The Golden Coach, Jean Renoir, 1953), Le Testament d ’Orphée Qean Cocteau, i960), Les Carabiniers (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952), Muriel, ou le temps d ’un retour (Alain Resnais, 1963) and Adieu Phillipine Oacques Rozier, 1962) Only the last film seems to have slipped out of sight if not of fond memory.

6. Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977, and Scott Murray, Australian Film 1978-1994. Two separate volumes with differing but complementary approaches, invaluable resources.

7. Craig Hosoda, The Bare Facts Video Guide. The only book of lists that acknowledges, aids, indeed celebrates, the voyeuristic instincts of the dedicated film buff.

8. Bertrand Tavernier, 50 Ans de Cinéma Améri­ cain. A true labour of love and devotion by the most dedicated scholar-filmmaker of the century 9. Out of sheer nostalgia for a pioneering effort, Denis Gifford’s British Cinema (Zwemmers, 1969), a listing of 546 British stars and direc­ tors and more than 5,000 films. Unfortunately, it was never updated and is cumbersome to track down directors.

10. Facets Complete Video Catalogue, 35,000 titles available, or sometimes out-of-print, on video, laser disc and DVD. Listed alphabetically, by director, by country or language, by genre and then a separate list of short films. 511 pages. All titles apparently available to be mailed to any country in the world if you order through the Internet. Go on its e-mail service and a list of anything from five to twenty pages of new titles arrives each Monday morning out of cyber­ space.

Honorable Mention: Leonard Maltin Movie and Video Guide. Still the biggest and, therefore, the most indispensable of the paperback guides.

Invaluably, it puts in the hard slog of an annual update. The judgements are often dubious and occasionally arrogant.

The List to Give Lists a Bad Name: the American Film Institute’s recently-announced top 100 American films of all time. Shameless and ignorant, not the least for its expropriation of David Lean.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

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The state governm ent has established a fund for the encouragem ent of

young filmmakers.

Eligible projects w ill be mainly

short fiction films documentaries o r experimental films.

The fund is adm inistered by the New South Wales Film & Television Office.

•The Fund is open to individualsor teams of individuals between the ages of 1 8 and 35 years who are NSW residents

•The Fund w ill make direct grants towards

production and post production costs only

•Projects must demonstrate cultural and economic benefit to NSW and be entirely produced in NSW using NSW based service providers

• Each project’s principal photography must begin within six months of approval

•There is no restriction on the form at [film or tape], subject m atter or type of film

$20,000-$25,000,

•T h e m axim um grant w ill be in the range of but the assessment com m ittee may recommend a larger grant for a proposal of exceptional m erit

•The closing date for the next round is

19February1999

Guidelines and applications for the Young Film m akers Fund must be used and are now available from:

New South Wales Film & Television Office Level 6, 1-15 Francis Street East Sydney NSW 2010 Phone [02] 9380 5599 Fax [02] 9360 1090 www.ftosyd.nsw.gov.au

Anthony I. G innane, a veteran producer of the Aus­ tralian film renaissance, is currently president of IDM Film Associates, Inc., based in Los Angeles.

As one examines the industrial topography of the Aus­ tralian film production, distribution and exhibition industry in 1973 and compares it with the landscape in 1998, one cannot but be appalled by the depressing similarity of so many of the issues confronting us. In some ways, it’s going through a time-warp.

Let’s look at a few of them.

Censorship In 1973, the Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals were still being assailed by censorship scandals as major international movies were being hijacked by the Com­ monwealth Film Censor. We were fighting for the introduction of the R-certiflcate. We got it in 1976.

Now, a new wave of right-wing, retro conservatism and PC-family values is progressively eroding the free­ dom of adults to view what they choose. Pasolini’s Said 0 le 120 giornate de Sodome (1975), yet again rebanned, is the most obvious example. There are a myriad of genre-based, B-thrillers pushing the erotic or violence envelope that are not even submitted for classification; major titles are being trimmed to avoid more restrictive classifications and the more conservative states con­ tinue to threaten and blackmail the federal board.

Australian Film Production In 1973, the embryonic Australian film industry was re­ learning Ken G. Hall’s lesson from before World War II that low-brow populist comedy like The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford, 1972) and Alvin Pur­ ple (Tim Burstall, 1973) make commercial box-office waves, while personal down-beat nihilistic pieces like The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974) or Between Wars (Michael Thornhill, 1974) fail.

In 1998, once again, we relearn that low-brow pop­ ulist comedies like The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997) succeed, whereas personal, down-beat nihilistic pieces like In the Winter Dark (james Bogle) and The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Richard Flanagan, 1998) fail.

Austalian Film Subsidy Direct subsidy via the Australian Film Development Cor­ poration (later Australian Film Commission) and state funding bodies was replaced by tax shelter indirect funding in the 1980s as the industry pushed for lesssubjective analysis and a multi-door marketplace. The tax shelter imploded at the end of the 1980s due to a mix of abuse by some producers and manceuvrings and astute PR by film bureaucrat apparatchiks who wanted their power back.

In 1998, the Australian Film Finance Corporation for­ mally reintroduced script assessment in the face of budget cuts and other constraints. Subjectivity is again on the rise, and the future of the industry 25 years on remains at the whim of government.

Australian Audience Tastes In 1973, Australian films’ share of the national boxoffice struggled to hit one percent. By the end of the 1970s, it had carved out a range varying from year to year, but averaging five to ten percent.

With occasional spikes into the teens - and 24 per­ cent in 1986 (the year of ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, low-brow populist comedy!), it has held under 10 percent over the quarter century. What does this tell us about the tastes of Australian producers and directors versus Australian audiences?

Trade Practices In 1973, independent exhibitors’ submissions to the Tariff Board Enquiry focused on difficulties with print supply, rental terms, the power of Hoyts, GUO and Vil­ lage, and the distribution groups’ affiliations (formal and informal) with them.

Twenty-five years and many multiplexes later, the

Independent Exhibitors and Distributors Association has finally signed off on a code of conduct which addresses some of these issues.

Australian Distribution Twenty-five years ago, the Australian distribution land­ scape was dominated by the majors and Roadshow. An independent, Seven Keys, pushed the margins with some success, but collapsed due to under-capitaliza­ tion and aggressive competition.

In the 1980s, Filmpac achieved some success but collapsed for similar reasons.

Now in the 1990s, Beckers-REP is trying again, but is finding the going just as tough.

The Fear of the Foreign (read “ USA”) In 1973, we were bouncing off the walls in fear of Jack Valenti’s ability to render our then nascent film industry rebirth still-born. The leftist anti-USA, anti-Vietnam stand underpinned the thinking of most of the industryfounder movers-and-shakers and has never really gone away.

Through the late 1970s and the 1980s, we stead­ fastly resisted signing any co-production treaties and became the last English-speaking country in the world with a film industry to sign a co-production treaty with anyone.

The GATT debates swirled through the late 1980s and now our world seems to be in danger of falling apart because of the High Court decision regarding New Zealand eligibility for Australian content, which can (to no one but politically-agended hysterics), in the real world of film and television industry commerce, have any practical effect on Australian production. Inane, misleading and inflammatory suggestions are made that New Zealand is a USA stalking-horse or that every other country with which Australia has a treaty (from Azerbai­ jan to Zaire) will try to emulate New Zealand’s strategy.

Why do we not embrace New Zealand, our closest Eng­ lish-speaking neighbour with a micro film and television industry, bring it under our wing and welcome the co­ ventures and opportunities the High Court decision provides? Why has this protectionist paranoia muddled our thinking this past quarter century?

But there have been some changes that are worthy of note. We are not all timid and afraid. One cannot but be full of admiration for the empire that Graham Burke and the Kirbys have built at Village Roadshow. It’s taken longer than 25 years (more like 45), but their develop­ ment from a group of drive-in theatres in Victoria to what will probably emerge as the biggest cinema circuit in the world, excluding the USA, coupled with distribution interests in a variety of territories and substantial pro­ duction interests in Australia and the USA, is something we should all be proud of. Hoyts, too, to a lesser degree, and now, belatedly, GUO have also moved onto the world stage.

In another, but related, arena, the development of the international distribution arms of Beyond and Southern Star have, to a degree that has not been fully recognized, underpinned and supported the activities of the FFC and our film industry in the 1990s. While it is undoubtedly true that John Morris’ decision in letting those two (then embryonic) groups handle the slate of the initial Film Funds kick-started both their activities, if government support for the FFC were pulled tomorrow the interna­ tional expertise and connections built up by these two companies might well prove the industry’s life boat.

Other plusses to note include the Warner-Village Gold Coast Studio and now Fox’s facility in Sydney and the upcoming Paramount Melbourne set-up.

Finally, I’m not overlooking the cultural success our pro­ ductions have achieved in festivals, from Cannes to Katmandu, over the past 25 years. But the cultural machine dines out on those successes to an almost monotonous degree. Let’s praise also the changes that have occurred in the industry’s industrial landscape over the past 25 years and, at the same time, ponder why so many pieces of the matrix remain depressingly the same.

READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP, MR SCHEPISI

Cinema Papers has regularly inter­ viewed Fred Schepisi during the course of his career in Australia, England and the USA. Here, Schepisi lines up a shot for The Chant of fimmie Blacksmith (1978).

MR FIXIT

Pierre Rissient, the French film direc­ tor and cinema activist, has had an (often silent) hand in numerous inter­ national filmmaking careers. Who else would promote a public test screening of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Cop­ pola, 1979) in a 90-seat (only!) cinema in Cannes, making sure the world’s media captured the ensuing riot?

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

M ichael H elms has survived watching countless D ario Argento horror film s, and is Editor o f the fanzine, F atal Visions.

N 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...

lÉISPPs

Greatly missed: actor John Hargreaves, here in Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1979).

TRAVELLING NORTH

... and south and east and west, and anywhere there is a film festival of interest to be covered.

YOU'VE SEEN THE BIG PINEAPPLE, NOW COP THIS

Sex comedies were big in thel970s. John D. Lamond’s mockumentary, The ABC of Love and Sex Australia Style (1978), about Australian sexual proclivities, exemplified the decade s claims for sexual liberation.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

Around 25 years ago, I was casually flicking through TV Week (then just about the only easity-obtainable source for film information, which worked perfectly in conjunction with Catholic-press item, The Advócate, and its film ratings section) and spied a photo spread for the Australian period shocker, Inn o f the Damned.

(Terry Bourke, 1974). As the alluring layout pene­ trated my super-impressionable, 12-year-old brain, I lapped up its intention to horrify, put it on my mental must-see list and got excited.

At that stage, I ate up any sort of horror (still do), but my refined sense of discernment told me then that this was something beyond the usual stream of Hammer, AIP and Toho product that normally poured through my local bijou.

Besides that, it had been shot in Gippsland, some­ where I’d even checked out. While 1certainly had some sort of awareness of The Adventures o f Barry McKenzie (Bruce Beresford, 1972) and Alvin Purple (Tim Burstall, 1973) and, although I didn’t actually get to eyeball Inn of the Damned (nor its predecessor, the bogus feature Night o f Fear [Terry Bourke 1973], both of which remain mysteriously absent on video), it will forever remain the first film I really knew to be Aus­ tralian. I can also recall imagining that a whole heap of Australian horror films must exist out there, even if they weren’t about to play at the Progress Theatre.

Now, in 1998, thanks mainly to Cinema Papers and my own sleuthing, I know there’s very few. But while we might have a dearth of genre films to call our own, and the ones that do exist are still aggressively ignored, it seems like it’s time to get excited again just like in the ancient TV Week as film bible days.

Thanks to advances in technology, a devolving Australian dollar and new competition in the arena of international-standard film studios (it’s great to see Queensland really kicking on for the first time since Bruce Beresford almost made Total Recall [Paul Verhoeven, 1990] there in 1987), the last two years have seen a major upswing in big budget, internationallyfinanced films made in Australia — and they’re all genre productions. Rimed in 1996 and released in the USA as Dark Empire, Alex Proyas’ Dark City has now effectively spread the word about what can be achieved here. The Matrix, which shot in the same space for six months in 1998, is now well on the way to its March ’99 USA release date.

Pitch Black — “Scream in space”, hypes its pro­ ducer— has just wrapped and Farscape, Komodo and Mission Impossible 2 are all in various stages of production. In between, smaller productions, like the Nickelodeon sci-fi flick Doom Runners, have provided continuity for all the prop wranglers, model makers, make-up artists and effects workers who may one day contribute to the great Australian horror film.

With big films paying the rent, there’s got to be more action happening at ground zero. There is already more than a little movement on the no-budget level.

Whatever, over the coming years it’ll be interest­ ing to see what those socially-biased critics obsessed with the preservation of Australian culture make of the situation. Of course, all arguments will fade as the lights go down as we get to watch the end prod­ ucts on a Superscreen in digital sound somewhere in suburbia. Hopefully, Cinema Papers will be around for another 25 years to keep a critical eye on the proceedings.

27

Walter Saunders is a Gourndit-Jmara man from the south-western dis­ trict of Victoria, who has been involved in the development of the Indigenous media and television since the early 1980s. He is currently Director of the Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Commission.

The Australian Content Standard (ACS) is a great thing. First implemented in 1961 and set at 40 percent (4 hours per 28 days between 7.00pm and 9.00pm), the ACS has assured that our commercial television stations must show Australian stories. It has been a boon for audiences and indus­ try alike: there is nothing like seeing stories that are quintessential^ about us; and, there is nothing like earning a quid doing something you like. Where would we be without programmes like Home and Away, Divi­ sion Four, Homicide, A Country Practice and Blue Heelers. Where would the industry be without companies like Crawfords, Grundys or a Southern Star, to name a few? Screen life has been quite rosy for Australian stories and their storytellers since the inception of an ACS. Without a doubt, the ACS would have to be one of the most effective pieces of public policy to be implemented.

But things are not as propitious as they appear. There is something lacking Vaughn (Luke Carroll) and in the programmes screened on the com­ Lena (Jamllla Frail).

Ivan Sen's Tears. mercial networks. There are no stories from the first Australians! Sure, we have some children’s programmes that have a touch of the tar brush about them and occasionally there are some episodes of popular series which are written by Indigenous Australians. And at other times we have Indigenous characters introduced in major series, albeit because of ethnicity. But, really, we do not have any programmes written, directed, produced and starring Indige­ nous Australians on commercial television. Unfortunately, without their view of the world, Australia’s television landscape is pretty much a cultural desert.

At various stages throughout the 1980s, Indigenous people have tried to increase the amount of Indigenous con­ tent on commercial television through different means, like the National Aboriginal and Islander Broadcasting Association, and organizations like CAAMA and TAIMA. It was tried again in 1988 and 1993 as part of a push designed to increase cultural diversity on commercial television. The result was that the broadcasters, through the Federation of Commercial Television Stations, agreed to be more sensitive in this regard and pro­ duced a series of Advisory Notes: The Portrayal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, The Portrayal of Cultural Diversity and The Por­ trayal of Women and Men. On face value this has worked for ethnic people and women with the appearance of more women in lead rôles and ethnic people being cast as regular characters and not introduced because of their ethnicity. But this has not necessarily worked for Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous people have also benefited from good public policy with the establishment of the Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Com­ mission. Like the broader industry, Indigenous filmmakers have made the most of the opportunities created by the implementation of good policy to make some quite fantastic films. From Sand to Celluloid remains, arguably, the most successful series of short films produced in Australia’s filmic history. Its stories are about living within the dominant white soci­ ety: deaths in custody (No Way To Forget and Payback); identity (Two-Bob Mermaid and Blackman Down)-, understanding (FlyPeewee Fly and Round Up). Similarly, the stories in Shifting Sands: From Sand to Celluloid Con­ tinued... moves people but, unlike From Sand to Celluloid, its stories are about Indigenous people from within Indigenous society: the family who are visiting relatives and have a ghostly experience (Passing Through); the relative living far from home who attends the funeral of her sister to find she is not accepted (Grace); having your husband or wife selected for you (Promise and M y Bed, Your Bed); wanting to escape mission life (Tears);

28

and missing and wanting family (My Colour, Your Kind). Given the level of public debate about all things Indigenous at the time both series were made, it is astounding that the programmes in Shifting Sands did not wave the flag more. Who could really blame Indigenous people from being critical of government in the face of the extinguishment of Indigenous property rights; the lack of a formal apology from the government for the generations of stolen children; and, the irascible mean-spirited speech the Prime Minister made to all Australians when he addressed the Reconcilia­ tion Conference, compared to the “You will love it” speech he made earlier the same year to farmers at Long Reach? Nevertheless, the films con­ tained within these two AFC initiatives are not didactic or overtly polemic.

Yet they are iconoclastic in what they symbolize to Indigenous people.

Above all, they are engaging enough for even the most discerning audi­ ences who want to know what concerns and what affects Indigenous Australians.

At present, apart from some features and programmes made for com­ munity consumption, all Indigenous product is made for government television with some of it enjoying a theatrical release. SBS and ABC have long been supporters of diversity. You can switch to either channel at least once or twice a month and find not only Indige­ nous characters in stories, but also stories which are written, directed, pro­ duced and created by Indigenous people.

Yet a surf to the commercial channels and you will not find a ripple. Indigenous shows on commercial stations are scarcer than an ironed shirt in Bob Ellis’ wardrobe! Why is Indigenous product rel­ egated to be screened only by public broadcasters? I do not mean to look a gifthorse in the mouth, and I am extremely grateful to SBS and ABC, but it is an extremely limited audience both in terms of numbers and demographics who watch the government broadcasters.

Moreover, those who do watch predomi­ nantly have a higher level of understanding of Indigenous issues; it is a bit like preaching to the converted.

Is the creation of an Indigenous Con­ tent Standard (ICS) the solution to this dilemma? What would its creation do for Indigenous productivity and inclusion into society and understand­ ing in general? At the beginning of 1998, the ACS was increased from 50 percent of programmes screened between 6am and midnight (around 9,855 hours per annum) to 55 percent (an increase of 985.5 hours per annum). Why not set an ICS at 2 percent of the current 55 percent per annum across the three networks? This would amount to 216.81 hours per annum of Indigenous content across all genre. I can almost hear the cries of aghast. I heard similar cries at the 1998 SPAA Conference when I broached the subject with a few: “An Indigenous standard would be alright as long as the quality is there.” This reminds me of the comments made by the commercial broadcasters in response to the establishment of the ACS: “There are no quality Australian writers”; “Australian directors are not skilled enough”; and “We don’t have good Australian producers.”

In hindsight, one can see how spurious these arguments really were. We can also see how the industry grabbed the opportunity an ACS presented and established the vibrant television industry we have today.

Indigenous filmmakers are no different. For them to be, feel and act like valuable and accepted members of society, they must be woven into it. The way for this to happen is for as many Australians as possible to hear their stories. They must not be treated as the “other” any longer. Ini­ tiatives designed to improve the participation rates of Indigenous people in industry are great. They are a sure way of creating space within indus­ try. But initiatives must advance and evolve if the recipients of them are to mature and develop into real industry players. The creation of an ICS by government is a way of ensuring that industry, through the commercial broadcasters, assists in the development of the Indigenous sector of the industry. Then, perhaps, Indigenous filmmakers will not feel like intelli­ gent parasites.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

Richard L owenstein ’s features include Strikebound (1984), Dogs In Space (1987) and Say A Little Prayer (1992).

THERE'S SOMETHING GOING ON HERE, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS, DO YOU, MR JONES?

Barry Jones, one of the instrumental fig­ ures in establishing the Australian Film and Television School (later AFTRS), checks his facts at an Australian Film Awards presentation.

AWESOME TWOSOME

George Miller and Byron Kennedy, founders of Kennedy Miller productions.

THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE

V.

One of the Australia’s gjfc. most successful film directors, George ^Miller, after making fr the breakthrough §. action film, Mad Max (1979).

'W'7

surprise

TO MARKET, TO MARKET

«

A snapshot of dif­ ferent motifs used to sell Australian films in overseas markets. The “great legs” ad ran into a storm of protest... from feminists and ‘great leg’ connoisseurs.

AFC AT CANNES

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

TODAY

Sometime in the early 1970s, before the days of SBS, before the time when the Valhalla and other repertory cinemas became a refuge for frustrated cinephiles, before European or independently-produced art films were accepted as a form of mainstream cinematic entertainment, when screenings of these films were a rarity and not a commodity, at a time when films shown at the Melbourne Film Festival rarely got a commercial release, my father took me to a screening at Melbourne University’s Union Theatre. I was thirteen years old.

We arrived at what seemed to be an endless queue of people that snaked out the main glass doors, down the steps and into the courtyard. We walked along the length of the queue and approached the side door of the ticket box.

The door was opened by a friend of my father’s (I think they had known each other in the Communist Party). Fie looked kinda stressed and anxious. There was a “sold out” sign sitting in the box-office window. “I think we’ve sold more tickets than there are seats, but I’ve got some camp stools sitting up the back, so I can sneak you in”, he whispered. We nodded and bowed our heads in shame as we walked along the frustrated queue and headed towards the wel­ come darkness of the cinema. A Japanese man pressed in tight behind a row of other desperate moviegoers impatiently waved around a fistful of dollars (sorry, I had to put that in). “I’ve waited five years to see this film!”, he shouted angrily at the closed box-office as we disappeared inside.

Dad’s friend led us towards the camp chairs set up at the back of the the­ atre and sat down beside us. There was not a spare seat in the house. People were sitting in the aisles. A sense of excitement filled the air. The lights went dim and two scratchy black-and-white Japanese calligraphy characters appeared on the screen superimposed over some sort of logo. A fuzzy sub­ title appeared underneath translating the calligraphy into TOFIO FILMS. To a young teenage boy, deprived of “the opiate of the masses” by two Marxist, book-reading parents who objected to daily doses of talking horses, thor­ oughly modern witches and other such examples of American Imperialism, what followed was a cinematic revelation. The exploitation of the under­ classes, the respect of the aged, the flower of youth, the bonding of friendship, the loss of a father, true love, noble moral values, honour, loyalty, weakness, strength, fear and solidarity, all combined with a sense of balletic violence, stillness, visual language and action that affected you more by what it didn’t show than what it did. The depiction of all this was via an array of sharply-defined, standout characters, portrayed both aurally and visually with a vivid clarity, texture and empathy unsurpassed today.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if just one of the endless stream of lame and bland big-budget action flicks that continue to emerge from the American sausage factory they call Hollywood, touched upon no more than ten percent of the skill, proficiency, characterization, dimension, humanity and profundity of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), what size of box-office take would be realized. Surely it would be of titanic (sic) proportions.

We both came out of the screening stunned. In the car on the way home, I responded mono-syllabically (can’t talk... feeling). In subsequent weeks, we followed this screening with ones of Rashomon (1950), Throne of Blood {Kumonosu-jo, 1957), Sanjuro (1962), Yojimbo (i960), The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san-akunin, 1958), Red Beard {Akahige, 1965), High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, 1963), Living (Ikiru, 1952) and The Lower Depths (Donzoko, 1957). We devoured them like starved readers, who, upon getting a taste for an undiscovered author, promptly devour every other book, poem, doodle or whatever they have written. In later years, after wandering to other filmmakers, we eagerly anticipated and tracked down screenings of Dodeskaden (Dodesukaden, 1970), Dersu Uzala (1975), Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985).

This was the era of our ‘Father and Son Night’ at school where we watched scratchy old, Education Department-approved sex-education films, full of dia­ grams and naked human primates staring blankly at the camera. We migrated from this to Renoir, Lang, Pabst, Buhuel, Von Sternberg, Von Stroheim, Pasolini, Borowczyk and Fellini, amongst others, all of which completely messed up what the Education Department had spent so much money trying to set right. (How was I to know that bathing in the blood of the local peasant virgins was not the thing to do?) There was a lot of different kinds of bonding cinematic experiences through that time, but nothing really compared to the delicious rush of that golden stretch of Kurosawa films seen for the first time.

See ya round, y’ol bastard.

--------------- ...------------------------ "mL '■ - '■ J---------------------------------------------

29

D ebi E n k e r , a former Deputy Editor at Cinema Papers, now writes about television and film for The Age. For me, Broadcast News has magic. It passes, with fly­ ing colours, that most basic test: it never disappoints.

Every time I watch it, I marvel at its accomplishment and appreciate its sparkle. I relish the rapid-fire, razorsharp dialogue, the knowing and astute insights into the workings of the television industry, and the charm and complexity of its central triangle of characters. Like all great films, it doesn’t fade with time; it improves with age.

Written, produced and directed by the estimable James L. Brooks in 1987, Broadcast News is set in the Washington bureau of a network news organization. At one level, it’s about the way that news is constructed: the hierarchy of the newsroom; the way that producers and reporters work together; the debates among the staff about ethics at a time when the line between pro­ viding information and producing entertainment has become thoroughly blurred. As it evokes a fiercely competitive environment, fuelled by the rush of adren­ aline that accompanies deadline fever, the film also places its characters in a media organization where rat­ ings rule and layoffs and down-sizings are de rigueur.

In the antagonistic, yet at times grudgingly-respectful relationship between seasoned reporter Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) and rising anchorman Tom Grunick (William Hurt), it defines one of the cruel reali­ ties of every television newsroom: that amid the continual jockeying for position, capable and experi­ enced people are passed over for recognition and promotions which instead go to telegenic airheads who can read teleprompters, take direction with ease and conduct themselves with aplomb at cocktail parties or on the lecture circuit. And while this is strongly sug­ gested through Tom’s smooth rise through the ranks, it’s also glaringly evident in the deft and devastating depiction of network’s chief anchorman, played with contained glee by Jack Nicholson. Bill Rorsh only appears briefly, but it’s more than enough time for Brooks to establish that at the top of the tree is not a veteran newsman to revere but a smooth-talking, utterly-insincere, massively-egotistical, handsomelyremunerated reptile who’s all puffed up on his own importance inside his well-tailored cashmere coat. Fol­ lowing in Rorsh’s footsteps through the network ranks, Tom knows his best angle and he’s learned how to sit on the tails of his jacket to stop the sleeves from wrin­ kling up around his shoulders while he’s on air, even if he can’t name all the members of the Cabinet.

Canny as it is in its depiction of the news business, it’s the seamless counterpoint between the personal and the professional that is one of the film’s great strengths. At the same time as it provides a cutting insight into the workings of modern media, it offers a vibrant, delicately-nuanced trio of central characters.

They’re an unlikely bunch - and beautifully cast as such - and they’re ideal for the film’s exploration of loyalty, the bonds of friendship and the thrill of romance.

Brooks’ characters are rich, full of contradictions and ambiguities. Tom’s a sly charmer, but he’s also, touchingly earnest in his desire to learn and do better.

News producer Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) is a driven professional, ruthless and exacting in the standards she applies to herself and others on the job. But she’s not above conniving to dispatch a rival to Alaska in order to clear her route to Tom’s bed. And skilled as she is at work, she’s also hopelessly clumsy in matters of the heart.

30

With Jane and Aaron, Brooks has given us one of the great male-female screen friendships. They are perfect pals. They share goals, values and ambitions. They confide in each other. They speak at a pace and com­ municate at a level that leaves others confounded.

Witness the late-night phone chat: “Wouldn’t this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive, if needy were a turn on?”, sighs Aaron after recounting the dismays of the day. “Call if you get weird”, replies Jane, sympathetic. As platonic friends, they’re totally in sync: “I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time”, Aaron instructs Jane. “Okay, I’ll meet you there”, she agrees. No expla­ nation necessary; she knows exactly what he means.

It’s consummate writing: simple and eloquent. Tom, of course, is the wedge that drives them apart, the man Jane recognizes is flawed but also finds irresistible.

Tom can’t touch Aaron or Jane in the brains trust department, but he’s got a natural savvy they could only dream about. Unlike Aaron, who’s too smart and prickly for his own good, Tom knows how to get help when he needs it and he’s an expert at working the angles in order to turn situations to his own advantage.

In one very real sense, he does represent everything that Jane and Aaron fear and loathe about their busi­ ness. But as he sets up and develops this intricate and dynamic triangle, one of Brooks’ inspired moves is to restrain himself from making Tom a total monster. His characters have more depth. Jane might be a control freak at work, or when issuing directions to a driver from the back seat of his taxi. She’s fierce, fiery, a barger-inner, a woman who walks and talks fast, who runs on a furious energy and acts on instinct rather than calculating the consequences. But she regularly dissolves into sobs of despair when she’s home alone (even though she’s so organized that she sets aside time in her busy schedule for the tears). Aaron might seem seasoned and whip-smart, but he’s a smart aleck and often his own worst enemy. Talented, yes; a diplo­ mat, never. And Tom, well, Tom might well be the Devil - as Aaron suggests - a demon with a deceptively benign mien. But we also see him as a guy who knows that he’s not too bright, who wistfully recognizes his limitations and craves the approval of his peers. While we are given ample reason to be wary of him and all that he represents, we also know that he’s desperate to be better at what he does, keen to learn and to improve.

Both streetwise and na'ive, Tom at times also even emerges as being more honest than his righteous col­ leagues. “You could get fired for things like that!”, Jane shrieks at Tom after learning that he has faked tears in order to gee-up the emotional drama of a news report.

“I got promoted for things like that!”, he retorts angrily, his instinctive understanding of the machinations of the business slicing through her ethical stance with chilling ease.

The film’s glorious final sequence takes us seven years on, to a trio older and wiser, to characters that have gone their separate ways, privately and profes­ sionally. Jane and Aaron, companionable friends in the rain under a gazebo, share updates of their lives, tacitly understanding that a romantic flicker has finally been extinguished, and moving on. Tom walks away from them - attractive and magnetic as ever with Aaron’s son happily tagging along after him - back to his stat­ uesque, admiring blonde wife and his new role as the network’s chief anchorman. Nothing is simple, yet it all makes perfect sense. It’s tender and bittersweet, filled with longing and acceptance. Magic.

As well as Cinema Papers, Cinema Papers Pty Ltd produced a number of anthologies, monographs and year­ books. 1980’s The New Australian Cinema was a best-seller.

In this first o f an occasional series of monographs on Australian directors, Brian McFarlane explores the themes and preoccupations in

t *■ * 3 ft,

T l i r f i lm s o f

PETER WEIR

Phis hrst in-depth overview of Peter Weir’s unique cin•<)i t# v ematic vision (by

Brian McFarlane) % A’ was followed by f f f K e i t h Connolly’s monograph on pf Bruce Beresford.

AUSTRALIAN

THANKS, WERE FLATTERED

MOTION PICTURE YEARBOOK

Another best-seller, the Australian Motion Picture Yearbook highlighted a year’s productions and key issues, with the first com­ prehensive industry listings ... continuously imitated by others ever since!

A BLOKE FOR ALL SEASONS

In Neuil Shute’s A '¡'own Like Alice (1981), actor (and later producer) Bryan Brown once and forever defined the laconic Aussie male.

Inset: Brown and costar Helen Morse.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

BETTER GUNS AND AMMO

John Jarratt in The Last Outlaw (1980), one of the many television mini-series that would flourish during the 1980s. Often, the best filmed drama produced during a year was made for television, not the cinema screen.

Remember The Dis­ missal (1983), A Town Like Alice, Bodyline (1984), Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1987), Fields of Fire (1987), Vietnam (1987), et al?

WHO AM I?

Four letters, beginning with B. Unfortunately, Cinema Papers got it wrong and came up with “Henry Crawford” (producer of A Town Like Alice).

Thumbs down to Cinema Papers. Mr Crawford was not amused, either.

For the. correct answer, see photograph, p. 14.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

Brian M cFarlane has laboured for Cinema Papers for 21 years. For relaxation, he is an Asso­ ciate Professor in the English Department at Monash University.

The answer is not, as a colleague suggested, a porn star, but one of the most-neglected and -under­ rated of British directors. When 1was asked by Cinema Papers to write, on this historic occasion, a short piece reflecting “the author’s passion for cin­ ema”, the opportunity to trumpet this unsung hero was too much to resist. After my 21 continuous years of hard labour in the Cinema Papers vineyard, it seemed like a reward for good behaviour.

Lance Comfort entered movies in 1925, fulfilling such functions as Sound Recordist, Special Effects man and ‘Technical Supervisor’ on several dozen films before directing his first feature, Hatter’s Cas­ tle, in 1940. This was based on a sadistically downbeat novel of domestic tyranny by A. J. Cronin (does anyone remember him?), with wild-eyed Robert Newton as Brodie, the Scottish hatter with ideas above his station and a family under his thumb. Comfort released the novel from the shack­ les of its dour and spurious realism, and brought real melodramatic panache to bear on its tableaux of obsessive aspiration and patriarchal cruelty.

Brodie browbeats his careworn drudge of a wife; brings his barmaid mistress to live in the ‘castle’; and kicks his pregnant daughter out into the snow - and that’s only when he’s feeling good about life.

The youthful James Mason, Deborah Kerr and Emlyn Williams respectively vivify the doctor hero, the put-upon daughter he rescues and her slimy seducer; and cinematographer Max Greene’s lumi­ nous chiaroscuro does justice to James Carter’s Gothic production design. I mention these names because, if Comfort was never a candidate for auteur status, at very least he was able to orches­ trate some impressive talents.

He was at his most buoyant in the 1940s when he made a series of melodramas that are worth anyone’s time and which draw regularly on such rewarding collaborators. Great D ay{1946) affectingly combines English pastoral (a village prepares for a visit from Mrs Roosevelt) and the melodrama of obsession (a former World War I captain steals a ten-shilling note and is brought to the brink of sui­ cide). Bedelia (1946) is a handsome wicked-woman thriller, with Margaret Lockwood, the decade’s archetypal ‘Wicked Lady’, murdering her way through several husbands and towards handsome insurance pay-outs. The film is sharp about her sex­ ual distaste for men; and this theme is even more potently treated in Daughter of Darkness (1948), in which an Irish nymphomaniac servant girl, Emmy Baudine, comes to work on an English farm and seduces and murders her way through the local eligibles. Remarkably for its time, the film retains our sympathy for her ‘otherness’ at the expense of the clipped vowels which seek to keep her in her sexual and social place.

If there is a continuing preoccupation running through these films it is that of the obsessive per­ sonality, and Comfort is not afraid to give some showy actors their enjoyable heads as they render this condition. Not only Newton, who appears for Comfort again in the sombre 1947 Simenon-based thriller, Temptation Harbour, but also Lockwood, who narrows her eyes and flares her nostrils to dangerous purpose as Bedelia; the Irish actor Siob-

han McKenna, who brings a compelling intensity to the genuinely strange, mad Emmy; and Eric Portman, whose neurotic edge superbly serves the needs of the déclassé captain in Great Day. The last of the 1940s obsessives is the parvenu country gent in Silent Dust (1949), played to suggest chilling monomania by Stephen Murray, his physical blind­ ness acting as an index of his blinkered dedication to the memory of his wastrel son. And the actors’ pyrotechnics in these films are again and again reinforced by full-throttle musical scores and cam­ eramen with more on their minds than pictures of people talking.

Comfort never enjoyed the acclaim accorded those filmmakers who worked in the critically-privi­ leged literary and realist strands of British cinema of the period. Melodrama had a strong commercial innings from 1943 to 1946, with the Gainsborough bodice-rippers, disdained by critics then, but recently re-evaluated in some of the most acute exegeses to be found on any aspect of film. Com­ fort’s first melodrama was too early for the Gainsborough cycle launched in 1943 with The Man in Grey (Leslie Arliss) and, by the time he hit his stride in the later 1940s, the vogue had passed. Dur­ ing the war his films were untouched by the new fashion for ‘authenticity’ in the fiction film: he made spy thrillers (Squadron LeaderX[1943], Escape to Danger[ 1943], both for RKO’s London operation), a stodgy biopic {Penn of Pennsylvania, 1941, which brazenly solicits American solidarity with belea­ guered England), a director-proof Old Mother Riley farce (1943) and a charming version of Priestley’s regional comedy, When We Are Married (1943).

Sadly, Comfort never seemed to be doing the right thing at the right time, for either major critical or audience support. As the industry changed in the 1950s, as different kinds of genres commanded popularity, as the studio structures grew more pre­ carious and the audiences less reliable, he found himself confined mainly to making B-movies - that is, supplying the bottom half of the double bill which was then the standard exhibition mode.

However, some of these are very good indeed: for the record, his best are probably Bang! You’re Dead (1954), a moody, off-beat piece of postwar malaise; Eight O’clock Walk (1954), a thriller which quite daringly turns on the issue of child molestation; Touch of Death (1962), in which robbery is compli­ cated by unsuspected poison; and the gripping kidnap drama, Tomorrow at Ten (1962). All these films move smartly, create the right tension, and often look stylish beyond their modest means.

The budgets grew less, but Comfort adapted himself to straitened circumstances, tightened his belt and his plotlines, worked second-string stars to often striking effect, made resourceful use of locations within easy reach of London, and kept his eye on the changing social climate. He had the advantage of a number of recurring collaborators, including cinematographer Basil Emmott, screen­ writer Lyn Fairhurst and editor John Trumper. It’s encouraging to see what can be achieved in dis­ count filmmaking if the personnel care enough about it. Comfort’s is not a solitary case: others such as Vernon Sewell, Lawrence Huntington, Montgomery Tully and Arthur Crabtree are similarly ripe for reappraisal: Lance Comfort, perhaps, hur­ dled the decades more persuasively than any, until his untimely death in 1967; it’s time to give him his due. That’s why I’m writing a book about him.

31

I GET TO KEEP THE CARDIE, RIGHT?

AAK en M o gg is a devoted Hitchcock scholar and Editor of The

MacGuffin.

Every night a new adventure! My ISP (Internet Service Provider) is obliged to give me just 75 minutes a day of access-time on the Net, but, if I wait till midnight before going on, I can usually manage to stay connected as long as I need. Which is fortunate! For a film fan or film scholar, especially if s/he has a Web site to be regularly updated, it’s possible to spend easily a couple of hours a day on-line. Importantly, it’s my experience that most of that time can be fruitfully spent.

There are some wonderful individual sites on the Web. I’m simply in awe of one devoted to the Czech animator jan Svankmajer, for exam­ ple. Then there are the academic-type sites brimming with learned essays and updated frequently. A long-standing favourite of mine is the UK Film-Philosophy site, though it’s rivalled these days by Screen­ ing the Past, based at LaTrobe University, Australia. Often, I make use of the Internet Movie Data Base and, for information on film books and general books, both the Amazon.com site and the Blackwell’s Book­ shop site. Of course, sometimes I don’t know if a particular topic is on the Net at all. At such times, I typically first see what the powerful AltaVista search-engine will turn up.

But what really engages me on the Net are the opportunities it pro­ vides to discuss and research my favourite topic, the films and career of Alfred Hitchcock. For a start, the public Usenet group, alt.movies.hitchcock, is seldom a dead-loss, thanks to someone like Fergal Hughes in the Irish Republic who regularly posts good com­ ments; however, the site’s overall standard is low, and ‘flaming’ is always breaking out. Much better, I find, are such academic groups as H-Film (for discussing matters of film history and general film culture), Screen-L (similar, with an emphasis on teaching), and Film Theory. All of these have helped me this year to formulate various positions most recently, concerning the significance of women wearing glasses in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers On A Train (1951), and Vertigo (1958). Sound mundane? It wasn’t!

Best of all for me has been corresponding with many of the people who’ve stumbled on my Hitchcock Web site. Here, I’d be churlish if I didn’t single out Dr Tag Gallagher, a good Irish Catholic who lives in Massachusetts, and who is the author of a standard book on John Ford. A year ago I sent Tag my analysis of The Wrong Man (1957), which he had told me was his favourite Hitchcock film, and ever since then we’ve swapped thoughts by email almost every night. Lately, he’s had me reading St Augustine (in part for an alleged Hitchcock connec­ tion!). Tag, though, is just one of my regular email correspondents, whose messages are nearly always welcome.

Nearly always welcome?! Well, I read an article somewhere about information overload, and I must say it rang true! Some mornings, I have to spend a good half-hour just filing the hardcopies of the previ­ ous night’s messages, before I can start on the day’s business. And, of course, I’m committed each night to updating that Web site I men­ tioned. It includes a nightly ‘column’, a News section, and a New Publications page for books and journal articles on Hitch. The Research & Information library of the Australian Film Institute regularly alerts me to such material - especial thanks, Aysen! - and, though there’s been a lull just lately, I’m expecting the floodgates to open next year, the Hitchcock centennial.

So those are my nightly doings! All things considered, I’m grateful.

It’s a whole new medium operating up there on the Net, in some ways embracing movies as the latter, historically, embraced novels and plays, to nobody’s ultimate disadvantage. Well worth getting into, if you just keep your head about what your needs are, and develop a sensible game-plan for best meeting them.

The glamorous Wendy Hughes is memorable in an atypical role in Paul Cox’s Lonely Hearts (1982), one of several films she would make with the prolific director.

YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING!

Nicole Kidman in BMX Bandits (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1983) at the start of her brilliant career.

MEL'O'DRAMA

By the time he starred in The Year of Living Dangerously, Mel Gibson had become one of the world’s hottest screen idols. He has travelled a long way from his first feature role, as Scollop {inset below, centre) in Summer City (Christopher Fraser, 1977).

URLs (W eb addresses) m e n tio n e d . A ll o f th e se are prefaced by h t t p : / /

filament.illumin.co.uk/svank/index.html Oan S va n km a je r A lc h e m is t o f th e S urreal)

www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/ (F ilm -P hilosophy)

www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast (S creening th e Past)

us.imdb.com (In te rn e t M o vie D ata Base - US) www.amazon.com/ (Am azon.com ) bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/ (B la ck w e ll’s B oo ksho p, www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/ (A ltaV ista) www.labyrinth.net.au/-muffin

O xford)

(A lfred H itchcock S ch o la rs /T h e M acG uffin)

32

C I N E M A PAPERS

J A N U A R Y 1999

THE KULTURE OF MULTI

“The Migrant Experience” (by Adrian Martin) was one of several articles chronicling the rise of multicultural themes in Australian film and television.

UNIQUE VISION

The daringly-original cinema of Jane Campion has been the focus of many Cinema Papers articles. Campion was first interviewed while still making short films, the year after Peel was a finalist in the 1983 Greater Union Awards.

Jane Campion, an expatriate New Zealander who has lived in Australia f o r the past seven years, is a recent graduate o f the Australian Film and Television School (AFTS). Her short film s Peel, A Girl’s Own Story and Passionless Moments (with Gerard Lee) have already attracted considerable attention and theatrical distribution. Peel was a finalist in the 1983 Greater Union Awards; A Girl's Own Story won the Rouben Mamoulian A w ard at the 1984 Sydney Film Festival and Best Direction in the Non-Feature section o f the 1984 Australian Film Institute Awards; and Passionless M oments won Best Experimental Film at the same A wards. Campion is currently working on a project with the Women’s Film Unit at Film Australia.

Campion is interviewed by M ark Stiles. in films? was at Sydney College of the Arts, which is probably my greatest leaching influence. I had a fantastic time at the school. I had very old-fasbioned ideas about an which i had picked up at home — you sort of drew things — and that was what I wanted to learn. Art was all very mysterious: there were these wonderful paintings and you wanted to look at them for a long time without really knowing why.

Art school knocked a lot of that out of me. It is not so much that it really changed me but that it made me rethink everything, which was pretty monumental at the age of 25.

434 — December CINEMA PAPERS

After that, I decided I wanted to do work about things I was think­ ing about and involved in, which were generally relationships and love . . . and sex! Previously, I would go to art school and draw, and I couldn’t wait to get home and gossip about the intricacies of relationships and so on. Then I thought, “ Why am I not doing my work about these things?” So I started making story paintings and it clicked that I was trying to tell stories.

Did you start writing?

Yes. 1 started writing plays, little performance pieces, and began putting them on. They were pretty

UNIQUE VISIONS CHALLENGED

This attempt at comparing a year’s output from Melbourne’s Swinburne with that of Sydney’s AFTS became a blistering attack on the lack of anything original - daring or otherwise.

33

R acf M athews is a passionate film buff and a former

Minister in the Victorian Government.

Michael Powell - my favourite director - called the first vol­ ume of his memoirs, A Life in the Movies. What follows is a lay view from the audience. Invidious as list-making may be — and so subjective as to ensure that no list ever stays the same for more than a few hours after preparing it — some highlights tend to be constant. Those chosen in no sense purport to be a best-films-of-all-time list, but simply those which seem — as of this moment — to have given me my greatest movie-going moments.

Come and go as do other titles, Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoléon always stands out among my favourites. Seeing Kevin Brownlow’s restoration of it for the first time in 1983, on the big screen at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne, with the accompaniment of the full Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra, was a rare moment of revelation. My breath was taken away by the sheer majesty of Gance’s conception and the sweep of his technical mastery and audacity. A passage from the post-production script catches the intoxication of the occasion: while the Beggars of Glory, their stomachs empty but their heads filled with songs, leave history to pass into legend, the ragged troops are interrupted in their rhythm by the sight of a shadow on the road before them.

The eagle! It stretches its wings across all three screens, and the great advance picks up its impetus. As the images become faster and faster, the triptych becomes one great tricolour flag, and the chant is succeeded by the “Marseil­ laise”. A mælstrom fills all three screens. “The whole Revolution”, the passage concludes, swept on at delirious speed towards the heart of Europe, is'now one huge tricolor flag, quivering with all that has been inscribed upon it, and it takes on the appearance of an Apocalyptic, tricolor torrent, inundating, inflaming and transfiguring, all at one and the same time.

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) usually takes second place, both for its excellence as a popular film and for the uniquely poignant mixture of idealism and lost innocence which it conveys — if anything, more strongly as the events which inspired it recede from popular memory. I thought for a long time that Claude Rains had given the perfor­ mance of his life in Casablanca - that is, until I saw him as the diplomat in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

Bogart was the perfect Rick. Dooley Wilson’s rendition of “As Time Goes By” is about as sublime a match of music to mood as movies have ever managed. And how many other movies are there where, after repeated viewings, your heart still rises into your mouth as in the “Marseillaise” sequence of Casablancal Frances Ford Coppola - whose generosity enabled the print of Brownlow’s reconstruction of Napoléon to be made usually comes in third, for the Godfather trilogy as a whole, and sometimes rates a further mention around number six for Apocalypse Now (1979). If The Godfatheris technically by far the better film and the more likely to endure, Apocalypse Now has the advantage for my generation of having made explicable to us the nature of the war in Vietnam through images of astonishing poetic force and virtuosity. It’s hard to imagine a more complex layering of meanings than in the helicopter attack on the Vietnamese village.

Orson Welles almost always rates two mentions, more often than not with Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff, 1966) in fourth place and Citizen Kane (1941) at number eight. The strengths of Chimes at Midnight include: Gielgud delivering what must surely be the most heart-wrenching ever rendi­ tion of the great Flenry IV speech; Welles’ Falstaff; and the skill with which Welles brings together Shakespeare’s two plays in a single seamless cinematic masterpiece. Chimes at Midnight also has one of cinema’s more striking battles.

Citizen Kane calls for no comment other than that, in the

34

present context, it deserves a higher ranking than the com­ petition allows. See Kane as often as you may, it loses none of its power to astonish.

Powell and Emeric Pressburger are mostly in fifth place for their Tales of Hoffmann (1951). It is not for nothing that Martin Scorsese credits Hoffmann with having inspired him to become a filmmaker. What Powell sees as having been his “totally composed” film fits squarely into the category of neglected cinematic gems. How else could the savagelymutilated, stripped-of-its-colour version the young Scorsese saw on television have established so compre­ hensive a hold on his imagination? Innovative use of colour was always one of the glories of the films Powell and Pressburger made in the course of their partnership as The Archers - and nowhere more so than in Hoffmann. Scenes such as Helpmann’s first entry and his entry with Ludmilla Tcherina in the gondola in Venice are powerful testimony to Powell’s eye and the exotic sensibilities of his designer, Hein Heckroth. Was ever a woman’s face captured quite so sensually as in Tcherina’s reflection in the canal? I was so bowled over seeing the original release of Hoffmann at the Athenaeum in 1951 or 1952 that I went back seven more times before it was taken off and - to the best of my knowl­ edge - has never since been screened publicly in Australia, although a video cassette and a laser disc of it are available in America. Not least, Hoffmann was my first experience of feeling passionate about an actress: Pamela Brown, who played Hoffmann’s Muse, Nicklaus. Powell’s memoirs dis­ close that, at the time, he and Brown were lovers. Perhaps something of the electricity which must have crackled between them came through to me. Other actresses, notably Alida Valli, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Christie, later captivated me, but never remotely like Pamela Brown!

The Seven Samurai (.Shichinin No Samurai, 1954) usually rates around number seven. While the Western began as an American genre, it took Akira Kurosawa to perfect it. Deep as is my affection for almost every Western John Ford ever made, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), George Stevens’ Shane (1953) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the combination of lyricism and explosive action in The Seven Samurai transcends all of them.

From an opposite perspective, Sergei Eisenstein’s highly-static and formal Ivan the Terrible Part I (Ivan Grozny, 1944) and Part II (Boyarskii Zagovor, 1958) shoul­ der aside his Alexander Nevsky (1938) for ninth place, simply because its examples of the sort of pictorial compo­ sition in which Eisenstein and his cameraman, Tisse, excelled - scenes such as Ivan’s Last Rites, the wedding feast and Ivan looking out across the procession of citizens which calls for his return to Moscow - are more numerous.

Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Came, 1945) mostly makes it into tenth place by a fine margin over umpteen other possible candidates which from time to time seem to have better claims. Those which miss out narrowly include, for example, Powell and Pressburger again for: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), The Red Shoes (1948), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and / Know Where I’m Going! (1945); Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Rebecca (1940); Bob Fosse for All That Jazz (1979) and Cabaret (1972); Franklin j. Schaffner’s Patton (1970) and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), Robert Altman for Nashville (1975), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1969) and Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction (1994). Flawed movies which nonetheless retain elements of something special - for example Coppola with The Cotton Club (1984) and Michael Cimino with Heaven’s Gate (1980) - are a big headache for list-makers.

And so it all seems, as of 10am on Thursday 28 August 1998. Irrespective of which are at any given point the inclu­ sions and which the exclusions, or in what order of preference, none of them have been other than memorable.

P.S., I LOVE YOU actor Nicholas Gledhill Sumner Locke Elliott’s Careful He Might You (Carl Schultz, 1983).

NOBODY'S FOOLS Melbourne husband-and-wife team David Parker and Nadia Tass made the first of their many comedies with Malcolm (1986), an affectionate caper about a dim-witted tram driver drawn into a series of offbeat larrikin adventures.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

F R O N T

L

I

N

E

W illiam A. T yler , based in New Lambton, NSW, is a poet and author of the book,

S

Making the Best o f Invalid Life.

10B A R IP ?

Taxing qu estions for the film industry Have reports of the deat of 10BA been g reatl exaggerated? Is there sti life in the tax rort? Takin the initiative in the debatt the Australian Film Corr mission has put o ut a dis cussion p ap e r on th future o f the industr which exam ines the of tions for financial assis ance, and comes up with proposal that would n place the often-maiigne 10BA with a governmen backed loan fund. Th AFC is now canvassing Ir dustry views on its plar and will report to th government in Februan There has not been so much ’.afc abco! tax sense rhe heaay days oi the .riamcus 3 atom of the Har­ bour" tax. avo dance schemes. Wim tire Federa? Government determined to increase its tax take and reduce

1CBA was that the ocvemmertf was ccnvnced that in -is previous incama^ons JO0A was too effective and was cos&nn too much. Arts Mir»3e' Barry Gohen summed uo

of an Austrian identity need to be The government perhaps cvt? ctyrecfy, bear-res the tem mousey has matured. ?nas 3 has grown in a protected environment and that now

iend-ng author-ty would fend m the form of convertit noies, when means that if the was a success (he bank” would have me coton o' convertir^ the io2n into a share d1 ho r*n Whatever cro'ís were marts

SAY, IS THAT THE INCOME TAX ASSESSMENT ACT 1932 IN YOUR POCKET, OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME?

The system of tax concessions utilized in the mid-1980s to increase private invest­ ment in Australian film has now been all but totally discredited. Yet the question remains: how else would Paul Hogan, Jane Campion, George Miller, Gillian Armstrong, to name but a few, have made what in some cases represent their finest works to date?

ON THEIR WAY

John Duigan’s evocative drama of ado­ lescence, The Year My Voice Broke (1987), introduced three unfor­ gettable faces, when Noah Taylor and Leone Carmen (and Ben Mendelsohn) made their feature débuts.

MERYL, QUEEN OF THE DESERT

... and Queen of the Accent. Streep is a “bit of an o’righter” as Lindy Chamberlain in Fred Schepisi’s Evil Angels (1988).

This is an article about Maria Montez, an old Hollywood star of my childhood, whom I believe deserves more recognition for providing sheer entertainment, if only as an escape from the depressing World War li. She starred in a number of Easterns, to do with harems, etc., as distinct from the Westerns, to do with cowboys.

Montez was born Maria Africa Vidal de Santo Silas on Sunday 6 June 1920 in Santo Domingo, a seaside community in the Dominican Republic. Her country was later to honour her for her screen success, with the Order of San Pablo Duarte and the Order of Trujillo. She was a fiery, temperamental woman, a regular beauty, who seems to have had that elusive quality of charisma - that is, judging by the way patrons queued up to see her films. She was called a Queen of Hollywood and was a leader amongst the “glamour girl” actresses of the ’40s.

Montez began to take her place in the 1940 film from Universal Studios, The Invisi­ ble Woman (A. Edward Sutherland), and in 1941 appeared in the island fantasy film, South of Tahiti (George Waggner). This was followed the same year by Moonlight in Hawaii (Charles Lamont). However, her first film of note was Arabian Nights (lohn Rawl­ ins), of 1942. This Eastern saw the first teaming of Montez, Jon Hall and Sabu, remarkable for the beauty of Montez and the mounting in Technicolor. Montez plays an enslaved, curvacious dancing girl, who succeeds in marrying above her status the dashing hero, the Caliph (Hall).

Also, in 1942, Montez played in, and is murdered in, The Mystery o f Marie Roget (Phil Rosen). The next year, White Savage (Arthur Lubin) was released, starring the trio of Montez, Hall and Sabu. In glorious Technicolor, the island princess (Montez) is trying to remove the obstacles that bar her marriage to shark-hunter (Hall). Sabu acts as Cupid.

Then, in 1944, the trio was joined by Turhan Bey, as a slave-boy, Jamiel, in a rôle he was born to play, in AH Baba and the Forty Thieves (Arthur Lubin). Scotty Beckett played Jon Hall as a boy. The film is basic-level entertainment, with the credits, at the beginning, washed-down stone walls, which is an original and pleasing thing. The pace is quite fast, as the Caliph’s son (Hall) finds refuge in the cave of the Forty Thieves (“Open Sesame”) and becomes their leader. Ultimately, they rout the Mongul Khan and save Montez from having to marry him, when she is promised, from childhood, to Ali. This film was remade in 1965 as Sword of Ali Baba (Virgil Vogel), in which much of the original footage is reused.

In 1944’s Cobra Woman (Robert Siodmak), the trio were seen again. Montez plays twin-sisters: one good, one bad. This is Technicolor fantasy-escape of the ’40s at its zenith. The charismatic Montez is a joy to behold, especially as evil Naja in a cobra rit­ ual with some of her subjects in agony. As Tollea, the good twin, she wears sarongs, whereas the bad twin wears sequined evening gowns. Bill Collins has called this “a movie treasure”, though, thinking back to my boyhood when I saw it, I was not alto­ gether happy about my favourite star’s playing the evil rôle along with the good!

Also in 1944 came Gypsy Wildcat (Roy William Neill), a low-brow but engaging Mon­ tez film, with pace and artistry, as she depicts a princess, raised by gypsies, in a colourful, splashy, if routine film in a mediaeval setting. For this film, the heroine was coached for dancing and one wit remarked: “If they make her any more fiery than she already is, they will have to call the fire-department!”

It was in 1944, too, that this star appeared in Follow The Boys (A. Edward Suther­ land), a war-effort film.

Then, in 1945, the trio starred in their last film together, Sudan (John Rawlins). The poster says “Where Adventure Lies ...And Love Rules”. It’s 76 minutes of super­ charged pace, which Bill Collins “loves” for its “consummate artistry”. Another critic, Leonard Maltin, thinks of it as “colourful, but empty adventure romance”, though Collins has praise for its photography, art direction, costume design, make-up artistry and wonderful music score, on themes of love, anguish and majesty. Queen Montez escapes evil Prime Minister, played by George Zucco, with the help of Hall and, with them again, Turhan Bey. This show was filmed in New Mexico in a Navajo Indian Reservation and involves the incident where Montez wanted a loose lion in her place, but, once the lion roared, she quickly changed her mind and said it would best be kept in a cage, though it was the Queen’s pet!

In 1946, Montez starred with Preston Foster in Tangier (George Waggner). And, in 1947, she was second-billed and in one lengthy scene as a countess in The Exile (Max Ophüls). Her last Hollywood films were Pirates of Monterey (Alfred L. Werker, 1947) and Siren of Atlantis (Gregg C. Tallas, 1948).

Montez made several films in Europe, including Wicked City (François Villiers, 1950) with real-life husband Jean-Pierre Aumont, before she died young of a heart attack after stepping into too hot a bath.

As to Academy Awards, it is noticeable that The Invisible Woman received an award for special effects. Arabian Nights was Universal’s first colour film, and received a num­ ber of awards in 1941.

"VERBODY'S DOING IT

. even Mel, in this cheeky subscription form, dways a mate of Cinema Papers, Mel Gibson :ontributed to the two-hour television documen:ary made to honour ten years of Cinema Papers, Australian Movies to the World.

A ndrew L. U rban is Australian correspondent for Moving

Pictures, founder of the on-line magazine Urban Cinefile and a true gentleman.

I don’t remember the cinema, the year, the month or the day, except that it was in London in 1962 or ’63, but I do remem­ ber the film, every frame of its 24-minute running-time. It has been in my head ever since, like a video on demand. I marvel at its economy and its ability to convey an extraordinary array of emotions and ideas, without a single line of dialogue. I felt this film. 1felt it more than I’ve ever felt a film since. In its haunting images and simple yet moving story, its leap of imagination, I discovered what truly-affecting cinema can be.

I was a teenager already accustomed to the French New Wave, although I didn’t hear that phrase until many years later. I didn’t know that I was seeing arthouse films by choice; L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961), it seemed to me, was just what cinemas should be playing; inventive, experimental, ambiguous works of motion picture arts. My youth and lack of experience gave me enthusiasm if not critical skill, and La Rivière du Hibou 0Incident at Owl Creek, Robert Enrico, 1961) grabbed me by the throat, by the heart and by the head.

Perhaps what I remember today — and I haven’t seen the film since — is an abridged version. Perhaps it’s totally accu­ rate. In any case, I’d like to share my memorized version of this film with you, although I fear my telling of it will reduce it to its image-less, misshapen form. Nevertheless...

The camera, from a hillside, is overlooking a small wooden bridge over a modest river. Soldiers escort a blindfolded pris­ oner, his hands tied behind his back. The small group detaches and approaches the bridge. Mid-shot to close-ups.

The remaining soldiers form a line along the riverbank. POV from bridge. The officer looks on while the prisoner is posi­ tioned on a plank that is placed across the footbridge, extending over the river. Prisoner is made to walk to outer edge of plank. Close-up of his face. Cut to the officer. The offi­ cer nods. Cut to the soldier standing on the safe end of the plank. He steps off. Cut to the prisoner, who begins to fall.

Switch to slow-mo; he falls down, towards the river, into the water; cut to underwater view of prisoner sinking, sinking.

Struggling against the ropes, his hands come free, and he surfaces, eyes wide in fear - and hope. Prisoner thrashes out, swimming downstream. Soldiers begin firing at him. Miracu­ lously, none of the bullets hit, arms flinging furiously against the water, against hope, against death. The river bends; he is gasping. A sandy, pebbly little beach offers a haven. Limp with fatigue but alert with adrenaline, prisoner starts up the beach and into the forest. Here, an avenue between the trees opens up and leads up through the forest, sunlight dancing.

Cut to prisoner’s POV: in the distance, at the end of the deserted gravel avenue, a large, ornamental wrought-iron gate stands closed. Beyond the gate is a large, comfortable home set in spacious grounds. Cut to the prisoner, joy and anticipation, beaming as he nears the house. Cut to a view through the gate. On the terrace, a beautiful woman and curly-haired child are playing, oblivious at first to the pris­ oner. Cut to prisoner’s POV: the gate swings open and he runs through, runs madly towards his woman. She sees him, begins to run towards him, laughing with love, with joy, with relief. Switch to slo-mo. Prisoner’s POV: she is running towards him, they are almost touching, arms wide open for a heartfelt embrace. Quick cut to her face, within inches of his.

Cut back to close-up of prisoner as he is about to embrace the woman. Jump-cut to same shot, but now the prisoner’s head is jerked back cruelly as he reaches the end of the rope hanging off the bridge. Hope, despair, love, life, death; in a few moments here, we have met them all, and felt that sud­ den shock of reality as if the rope were round our own necks.

Thank you Ambrose Bierce for writing the short story and thank you Robert Enrico for directing Incident at Owl Creek, the film that triggered my love for cinema.

HOW DO YOU KEEP THEM DOWN ON THE FARM, AFTER THEY'VE SEEN LA?

Simon Wincer’s adventurous Aussie-boy spirit is felt in his much­ loved The Lighthorsemen (1987) and Lonesome Dove (USA, 1989). After making Lightning Jack (1993) with Paul Hogan, Wincer helped Cinema Papers celebrate its 20th birthday.

HOME BOY

DOP and director of count­ less rock clips, Ray Argali made a startling feature début with the wistful domestic drama, Return Home.

JOHN FARROW: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY

Rarely acknowledged in his homeland, Farrow remains one of Australia’s finest filmmakers. Scott Murray’s monograph on Farrow resulted in more mail than any other article published in Cinema Papers. Daughter Mia loved it, too, her

.,S 'r C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

T om Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Media & Com­ munications at Swinburne University and a film critic for The Sunday Age.

n c i - 1

The passion is the movies. A passion that’s simple to declare, but impossible to define with any preci­ sion.

In the first place, there are the exquisite moments which bring a situation alive in ways that are unique to film. Like Ethan Edwards (john Wayne) shuffling off alone into the desert, framed through the doorway of the home he can never enter, at the end of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). Or the memorable closing shot of La Femme Infidèle (Claude Chabrol, 1969), as the simultaneous backward dolly and forward zoom perfectly evoke the agonized yearning of Charles (Michel Bouquet) at the separation from his wife.

Or the confrontation atop the ruins of civilization between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) near the end of Blade Runner (Rid­ ley Scott, 1982), Vangelis’ perfectly-judged synthesizer score surging behind Roy’s “time to die” soliloquy, the heavens weeping at the tragedy that enfolds both men. Or the extraordi­ nary circular tracking movement near the end of Le Crime de M. Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936) which both embraces the film’s sense of community and mourns the inevitability of its passing. Or the magnificent closing sequence in Jim McBride’s Breathless (1983), a criminally-undervalued reworking of Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (1959), as Jerry Lee Lewis’s title number takes charge of the action like a siren song and Richard Gere’s hellbent hero blissfully succumbs to its allure. Or the final sequence in Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937), perhaps the most heartbreaking in the history of the cinema, as the old couple, Everybody’s parents, bid each other a final farewell (“It’s been nice knowing you!”) and the melody of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” rises on the soundtrack. Or McCabe (Warren Beatty) dying alone in the snow in the last shot of McCabe and Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), his belief in himself (“I got poetry in me!”) come to nought.

These are some of the euphoric moments that, for me, have withstood the test of time. But there are also innumerable others that seize the atten­ tion from time to time, even if they’re eventually likely to get lost in the rush. This week, it’s the evocatively flickering candle on stage as Neil Young and Crazy Horse play their hearts out in Jim Jarmusch’s grungy concert film. Like the candles that provide intimations of mortality in Max Ophuls’ poetic masterpieces (for Stefan and Lisa by the piano in Letter from an Unknown Woman, or Countess Louise in Madame d e ...), the one in The Year o f the Horse is, on the one hand, simply a background detail and, on the other, a resonant reminder of the transience that is everywhere felt in Jarmusch’s film. It’s burning bright, full of the lived-in passion of the band’s performance, too soon over.

Last week it was some Brian DePalma prowess. Snake Eyes may be no masterpiece — it’s a minor effort in comparison to Blow Out (1981) or Casualties of War (1989) — but, from the extraordinary opening sequence to the magnifi­ cently-choreographed dénouement, it represents the kind of filmmaking that has largely gone miss­ ing in the age of digital enhancement. DePalma

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

stages movement as well as anybody in the his­ tory of the medium and, when his cinematic juices are really flowing, it’s like watching music.

There have been many other passions over the decades since I was introduced to the flickering magic. First there was Bambi (David Hand, 1942); then a batch of Westerns unspooling like chapters in an ongoing saga about Randolph Scott’s search for a reason (I discovered only later that Budd Boetticher was responsible for most of them). Pre­ pubescence brought other on-screen heroes too, unlikely now, but towering princes then, every one of them: Alan Ladd (most memorably as Shane, but also in Desert Legion and The Black Knight, or running for cover in crouched position in Saskatchewan), Rock Hudson (during his time as an action hunk, in films like The Lawless Breed and Sea Devils), Rory Calhoun (so cool, I thought, in Powder River), and, of course, Errol Flynn, everyone’s favourite swashbuckler1. And the princesses, most of whose appeal still makes per­ fect sense to me: Audrey Hepburn (Roman Holiday), Grace Kelly (High Noon, To Catch A Thief and The Country Girl, which I managed to see as a kid, despite its ‘adult’ subject matter), Elizabeth Taylor (mainly in the Father of the Bride films), Julia Adams (The Lawless Breed, The Man from the Alamo), Barbara Hale (in Lorna Doone)2 .

For better or worse, these actors, locked inside the straitjackets of the parts they accepted but somehow transcending them too, all played important roles in my early filmgoing years and my childhood fantasies. My earnest young eyes wide open, I translated them into my own private scenarios, according to my own needs and desires. The innocent yearnings they satisfied and the pleasures they brought me are long gone. But i can still find their echoes in the Sunday-morning previews of children’s films which distributors often run for critics and their families, correctly surmising that the best way for a hard-headed adult to come to grips with the appeal of The Res­ cuers Down Under {Hende! Butoy, 1990) or The Parent Trap (Nancy Meyers, 1998) is through the eyes of their children.

As friends and students alike will attest, I’m usually intolerant of those who so thoughtlessly and irreverently disrupt the relationship between films and their audiences with distracted chatter­ ing or noisy nibbling. They should know better.

But the excited responses of a group of little kids watching a movie exists on a different plane alto­ gether. In their exuberant, unqualified and often noisy surrender to its invitation to immerse them­ selves in the experience can be found a reminder of how it ought to be, of the sense of enchant­ ment that allows us to soar until we think we know better. Bearing witness to the innocence I’m talking about here (maybe even bonding with it) isn’t the only pleasure left to the adult who has moved on from his or her initial wonder years.

Being grown-up has meant new sorts of filmgoing experiences, different kinds of discoveries, and not just to do with those who belatedly began to shine on screen for me: from Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and Fred Astaire to Robert Redford, Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson; and from Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne and Barbara Stanwyck to Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Pfeiffer and Emmanuelle Beart.

I suspect that the importance one ascribes to

particular film-going experiences can never be separated from the place they occupy in one’s for­ mative years. For me a turning-point came with the revelation that there were other ways of look­ ing at the mainly American films I’d grown up with, the realization that the real heroes were the artists never seen on screen. Budd Boetticher was one, but there were many others too: Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Douglas Sirk, Vincent Minnelli, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, McCarey, Jacques Tourneur, Orson Welles, Rouben Mamoulian, Erich Von Sternberg, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh, Sam Fuller, Robert Altman, Robert Mulligan, Alan J. Pakula, Sam Peckinpah. And then all the writers and cinematographers and those countless unseen artists who left indelible marks on my sense of what films could be. Alongside this, largely through the good graces of the Monash University Rim Society, the National Film Theatres in Melbourne and London, and film festi­ vals, came the lesson that films with subtitles mattered, too. And as my sense of the artists behind the scenes continued to multiply — Ophuls, Jean Renoir, Godard, Chabrol, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Jacques Demy, Maurice Pialat, jean-Pierre Melville, Nagisa Oshima, Wim Wenders — new horizons opened up.

My passions also came to include the kinds of films that openly resist definitive readings, that make us really work at them, that insist on ambi­ guities rather than certainties, that leave us (or at least me) uneasy rather than reassured. It’s one of the reasons that Laura (Otto Preminger, 1954) remains so fascinating: if Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) is taken to be “dreaming” the second half of Preminger’s film, how might that affect the sense we’re able to make of it? It’s why the end­ ing of The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997) is so poignant, identifying the middle-class family as both a nightmare and a haven in much the same way as Sirk and Minnelli’s films do. This is not to say that the exhilaration of a happy ending can’t be equally exciting. But only as long as it’s been earned, and isn’t simply another example of a filmmaker desperately inserting what Sirk in his wisdom used to call an “emergency exit”.

The work of critics in books or in journals like Movie and Film Comment have long been part of the passion, too: for the insights they have to offer and the models they’re able to provide. This delight in the art of criticism, in the ability to make the pieces of the jigsaw fit together, sometimes in ways that were never intended, has now, in fact, become inseparable from my love of the cinema.

It’s why I love to read the work of good critics and others, too numerous to mention here, who’ve helped to shape my sensibility, who’ve enhanced my understanding of the ways in which particular films weave their magic, and from whom there’s still much to learn about the art that is the movies.

1 Shane (George Stevens, 1953); Desert Legion (Joseph Pevney, 1953); The Black Knight (Tay Garnett, 1954); Saskatchewan (Raoul Walsh, 1954); The Lawless Breed (Raoul Walsh, 1952); Sea Devils (Raoul Walsh, 1953); Powder River (Louis King, 1953). 2 Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953); High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952): To Catch A Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955); The Country Girl (George Seaton, 1954); The Man from the Alam o (Budd Boetticher, 1953); Lom a Doone (Basil Deane, 1935).

37

A rchie W eller is a Perth-based novelist. His book, Day o f the Dog, was filmed as Blackfellas in

1993.

Aborigines in film! Long ago, when making The Day of the Dog into Blackfellas Games Ricketson, 1993), I said that cinema was the White Man’s Dreaming at an AFI conference attended by our Amer­ ican brothers (one of whom was the son-in-law of The Wild Bunch’s Sam Peckinpah).

For me, going to watch a film has meant a good story and a hero I can feel close to. So, in the old days I identified with Jim Brown saving Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles (Tom Gries, 1969) or saving the world in The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967); I laughed with the hero in Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) and with Richard Pryor films. I identified with Burt Reynolds in Run, Simon, Run (George McCowan, 1970). One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) would have to be one of my favourite films, not just because it was a fantastic film but because it had a strong non­ white hero (Will Sampson) who was even better than John Wayne (whom I never really liked much anyway, with his “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”). Sampson was also in Orca (Michael Anderson, 1977) and The White Buffalo (}. Lee Thompson, 1977). I saw all these films because I was searching for an identity myself. But where were the Aboriginal Will Sampsons, Burt Reynolds, Jim Browns?

One of the first films I saw that made me proud to be Australian was Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971), acknowledged now as a classic. But it was not only my screen love affaire with the delectable Jenny Agutter that made this film special for me; it was seeing a film about Aborigines with an Abo­ rigine in the starring role.

Not too many years later I saw Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora, 1976). Again, here was some­ one I could truly identify with — an Aboriginal survivor who becomes best mates with a white bushranger who, let’s face it, had not the charisma of Ben Flail nor the courage and folklore of Ned Kelly. In fact, I doubt if Mad Dog will ever make it on anyone’s best-ten list, but I was happy to see David Gulpilil (this time his name spelt correctly at least) just as I thoroughly enjoyed Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976), made not long after.

No longer did I have to choose Native Americans (Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, A Man Called Horse, The Return of Billy Jack) or African Americans (Sidney Poitier, Brock Peters, Richard Roundtree, the indomitable Jim Brown) as my screen heroes. And this is something so many Kooris, Nyoongahs, Murris, Nungas really desired. Even when sitting in the segregated sections of the vari­ ous cinemas back in the bad old days, you can bet they also worshipped Tom Mix and Jimmy Rogers, Tarzan and Charlie Chaplin, just like everyone else.

And this wasn’t Robert Tudawali and Rosie Kunoth Monks — both talented Aboriginal actors who deserved better screenplays and more of a fair go. This was not the motley crew in Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1954) who get chased away by the timely arrival of the ‘cavalry’ and thus let the brave settlers continue settling with impunity. They were not the other extras in other best for­ gotten films stereotyping Aborigines as untrustworthy savages, child-like, or ignorant sad remnants of a primitive race. Neither was this Ed Devereaux nor Kamahl.

For a while, in the 1970s and ’80s, a number of films were made that largely were criticized as being less than kind to Aborigines. The much despised Skippy Costume Dramas where all the women were raped, it appeared; the ‘mumbo-jumbo magic’ of the natives without really exploring the Aboriginal mind; the great sense of humour, dark and bitter-sweet though it might be existing in the camps, settlements or missions and gaols — and especially the wonderful, complex Aboriginal culture. But films like The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977), Eliza Fraser (Tim Burstall, 1976), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978) and We of the Never Never (Igor Auzins, 1982) were all important, I feel, because they gave Aboriginal actors a chance to work and develop their skills.

Don’t forget, some of these films were made a mere few years after 1968 when Aborigines became citizens in their own country.

Even Morris West’s The Naked Country (Tim Burstall, 1985), A Waltz Through the Hills (Frank Arnold, 1988), Deadly (Esben Storm, 1992), Dead Heart (Nicholas Parsons, 1996), Backlash (Bill Ben­ nett, 1986) and The Fringe Dwellers (Bruce Beresford, 1986) might have their critics (and in some cases well-justified), but I was proud to pay my two bobs’ worth and sit there with my popcorn watching my people — and often my dear friends — performing up there on the screen, 20 feet high and giving it to the white man. There were the pioneers like Bob Mazza, Justine Saunders (who can forget her performance in Stephen Wallace’s 1984 Mail-Order Bride, one of the few times she didn’t have to get raped?), Tommy Lewis, Ernie Dingo, Lydia Miller, Bryan Syron, Franklyn Nannup, David Ngoombujarra, John Moore and others — and, of course, one of the first, David Gulpilil himself.

Just like the Blaxploitation films of the late ’60s and ’70s that surged forth in America, Aboriginal filmmaking is having its own renaissance. For years, there have been documentaries and shorts made for television by the likes of the wonderful and much-missed Essie Coffey, but now we are shouting and yelling out a war-dance of pure joy as we charge onto the big screen. Look out Aus­ tralia!

With compilations like the marvellous Shifting Sands and From Sand to Celluloid: Shifting Sands Continued.... the great short film Shortchanged (well-acted by David Kennedy), Bryan Syron’s Jindalee Lady (1993), Rachel Perkins’ Radiance and Blackfellas, Aboriginal producers, directors, editors, camera and sound technicians and a whole score of crew are making Aboriginal films as they should be seen: told completely by Aboriginal people. The success of the two mentioned com­ pilations here and overseas is testimony that, just as Aborigines enjoyed the old Westerns and Elvis Presley of years gone by, white people are coming to terms with our own particular stories.

And, do you know, I wonder how many people really realize how absolutely special it is for an ordinary Aboriginal man or woman, not clever, not rich, not anything very much, to sit down alone among a crowd of whitefellahs and hear — even feel — the intimacy imparted by the largely white audience as the magic of the White Man’s Dreaming brings the story of the Blackfellahs’ Dreaming to them, as well as making us laugh, cry and believe in ourselves.

Jocelyn Moorhouse is, with Gillian Armstrong, the most successful Australian woman director in Hollywood.

FORMAT FASHIONS 2

The “Technicalities” column in Cinema Papers has chronicled most of the technological advances of the late twentieth century, including the emergence of HDTV .

RECENTLY SEEN HEADIN' DOWN SUN­ SET BOULEVARD IN A RED CONVERTIBLE

Previously, Geoffrey Wright’s energetic film of urban unrest, Romper Stomper (1992), provided press fodder, sparking heated controversies for its alleged racism. And who could forget the incident involving Wright, a glass of red wine and a promi­ nent film critic?

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

D ennis A ltm a n is Professor of Politics at La Trobe Univer­ sity; his most recent book is Defying Gravity.

After contributing to the cannon of Australian cinema, Dutch-born Paul Cox became disatjsfied with the direction of his career and moved to Canada. He is now filming in Fiji.

IT'S NOT THE MELBOURNE CUP

The start of Chris Long’s ground-breaking, 19-part series on the beginnings of film in Australia, which sent ripples among those too lazy or uncaring to reconsider the historical myths (or correctly re-label the horse-race footage as the 1898 VRC Derby).

WEDDED TO SUCCESS

The aficionados loved the short, Getting Wet (1989), but who imagined then that Paul (later Paul J., then just P. J.) Hogan would become the hit director of Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and My Best Friend’s Wedding (USA, 1997)? Pic: David (Daniel Lapaine) and Muriel (Toni Collette).

GO-GO FIGURE

The FTCFarm.qtinced ^kestment irM|g|f film about,three drag qutens driving | i | bus LdlAlice. The|pEn industrijSI groaned. The film mdde a fortune.

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eux

The creative bond between New Zealand and the mainland (whoops) is a regular pre-occupation of Cinema Papers.

The first film I was taken to see was Bambi (David Hand, 1942), and I was so scared by the forest fires that I hid under the cinema seat until the film was over. Ever since then films have had a powerful impact on how I see and imagine the world.

But so it is for almost all of us. If we live in a world shaped intellectually by the legacy of Marx and Freud, then our images of that world are very much a product of the movies.

In my case, a thirty-year love/hate relationship with the USA is framed, exaggerated and illustrated by the power of Ameri­ can film.

Despite important film industries on every continent, it is the Americans who have dominated virtually every branch of cinema during the century. A series of stamps issued by Cuba in 1996 for the hundredth anniversary of film summed it up for me: of the eight stars they showed, the great majority were part of the American film industry, even if, like Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, they were immi­ grants.

I have been teaching American politics on and off to stu­ dents in Sydney and Melbourne for three decades, and I know how far our image of the USA is moulded by its films (and tele­ vision). My generation picked up crude caricatures of Mexico from Warner Bros cartoons and learnt racism from Westerns (as James Baldwin said, he cheered for the cowboys until the day he realized he was an Indian.) Today’s generation know the cityscapes of Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago from film even if they are not sure to which state these cities belong.

What is remarkable about American film is its range: the best cartoons, the best musicals, the best blockbusters, but also films which can be remarkably political subversive and moving, whether it be On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) or Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989). Thus, that great taboo of American political life, class, has been dealt with in a large number of mainstream films such as Saturday Night Fever (|ohn Badham, 1977) or Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Paul Mazursky, 1986). The one area where American film still lags behind is sex, even if it produces large numbers of the world’s pin-ups and the largest pectorals (both male and female).

Thus Hollywood was very slow to allow inter-racial sex, and far slower than the European cinema to acknowledge homo­ sexuality. Even now, when every third film has a gay character, none of them has yet been allowed a sex life of the sort that comes near to that depicted in Head On (Ana Kokkinos).

What the American film does better than any other is to combine sheer energy and technical skill with a deft appeal to both our emotions and our intellect. It is common to dis­ miss mainstream American film as dumb, but in fact the wit in surprising places: think of early Tom & Jerry cartoons or the better musicals and sometimes stunning screen writing means that many popular films have more intellectual con­ tent than is recognized. (This is not, however, an endorsement of the French cult of Jerry Lewis or the tendency of some in cultural studies to elevate entertainment to impor­ tant documents to be eternally deconstructed.)

When I studied at Cornell University, Clinton Rossiter, the well-known USA political historian, used to stress in his classes that this was a large and corny country. In the end it’s the sheer exuberance of the American film, its capacity to overstate and exaggerate, which gives it so much of its power. I don’t particularly like the fact that American films dominate (indeed, I’ve several times complained to Qantas that its in-flight programme is too exclusively American). But 1 recognize that, in the end, this dominance is essential to the larger global pre-eminence of the USA. Could we speak of this as the American century without American films?

39

J im S chembri is a gem. He is also a comic novelist and film critic l i l t

for The Age.

40

It’s the 39th minute of Psychotic Overload VII: The Return of the Final Revenge, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Jennifer Love Hewitt, and they’re running around the darkened corridors of an old school building being stalked by the axe-wielding, serial-killing son of a defrocked priest who was meant to have died in childbirth but who has been stalking women in small­ town America for seven films now.

And I’m sitting there thinking: Why? Why am I doing this? I’ve never seen this film before, but I’ve already seen it 100 times. Why? Why am I doing this?

This film is bad - real bad - but it’s not as bad as this morning’s screening of the $150 million special-effects action-adventure extrava­ ganza, Mid Oceanic Ridge, in which a team of international terrorists led by Art Malik plant nuclear devices along the ocean floor and threaten to breach the Earth’s crust unless they are given $20 billion and the only people who can save them are a team of renegade bomb-diffusion experts lead by George Clooney and a group of straight-laced, by-the-book intelligence experts lead by Harrison Ford, two men who are at loggerheads at first but who soon develop a begrudging respect for each other as they put aside their differences and pool their talents to save the world before it splits in two.

It’s the 48th minute of Psychotic Overload VII now and Jennifer has just swung an axe unsuccessfully at the madman who has turned around just in time not to see Jamie Lee Curtis run around the corner brandishing a block splitter...

Why? Why am I doing this ...?

When Melbourne had a Valhalla cinema in North Rich­ mond, I used to love going to the evening double bills. I always found out beforehand what time the second fea­ ture finished to see how much time I had to get to North Richmond station to catch the last train home. Sometimes I could walk it. More often than not, though, 1had a scant few minutes to run the several blocks from the cinema’s foyer to the station.

Often I’d see the train pulling in as I scurried like a drug dealer fleeing a bust towards the on-ramp. I’d leap into a carriage and drop onto a seat, panting, covered in sweat, relieved that I’d made it. Sometimes I’d almost faint from the exer­ tion. But I never asked, “Why am I doing this?” The love then was unconditional, the devotion total. There was no need for questions.

I ask a lot more questions now, questions like: How did this get made?

Who green-lighted this turkey? This had a director? This was paid for with Australian tax dollars? $120 million for this? Where? I have to ask a lot more questions now. It’s my job.

The cynicism, the scepticism, the turns of phrase you develop are inevitable when most of the films you see are films you would not see if you didn’t have to, and would not wish upon a tax auditor.

But the love for the art is still there, undiminished, even in the 59th minute of Psychotic Overload VII as Jamie and Jennifer, having been drenched in the blood that spouted from the decapitated body of the mad­ man, run out of the school grounds, into their four-wheel drive and off into the night, where even darker terrors await them.

Even in the face of the gravest cinematic adversity you must remain, in your heart of hearts, an optimist. And Psychotic Overload VII doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better - but it might. That’s what keeps me in there, that’s what keeps me watching, against every instinct I have, against every fibre of intelligence. It must have that chance at redemption, that chance to give me a moment, anything- an image, a line of dialogue, an idea, a nuance - something to keep this from being a complete waste of time.

I had the feeling Psychotic Overload VII was going to stink. Since Over­ load II, they’ve all stunk - but to assume it was a stinker, to not give it the chance to prove itself, would be to deny the love. And denying love is one of the few impossibilities in life.

This is why, in the first picosecond of every film I see, there is a moment of complete surrender. I can carry all the prejudices, preconceptions and

jokes about the next lumbering, over-hyped Hollywood behemoth heading our way, but the second the curtain parts and the film starts, it evaporates in an instant of utter submission. Whether the expectations are high or low, whether the advance word is good or bad, every film might just be the best film I ever see. It has to have be allowed to breathe and weave its own magic on its own terms.

Psychotic Overload VII has had 73 minutes to weave and breathe and I’m nearly dead. But will it give me a moment? Because sometimes a moment is all you need.

Discussions about cinema can spend inordinate amounts of time on one film, or one type of film, or one director’s work. This can be fun, but the best conversations are the ones that free-associate scenes from hundreds of films. Whenever you think about a passionate relationship, it’s not a coher­ ent analysis of it that springs to mind; it’s the moments that make it worth enduring the pain and sacrifice that course through the mind.

And so it is with cinema. As I fight off the delirium of semi-consciousness being thrust upon me by Psychotic Overload VII, I see Colin Friels telling Claudia Karvan about her mother in Hightide, the underwater shower of shrapnel in Gallipoli, the final shot of Mia Farrow’s face in Rosemary’s Baby, Woody Allen attempting to play the cello in a marching band in Take the Money and Run, the opening of the refrigerator in Heaven and Earth, Gene Hackman tearing his room apart in The Conversation, the fate of the suit­ case full of money in The Killing, the screaming baby in Four in the Morning, Burt Reynolds with his crossbow as he is about to pierce the rapist in Deliv­ erance, the double sunset in Star Wars.

These moments are from great films, but a film doesn’t have to be great to give you a great moment. And in this world where the flood of cinematic mediocrity is reaching biblical proportions, the hope that Psychotic Overload will give me a moment survives.

It’s the 81st minute and Jennifer and Jamie have hap­ pened across the local sheriff in his patrol car who we thought was on their side but who is actually the father of the madman they’ve just killed, so now he’s after them and they run off screaming into the night with the angry dad in hot pursuit.

This can’t get any worse, you think-then it does. Jamie and Jennifer try to piece together an ad-hoc mantrap they learned how to make on one of those self-defence summer camps.

There’s going to be nothing to take with you out of this, you think. Noth­ ing but another wasted experience. Wasted, sure, but an experience nonetheless. And if they make Psychotic Overload VIII you’ll sit through fr­ ail of it. And the chances are it might be even worse than this, but you’ll still give it that chance because, deep down, the love is there and the love is unconditional.

When asked why he kept making films when he found the business side of it so maddening, Orson Welles likened the situation to being with a woman who drove him nuts. So why did he stay with her? “Because I love her.”

The wicked police officer of Psychotic Overload VII has spotted the mantrap, and he’s run around it and he’s taken a shot at Jamie Lee Curtis but Jennifer Love Hewitt has just stuck an old kitchen knife into the base of his neck and the blood is pouring out everywhere and as he buckles to the ground screaming they kick him and drop rocks on his head hoping against hope that the writers will be able to dream up another sequel to this.

And you watch, and bad and boring and chronically void of ideas as it is, you let out a small, involuntary laugh.

Well, at least they thought I’d like it when they made it, you think.

It’s some consolation. A bigger consolation is that the law of averages is on your side, and in the next week or two you’ll probably see something you like, which will be a welcome experience, because at the moment the experience is hurting.

So that’s why I’m doing it, sitting through this crap, hoping against all odds for just a moment to take with me. It hurts, but love is supposed to hurt. It’s part of the deal. How does that quote go? “If you love me, then you must love the least of me as well as the best of me.” Or something like that.

It’s from The Bible, I think.

They were probably thinking about cinema when they wrote it.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1 999

G eophœy R ush

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one of the great actors of the day,- seen most recently in Elizabeth and in

i Shine, for which he justly .won an Oscar.

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f I got hooked on silent films when I was ten. The English comedian Bob Monkhouse hosted «1 televi­ sion series called Mad M ovies which screened in the early 1960s - from memory, on Saturday' nights

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Overseas Features directed by Australians'

In 25 years, many friends have passed away, and are greatly missed. Ivan Hutchinson loved cinema and Cinema Papers loved Ivan.

PIG POWER The (sometimes) annual round-up of turkeys, dogs and occasionally-good films.

STARRY, STARRY EYED..

Cinema Papers cauj hi up J with Rachel Griffiths the''^ minute she stepped into the] spotlight, as it has done, '7}M with countless actors (and ' directors an DOPS and ...).

Each episode was only half-an-hour long and focused on extracts and sequence montages y from comedy two-reelers made in the teens of this century, when the medium of popular fflmmak^ i ing was barely a decade-and-a-half old. It was all rhythms and gags. With wild and eccentric! ¿'.performances. There were lots of MackSennett’s aptly-nicknamed cokey comedies from Keyf stone, packed with outrageous spend-up madness. Unfortunately, this is the image most people -■ ^ seem to have of silent films in general. But we were able to see Chaplin fresh from vaudeville in his pre-tramp mode, Keaton when he was still a foil and support for Roscoe Arbuckle, and the la n d le ss breathtaking array of lesser-known team players: Al St John, who jumped with both legs ; ¿splayed before ever setting off; Billy Bevan’s unique, walrus-moustached cop; Ben Turpin's insane and hilarious cross-eyes. They all riffed and it was giddy viewing. Adrenalin and laughter pfrqjfrattion and timing. Brilliant schtick with unrelenting invention. Mad M ovies was only a begins > nmg and an ideal visual companion piece to the streetsmart dialogue of the Bugs Bunny Show on, I think, Friday lights.

At about the same time, Disneyland (on Sunday nights, for sure) treated us to a comprehenf sive survey of thé development of the Kinetoscope, the Kinematograph, and a curious array of other competing patents struggling for commercial supremacy in their infancy. Horizontal, vertical ^?atnd oblique contraptions projected or reflected a beautiful study in movement. On Saturday afters noons, we went to the Flicks, not ever realizing this word derived from the erosion of Flickers, the y, imaginative and accurate early slang for the Pictures, Photoplays or the Movies. The terminology, interestingly enough, has always favoured the visual and the kinetic. Even when Jimmy Cricket was moralizing to us at school that he was no fool, nosirree, and could live healthily and through ; caution and safety to be 103, you couldn’t avoid appreciating the clacking and whirring and spooling, the Sprockets and lamps and fragility of celluloid in the 16mm world going on up the back of l the room. I’m, of course, joining up all these random dots with hindsight, but any understanding . of the techniques and magic of moving pictures 1 might have now springs from these sources.

While I was touring with Godspell around Queensland in 1973, a film club in Rockhampton r screened Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). this 50-year-old film had people rocking with great > waves of laughter. It was the first silent feature I’d ever seen and it was mind-blowing. The bril; liant deadpan humour of two starving Yukon goldminers eating a boiled boot, surly Mack Swain - providing a grim realist counterpoint to Chaplin’s simple gourmand. Charlie’s poignant and seern^ ' ingly impossible love for Georgia, often expressed in slapstick. The miner’s hut perilously ' balanced on the edge of a cliff with a series of gags played like a comic fugue. But for all the "expected humour and physical expertise, there were themes of personal loneliness, isolation, fi^tough details of a remote makeshift community, and a haphazard sense of fortune.

During studies in Paris,;! saw all the great comic features from the ’20s - on screens; thanks to (ithe Cinémathèque and speciality houses. When millionaire bridegroom Keaton escapes a horde of putt ntial wives in Seven Chances (1925), the conventional mid-shots of the classic ch'aspjsud£ denly leap to an extreme wideshot as a few kicked stones trip over into huge boulders and, with &the pursued Keaton diminutive, the action takes on the mythic but unsentimental dimensions of * MinMhing worthy of Beckett. The visceral and aesthetic leap taken in one cut is phenomenal, v My passion and circumstantial contact with this period was always through the clowns. Inad' vertently, I would slowly appreciate the subtle artistry of the oily surfaces of water photographed i-s'o broodily in F. W. Murnau’s gothic Nosferatu (1922), or the intense super-real psychological ' compositions in Stroheim’s Greed (1925). But as the syntax of cinema language reached such s dizzying pictorial heights in the pre-verbal mid-’20s, I loved the fact that Keaton and hi§ crew Pyfould plavy baseball while awaiting inspiration, and that Chaplin could shut down production for, ^sometimes, months when a key bit of narrative detail essential to a complex gag wasn’t forthcomi ing. ^ In some ways it seems disparaging to refer to any of these creations as ‘silent’ films because *§ of their eloquence. No doubt the term resulted during the rapid takeover by the talkies which made these earlier, lush expressions appear to be faddishly minus something. The pantomimists r and the visiial artists agreed with D. W. Griffith who saw the almost vulgar pursuit of chat as comËpletèlÿ alien to the form — the play of light and action on a surface.

When I Started work professionally as an actor in the theatre, I first read a sort of cinematic I bible and probably the most definitive work on silent films, The Parade’s Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow. Almost single-handedly, well double-handedly with David Gill, he championed and cel­ e b ra te d this medium with archaeological scholarship. They have produced, for anyone who isn’t ; stricken with the insidious blight of cultural amnesia, the most comprehensive and insightful ana’ lytical guide into this truly golden age. The silents reigned for more than 20 years, screenings are rare. So in the spirit of enlivening history, I shamelessly promote the following: from the early '80s, there is Hollywood The Pioneers, a 13-part series with specific chapters on Cinematography, ; .Westerns, Leading Ladies', Clowns, etc. (from the tatter took out for an Italian genius called ' Cretinetti on skatês;.Chaplin is;balletic in The Rink, and Modem Times, but Cretinetti is a gut! busting lunatic on wheels); Buster Keaton — A Hard Act To Follow; The Unknown Chaplin. The pearly chapters of Australian Film 1900-1977 by Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper will also whet your appetite ^ Beckett always imagined Chaplin and Keaton as Vladimirand Estragon. Touches of Victorian 7 pathos Yin to twentieth century existential Yang. But funny. Keaton, just before he died, did Beck, ett’s ‘Film’. For,Godot, we can only wait.

S cott H icks is the acclaimed director of Shine, whose eagerly-awaited next film is Snow Falling on Cedars.

It seems to me that much of mainstream Australian filmmaking has for too long been obsessed with technical perfection. The past couple of decades are littered with films of flawless focus, exposure, design and editing, mausoleums jammed with waxworks which lack the essentials of vigour and life. Perhaps its the dread legacy of the 1970s’ desire for respectabil­ ity in our National Cinema, which stifled the early fumblings of the Bazzas, Alvins, et al, in favour of the ‘classier classics’ like Picnic, Wisdom, ‘Breaker’ and Brilliant Career.1 It was the waspish Pauline Kael who dubbed this genre “sheer taxidermy”, and certainly the lamer cousins of these successes, the flatulent television mini-series of the 1980s that emanated from bodies like the South Australian Film Corporation (now reinvigorated, but known at that time as 19th Century Fox), were aptly tagged.

It’s probably the documentary filmmaking, which I’ve main­ tained in parallel to my feature career so far, which taught me the strength of the happy accident, that unpredictable and unrepeat­ able combination of light and movement that can lend power to an otherwise insignificant moment. Because to me filmmaking is the effort to infuse every frame with energy, or, more accurately, emo­ tion, and sometimes the pursuit of perfection for its own sake actually kills that very feeling.

Only great persuasion can convince some cameramen to get the camera off the dolly and into the hand. And few will pay heed when told that the extra take they are requesting for some minor techni­ cal improvement will not make it over the one you’ve just done where the performance sang loud. And at the other end of the process, it’s refreshing to work with editors who can creatively embrace the offcuts, flash-frames, whip pans and ‘off-air’ stolen moments of spontaneity, in recognition of their power and energy.

Of course, there is nothing new in all of this. The Underground Cinema (is there still such an animal, or has it been subsumed into that ill-defined catch-all, “independent”?) long espoused these values, then unaccept­ able to the mainstream. However, since it is the fate of the avant garde to become avant garbage overtime, the commercial world appropriated these symbols of the erstwhile amateur and harnessed them as effective selling tools.

Make no mistake, this fractured aesthetic is every bit as demanding as its goody two-shoes perfectionist non-identical twin. It requires judge­ ment, daring and restraint, along with an understanding of rhythm and the emotional passage of the story, over and above the attention-deficit immediacy needs of most commercials. I find in setting up for a shot these days, it takes as long to look for ways to fuck it up a bit as it took to light it in the first place! Blur it, shake it, obscure it, mask the frame - anything which might help to infuse further life and layers to simulate life’s casual imperfections. Free it from some of the restraints and act as if you might never get another chance to catch it again.

This last dictum applies most importantly for me to performance, also.

For all the needs of rehearsal and deliberation with actors, in the end I try to imagine the scenario I’ve created is, as in documentary, unrepeatable and beyond my control. Not, I admit, to the degree of Fassbinder’s “one take fetish” which Armin Mueller-Stahl told me about in Shine. He would shoot each set-up once only, infusing the situation with risk and creative danger for all. So developed our catchcry during shooting: “Fassbinder, Fassbinder- let’s get it in one!” And, surprisingly often, we would be printing takes two and three - the advantage, of course, being that you can shoot many more set-ups and romp around in the editing-that ulti­ mate re-scripting process conducted far from the barely-controlled mayhem of shooting.

I love Frank Zappa’s criteria when auditioning musicians. He took for granted their technical ability. He looked first for a sense of humour, then a willingness to improvize, to be inventive. The very act of improvization presumes a grasp of technique and a desire to press beyond its restrictive boundaries. Some of these elements can be extremely useful in the filmmaking process and the endless process of creating life on the marble slab of the set.

STILL SHINNING

Director Scott Hicks, left, with cast and crew during the filming of Snow Falling on Cedars.

m i

GIRLS' OWN INDUSTRY 3 (TEEN DIVISION)

This was the biggest-selling Cinema Papers of the decade, followed by the one with Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet on the cover.

S16NS

asing is happening via the Internet.« P if lost treasures, but trying to find fee ;n when a gem is finally located, m i ly the film you want. The veisk» css |& ra a y also be only available In a sod | ® Its censorship status, too, may be» ala few tips. By Scott Murray.

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(Peter Weir, 1975), The Getting o f W isd o m (Bruce Beresford, 1977), ‘B rea k er 1M o r a n t (Beresford, 1980) and M y Brilliant Career (Gil Armstrong, 1979).

1 P icn ic at H a n g in g R o c k

42

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

M ark S pratt is a Melbourne-based film distributor, operating Potential Films and

RETROSPECTOACTIVE

When creating a national cinema’s cultural identity, there is a fine balance between moving forward and looking back.

BARRY'S G In an already-prolific career Miranda Otto has danced often, sung C&W in Doing Time for Patsy Cline (Chris Kennedy, 1997), right, and finally played opposite her dad in Dead Letter Office (John Ruane, 1998).

. ¡¡her VHS, teeidisc or DVD formal. m be a time-consuming and frusatst be edremely careful about <r may be censored, onlelterboxed, jiralian standard such as NTSC, :isét. fhere are many things to be

FORMAT FASHIONS 3 The Internet has dramatically changed the way fans track down, view and buy movies. Circumventing the censor is but % one dffthe pleasures in the pursuit of ¿am jgk one scinematic .passions,/

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C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

ons

Chapel Distribution.

I’m fascinated by the films, mostly with high-profile talents involved, which attract an escalating and often irrational campaign of negativity to a spectacular crash and burn at the box office. The process often starts with tales of “production difficulties”, budget blow-outs or some animosity arising between the makers and the media. If the finished product is a crowd-pleaser (Titanic), then all is forgiven and the critics, how­ ever grudgingly, come on board. If the film is instead disturbing or against the current Zeitgeist upon its release (Heaven’s Gate), then the critics by and large will form a pack to savage and finish it off. Those films singled out from time to time for the full-scale vitriol shower (Ishtar, Revolution, Waterworld, to name a few more) are usually not as “bad” as the hype would have you imagine and, in fact, often much better than scores of other bland, mediocre or compromised films that don’t raise a fraction as much criti­ cal disdain and even go on to make huge amounts of money. No number of lone voices or reappraisal after time will ever re-convince the general public that Heaven’s Gate is anything other than a “turkey”. Assassination is final and very much predetermined.

This year, the long-in-gestation film of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loafing in Las Vegas was premiered at Cannes and from this distance there seemed to be an immediate consensus that it was a disappointment: too long, miscast and a general misfire — a tone that was echoed in most of the USA reviews soon after. When the film reached Australia, there was more of this. Is it a film that just doesn’t play in the atmosphere of a press screening? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seemed to be attracting a quite strenuous level of attack and when reading the two reviewers in The Age, Adrian Martin and Jim Schembri, in rare accord in condemning the film almost identically as being unfunny, tedious, pointless, etc., I was hooked and knew I had to see it immediately.

Failure on a grand scale is just as interesting as success. The notion that Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro and the whole production team had made a spectacular hash of the Thompson book was sad to contemplate but intriguing to dis­ cover why. I went anticipating that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might be one of those confoundedly unfunny comedies, a stinking cadaver of a film by a major direc­ tor. Preston Sturges’ The French, They are a Funny Race (aka, Les Carnets du Major Thompson, 1956), Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) and Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979) came to mind.

Within the first few minutes, I found myself pleasurably admiring the beautiful Panavision images of the Arizona desert and smiling at Depp’s deadpan monologue of Thompson’s prose. The smiles turned to chuckles as the two drug-addled journos arrived in, and tried to make sense of, that most hallucinatory of American cities, Las Vegas. About 15 minutes in, I realized that most of my negative expectations had melted away and I was finding the film highly enjoyable and worth my time. For me, the film was funny, interestingly-constructed with jumps forward and backwards in time, and was making points about its period representing the “end of the ’60s” and attempting (more successfully than, say, Oliver Stone’s The Doors) to reproduce via cinema the experience of being under the influence of a number of different drugs.

This last is an important point because most of the anti-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reviews went on about it being “boring” to simply film stoned people. (Is this some PC ’90s guilt-trip that we mustn’t approve of characters whole-heartedly indulging in copious drug-taking?) Gilliam doesn’t just do that, but through the perfor­ mances, cinematography and some special visual effects evokes many varied drug experience. In my sheltered life, I’ve never come across anyone even thinking of using ether as a recreational life-enhancer, so the sight of a rubber-legged Johnny Depp making his way across a Las Vegas hotel foyer, explaining that ether keeps your mind lucid while your body has other ideas of co-ordination, is one of the damnedest things I’ve seen all year and one of the funniest. Finally, this seemed to me to be a film of some considerable vision and imagination, rare enough commodities in the ’90s, and hardly deserving the cascade of brickbats.

I know there are other people out there who enjoyed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as much as I did and I’m sure Martin and Schembri and the rest weren’t lying about their reactions to it — I’m sorry they didn’t “get it” and have a better time. But I’m more sorry for the many who in this busy age of capsule reviews and star ratings were probably put off seeing the film because of that mysteriously mushrooming “word” that it was “bad”. My point in this piece is in the space available to encourage everyone to go and see any film that attracts them in some way, no matter what the damned critics say! We should deplore the mean-spirited and pretentious writers (I’m not referring to the pair named above!) who seem compelled to dictate a “one size fits all” critical mentality as the arbiter of what everyone should choose to see. I’m not proposing a crackpot theory that it might follow that every nearly universally con­ demned film is great — look at this year’s Godzilla or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — but I do suggest a wariness on the part of the filmgoer about films repetitiously damned (or overpraised, but that’s another story). Meanwhile, I still haven’t seen Welcome to Woop Woop and The Avengers starts next week.

43

Istvan (Pascale Christophe) and lover "Erzsébet Bàthory", Contes Immoraux

The lips of Julie (Lise d'Anvers). "La Marée", Contes Immoraux.

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Plaza-Splawski (Marek Walczewski) and Ewa (Grazyna Dlugolecka). Dzieje Grzechu(The Story of a Sin).

The Films of Walerian Borowczyk part 2 C o n te s Im m o ra u x

( 1974) Alternative title: Immoral Taies (UK), I Raccontl Immorali di Borowczyk (Italy) Argos Films. CONTES IMMORAUX. © 1974 Argos Films. France. 35mm. Origi­ nal running time: 103 mins. Other versions: 92 mins (Italy). Video: 1:38:27 (1:46:12 including prologo).

Production: Anatole Dauman. Scé­ nario: Walerian Borowczyk. “La Marée” based on a short story by André Pieyre de Mandiargues in Mascarets. Assistantréalisateur: Dominique Duvergé.1 Caméra: Bernard Daitlencourt, Guy Dur­ ban, Noël Véry, Michel Zolat. Décors: Walerian Borowczyk. Costumes: Pîet Bolscher. Montage: Walerian Borow­ czyk. Musique: Maurice Le Roux (musique originale); Guillaume de Machaut (“La Messe de Nôtre Dame”); musique espagnole ancienne (La Mùsica en Cataluna); musique hongroise anci­ enne (Hungarian folk music).

Cast: “La Marée”: Lise Danvers [Julie], Fabrice Luchinî [Boy2]; “Thérèse Philosophe”: Charlotte Alexandra [Thérèse]; “Erzsébet Bâthory”: Paloma Picasso [Erzsébet Bâthory], Pascale Christophe [Istvan]; “Lucrezia Borgia”: Florence Bellamy [Lucrezia Borgia], Jacopo Berinizi [Pope Alexandre IV], Lorenzo Berinizi [César Borgia]; plus, Nicole Karen, Robert Capia, Thomas

44

Hnevsa, Gerard Tcherka, Mathieu Rivolier, Kjell Gustavsson, Philippe Desboeuf; [Marie Forsâ (Close-up Girl)]. riginally, Contes Immoraux was to have six episodes on six principal taboos: pornography, fellatio, mas­ turbation, lesbianism, incest and bestiality. As Rémy de Gourmont wrote: Man, who embodies all the aptitudes of animals, all their industrious instincts, all their diligence, could hardly avoid the heritage of their sex­ ual methods, and there is no debauch that does not find in nature its normal type.3 In most countries, however, the opening prologue (the 8-minute4 line Collection Particulière, about Borowczyk’s museum of erotica) was deleted for reasons of length (though the Italian video distributor chose to retain it).

As for the final episode on bestial­ ity, Borowczyk has said: When a film is that long I’m forced to make corrections, to suppress scenes that could not benefit from the approval of the censor. It’s self-censor­ ship, pre-censorship.5 This segment remained locked in a vault until the censorship climate changed and it could be incorporated in La Bête as a dream sequence.

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Prologo: “Una Collezione Particolare”6 Synopsis: A man whose face is never seen (reputedly Walerian Borowczyk) displays various erotic objects for the camera. These range from a mechanical silhouette of a congressing couple to a sculptured dildo, erotic drawings (including one by Rembrandt) and explicit photographs. The man places many objects on a stand, sometimes upside down or side-on, resulting in a quick correction; others are wound up or lifted to the eye.

Curiously, the man also acts as cen­ sor, putting a finger over the explicit bits of some photographs, which raises an interesting censorship dichotomy: sketches and paintings can be as explicit as photographs, but go unbowdterized.

Whimsicality is the overriding tone, especially the many cuts to a carved policeman with spyglass. Some may be offended, but there is no accounting for people’s taste in pornography through­ out the centuries. This is merely a brief record.

1. “La Maree” (“The Tide”) Julie, my cousin, was 1 6 ,1 was 20, and that sm all age difference rendered her docile to my commands.7 Synopsis: With her mother gone for a day, Julie (Lise Danvers) is bustled down to a pebbly, cliff-bound beach by her cousin^ (Fabrice Luchini). There, with C I N E M A P AP ER S • JANUARY

1999

the aid of a watch and a timetable of the tides, he orchestrates Julie so that his fellatioed orgasm coincides with the exact moment of the high tide. “Now you know the significance of the tides”, he tells her.9 t first glance, L a Marée appears to be another examination by Borowczyk m t V I of male manipulation, with woman as pawn/victim. But the tone of this sun-drenched episode is too light-hearted to make much of the comparison, the game-playing that of sexually-inquisitive teenagers.

The link between the ocean and sex, orgasm and tides, has been made

C I N E M A PAP ERS • JANUARY

1999

many times before (the English lan­ guage even highlights the connection through verbs such as “ to come” ).

Many critics, though, felt Borowczyk had fallen prey to cliché. Meaghan M orris wrote in Cinema Papers: [Borowczyk] has drastically overdone the obviousness of his imagery, begin­ ning with the tired equation of sexuality and the sea. However beauti­ fully photographed, waves breaking during an erotic scene are stilt waves breaking once again in another erotic scene.10 However, Borowczyk is not con­ tributing to the visual cliché of lovers frolicking in the shallows à la From Here to Eternity (1953); he is rescu­

ing cinema from it. He boldly and specifically links sexual release with the ocean’s tides, which are ruled by the moon, a primary female life-force in all cultures.

Borowczyk draws other parallels as well. When Julie says she has met and kissed five boys over summer, her cousin asks, “Is that all?” “Yes.” “ On the mouth?” “N o, mother was always there.”

He then walks across the rocks to face Julie. Borowczyk cuts to a closeup of her mouth (surely the most exquisite rendering by an artist).

“Intact” , he says. (The camera then tilts up from Julie’s mouth to her eyes, as if peering into her soul. One may possess another’s body, but not necessarily the heart.)

The mouth is virginal in the sense of what the boy is intending; but the film is drawing an association between lips, as it were. People may shy from such a connection, but the impolite Martin Molloy radio show did not, speculating on what moti­ vates so many women the world over to have collagen implants in their lips.11 The answer from guest writercomedian Jane Kennedy was the same as surrealists have been suggest­ ing through imagery for decades.

The links and parallels continue

unabated. Certainly this film is atypi­ cal for Borowczyk in placing so much attention on word-play (per­ haps indicative of André de Mandiargues’ story12). “The tide will cut us off” , Julie exclaims, just as pas­ sion can isolate people from a worldly reality, which is why oppres­ sors have so attempted to control/repress/manufacture desire (as de Sade tells us).13 “We have come too far to turn back” , the boy continues; and so on.

All this analysis, however, diverts one from the essence of the film: its dazzling capture of the many subtle changes in light over the countryside and shore; the tones and textures of wet hair and skin; the silver-grey tincture of an approaching storm; bleached white cotton against smooth rocks. Never before has any film so poetically rendered the move­ ments of the sea, or made apparent its melodies. There is a visual poetry, a gentleness, not always there in Borowczyk and an absence of impending physical violence. The boy’s game-playing may have one on edge at times (and more so, no doubt, than when the film was made), but otherwise there is an idyllicism at play. And Julie at no stage sees herself as victim. As she excit-

45

edly remarks after it is all over, “We still have time for some fun.”

In fact, Borowczyk amusingly contrasts the boy’s pretentious intel­ lectual games (covering, of course, his sexual ineptness) and the uninhib­ itedness of Julie.

2. “Thérèse Philosophe” 10 July 1890. “The inhabitants o f our region demand beatification o f Thérèse H., the pious young girl vio­ lated shamelessly by a vagabond. ” La Gazette du Dimanche.

Synopsis: An extremely pious Thérèse (Charlotte Alexandra) lingers In church after mass, listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit and delighting in the tactility of religious artefacts. At home, she is chastized as a liar by a whip-flail­ ing old woman1* and locked in a room for three days, her only sustenance a few cucumbers. Inspired by an erotic book, she lies down on a bed, awaiting God’s presence, but has to be satisfied with the vegetables instead. She escapes through a window, only to be attacked in a meadow by a tramp.

hile Thérèse Philosophe is obviously concerned with masturbation, it is transgressive in that it explores an even more strict taboo: the sexual nature of religious belief (and attendant iconography)15.

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In church, Thérèse hears in the Voice of God a sensual overtone: I lead the human heart where it will.

My child, great knowledge is not needed to please me. Merely love me. I hold the blessings of both soul and body: seek them from me.

The Voice becomes even more sexu­ ally explicit while Thérèse is looking at the drawings in a pornographic book, Thérèse Philosophe avec l’H is­ toire de Madame Bois-Lautier , she has found inside a rotating wheel: My pleasure is to be with you. I am here to comfort you, to bring you joy.

My unexpected visit is a blessing to you, though undeserved.

The naïve Thérèse takes the words literally and lies back on a bed, in an image that evokes spiritual submis­ sion as much as sexual anticipation. “ My heart is ready, Lord” , she mur­ murs. But God does not appear, and in the Great Silence Thérèse makes do alone, the words of her Stations o f the Cross (“ Bewail your failures in self-denial”) failing to stem the build­ ing desire.

Thérèse Philosophe is detail-obses­ sive, with quick glimpses of many varied and curious pieces, mostly Victoriana: a wooden doll missing an arm, a black top hat, a porcelain bedpot; steel-rimmed glasses, which Thérèse places on a wood duck (that irresistible desire to humanize/tame

Nature); a trunk filled with corsets, photographs and a dangling key.

The tension in Thérèse’s picking up and discarding of objects is palpa­ ble, her serene yearning for G od’s presence intensifying into a noisy, onanistic burst of sexual ecstasy.

Being a good surrealist, Borow­ czyk imbues each object with iconographie significance. Tom Milne describes it as an “ uncanny ability to invest his images with an alien quality that is partly entomological, partly ritual, and partly pure poetry” 16.

(One questions only the term “ alien” , all the objects being very much the work of man.)

Unlike the glorious colour and light of the first episode, Thérèse Philosophe is oddly murky (as if shot on out-ofdate Polish stock17), but it is full of many clever visual jokes (the eyeless King Edward VI in the tapestry regain­ ing his sight, for example) and the whimsical tone plays nicely in setting up the bleakness of the ending.

When first released, there was much speculation in the press over whether Thérèse employs zucchinis or cucumbers (Meaghan Morris opts for the latter18). This flippancy was amusing but rather missed the point: that this is one of the few serious, non-sexist and “ uncompromising scene[s] of female masturbation” (as Kerri Sharp describes it19) on film.

Instead of being represented as sexu­ ally passive, dependent on a male to excite and a penis to gratify, Borowczyk’s women are fully and independently sexed.

It is also clear from the plumpish girl in this episode, and innumerable naked bodies in other episodes and features, that Borowczyk does not preference any one type of physical beauty. He is a true believer in Nature, delighting in all manner of shapes and sizes (female and male).

His work is a strong and necessary rebuttal to the fashion/media conspir­ acies of today.

In these and many other signifi­ cant ways, Borowczyk is a truly feminist director.

3. “Erzsébet Bâthory” Synopsis: In t6io, village life is dis­ rupted by Hungarian Comtesse Erzsébet Bâthory (Paloma Picasso), whose hench­ men round up girls for the château. They are stripped and washed, under the watchful eye of Bâthory’s page, Istvan (Pascale Christophe), before being led naked to the Comtesse’s chamber. In an increasing frenzy, the girts rip at Bâtho­ ry’s lace dress and fight over her pearls, unaware that they are about to be mas­ sacred and the Comtesse bathe in their blood. After sleeping with Istvan, who turns out to be a girl, the Comtesse is betrayed and arrested.

C I N E M A P APERS • JANUARY

1999

rom the opening scene, Borowczyk contrasts tyranni­ cal classist power with an idyllic natural order. In the village, women harvest cabbages and trample sauerkraut in wooden bar­ rels, while cocks and hens find pleasure in the yard and lovers in a hayloft. (In a truly surreal moment, a young girl goes from watching the latter to milking a cow!)

The Comtesse and her small entourage arrive (horses baying20 when she passes a religious station and when she kisses her page). A henchman attempts to impose the Comtesse’s will with a speech that could have been written by Deleuze and Guattari21:

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Happy are those who please the Comtesse. On Sunday, the Comtesse may permit those chosen to touch her wondrous pearl-encrusted gown. To touch it is to be granted eternal bliss.

In the Comtesse’s chamber, the touching of her gown becomes a fre­ netic orgy of desire (as can happen with other capitalist-marketed objects, be they rock bands or reli­ gious icons22). The gown is ripped apart and the pearls scatter, to be picked up and devoured (literally) by the naked girls. The most extraordi­ nary image is of a girl (Marie Forsa)

C I N E M A P AP ER S • JANUARY

1999

hiding a pearl inside her vagina, a potent comment on society’s manip­ ulation of desire, with materialistic yearning replacing the more natural sexual. N ot only is it is easier to profit from the former, but manufac­ tured desire distracts people from the terrors the all-powerful may wish to inflict on them. The girls are so obsessed with pearls and bits of lace, so misled into the need to fight one another, that they do not notice the unsheathed sword.

It is also telling that the Comtesse allows the girls to believe they can keep the jewels, and thus gain social ascendancy through added wealth, in the very moment before their death.

Rarely has a director so sickeningly made one feel the perversity of absolute power.

Bathory’s bathing in blood will not be to everyone’s taste - nor any longer to Paloma Picasso, who reput­ edly sought to buy the film and withdraw it from circulation. Noth­ ing more indicates a change in times than the once-fearless daughter of the great surrealist painter now being embarrassed by a work of true aesthetic prominence. The even more striking irony is that today Paloma does ads for a perfume and cosmetics company.

Visually sumptuous (with some of Borowczyk’s finest sets), this dark tale is lightly and crisply told. The group nude scenes are an advance on the two-dimensional bathhouse scenes in Goto, Vile cVamour and some of Borowczyk’s finest contem­ plations on the human form. Most painters and photographers have concentrated on a solitary subject or a small group (say, The Three Graces23). Borowczyk fills his frame with, at times, more than 20 naked girls; the whole process of observing nudity is altered and challenged. This is a mass exclamation on the beauty of the human form in all its variety, and the right of any artist to repre­ sent or record it. Not only Borowczyk has boldly continued an artistic tradition of centuries (sculp­ ture, painting), but prefigured the photographic work of Sally Mann and Jock Sturges.

The male gaze and its perceived aggression has been under siege in Anglo cultures for several decades.

However, Borowczyk’s recording eye is loving and joyous - he celebrates Nature, after all - and in this episode he tells a cautionary tale of where the sexually-predatory gaze can lead.

Erzsebet Bathory was one of the world’s great monsters, killing some 600 virgin girls. Understandably, she has fascinated many major writers, including Georges Bataille. Some feminists, however, accused Borow­ czyk of trawling through history to find an evil lesbian, but the charge is as ludicrous as blaming Peter Jackson for making Heavenly Creatures (1994) or newspapers for reporting on the lesbian schoolgirls who allegedly stabbed an old woman in a Brisbane park. Hopefully, the days of trying to exempt members of minor­ ity groups from open discussion are long gone.

Another charge was that Istvan switches from a lesbian relationship to a heterosexual one. Meaghan Morris:

Then comes the heterosexual salva­ tion: the page-girl calls in the police, the countess is arrested, and the girl falls into the arms of a soldier who seems to have been in a cupboard all along.24 The allegation of a “ heterosexual sal­ vation” is misdirected. Since when have women been forbidden from having both lesbian and heterosexual relationships? Do feminists really see this as some sort of betrayal?

Anyway, the film actually suggests Istvan is using Bathory for her own ends. Just before they make love, Bathory slips another precious ring onto the page’s hand. The hetero Ist­ van is doing the killing, and the loving, for financial reward.

It is unwise to try and simplify the sexual politics of a Borowczyk to the constraints of an ‘ism’; his films are far too complex, challenging, pro­ found.

4. “Lucrezia Borgia” Synopsis: In 1498, Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy), accompanied by her husband, Giovanni Sforza, visits her father, Pope Alexandre IV (Jacopo Berinizi), and his son, Cardinal Cesare Borgia (Lorenzo Berinizi). The Pope declares Sforza to be impotent and he is whisked away to certain death. Excited by drawings of horses copulating, Lucrezia has sex with the Pope and her brother. From his pulpit, Dominican Hyeronino Savonarola denounces the dissolute life of the ecclesiastical milieu.

He is arrested and burnt at the stake.

Lucrezia gives birth to a happy, smiling child, who is baptized in regal splendour by the Pope. ucrezia was the daughter of the Spanish Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later Pope Alexandre IV) and his mistress. She was married off three times for political reasons (the first at the age of 11). In 1502, when 21, she appeared with a three-year-old son. Clearly not the

47

result of marriage to an impotent man, the child was said to be the off­ spring of an incestuous all-night orgy at the Vatican. Borowczyk’s film imagines that night: I wanted this last story to have the amplitude of an opera scene. The Bor­ gia apartments seemed to me to be an ideal setting to deal with incest.

I wanted also at the end of my film to re-establish [this] woman in her role of mother. That’s why the last shots show Lucrezia holding a fine baby.

Despite its parentage, it, none the less, laughs at life. I find that very moral.25 Lucrezia becomes the first of Borow­ czyk’s heroines to take whatever means necessary to stop being the pawn of men and determine her own destiny.26 The story also confirms Borow­ czyk’s belief in Nature triumphant, unfettered by the arrogant decrees of man. The child does not understand society’s taboos and is born a beauti­ ful, happy child.

For many, this episode is the weakest. Tom M ilne writes that the scenes of Dominican protest are “ particularly ineffectual”27, and he is right; they provide no dramatic con­ trast to the Papal debauchery, and they fail to evoke the presence of, or a belief in, the Holy Spirit.

In terms of composition and mon­ tage, the episode is less striking than usual; the space enclosed by the

white-walled set is strangely empty of resonance (as compared, say, with the small room of Thérèse Philosophe, where every molecule in the air seems imbued with dusky nuance).

Borowczyk also cuts away from male nudity in a way he has not done before. After Lucrezia has had sex with her father and brother, the camera pans up her naked body as she lies face-down between them. In the same continuous movement, it pans across to César, and down his body. But the shot abruptly cuts out at Cèsar’s navel and recommences (after a very awkward cut, so unlike Borowczyk) on Alexandre TV’s stom­ ach, panning up to his face and then pulling back to include all three.

One can’t help feel it was all one seamless shot, but the genitals of the Pope were just too much for Borow­ czyk and/or the censors to cope with.

There are, however, several clever and imaginative moments, such as when Lucrezia shows her husband a statue (“My mother ... clothed, how­ ever”), only to have the statue later removed and she stand naked on its pedestal (like mother, like daughter).

The scene with Sforza refusing to accept biscuits offered to him by the Pope (each one broken into parts and the proffered bits quickly swapped for others) is also a gem.

verall, it is hard to under­ stand how those who so praised Borowczyk for his shorts and first three fea­ tures should have abandoned him so totally on Contes Immoraux. Cer­ tainly Borowczyk has obvious delight in, and he is most suited to, the com­ pilation format: I’ve always loved to compose short films to be bound together by common thought, by some living thread. Per­ sonally, I adore the first silent films that were very short; then, the films that made up short episodes. I don’t know why certain viewers don’t like them. I find the short form, the novella, is sometimes more difficult than the longer. And I very much like to change.

But there’s still a more difficult dis­ cipline, and that is to bound these short stories together by a common thought. It’s a problem to solve, like crosswords, as interesting to build as a toy made of different parts that at the same time cannot be pried loose, or, if so, only with irreparable damage to the whole.28 Why, then, the severe opprobrium over Contes Immoraux ? It surely comes back to what critics see as the inappropriateness of a serious direc­ tor dealing with sexual material. The ferocity of the complaints under­ standably led Borowczyk to become somewhat defensive, as witnessed when Sue Adler in Cinema Papers

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suggested to him that he made “ erotico-cultural films” . One can feel the director’s temperature rise: Erotico what? Who used that term? I have never made films of that type.

Why don’t you go looking for eroti­ cism and culture in Walt Disney’s films, where both abound? Take any film of his you care to think of: for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Why don’t you look for eroticism there? There is always a boy and a girl in his films; there are even dogs that kiss each other and make vulgar sug­ gestions - repressed desire you can feel a mile away.

Disgusting: desire that doesn’t dare! I have never made films of that type.

I don’t think my films are any more erotic than most other films. Except documentaries, perhaps; they are very rarely erotic.

One understands Borowczyk’s pas­ sionate response, as his films clearly do not set out to be erotic in the usual sense. For one, he films nude bodies quite disinterest­ edly, recording them in all their variety, without fetishizing or idealizing them.

For another, much commerciallydriven ‘eroticism’ comes out of, and feeds off, repression, whereas Borowczyk is the champion of desire being lived out to its fullest, in the myriad ways devised by Nature.

An unnamed critic in Continental Film Review came close to it when he/she wrote: Borowczyk is not concerned with happi­ ness, comfortable love and hygienic, even therapeutic, eroticism!;] he is con­ cerned with the physical drive that motivated Tristan and Isolde, Phedre, Don Giovanni, and Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, and he is concerned to reveal this naked flame as an emotive force that has over centuries tempted great artists to try and capture it in words, in paint, in sound and now, on film.29 When Sue Adler asked Borowczyk, “What is the difference between a home-made porn flick and film with erotic content by Borowczyk or Nagisa Oshima?” , he replied: It all depends on montage. For me it is exactly the same whether I show a stilllife or a man eating an apple or a man and woman during the sexual act.

People have strange problems: they close their eyes if they see a naked person, yet to open up a type­ writer is not considered pornographic.

The point could hardly be clearer, but apparently not to the critics who did so much to marginalize Borow­ czyk’s career of a genius. A greater pity is that they closed their eyes (and some of the public’s) to the great works to come.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

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( 1975) Alternative titles: The Story of a Sin (UK), Histoire d’un Péché (France) Dzieje grzechu.30© 1975 Film Polski.

Poland. 35mm. Original running time: 128 mins. Video: 2:04:02.

Scriptwriter31: Walerian Borowczyk.

Based on the novel by Stefana Zeromskiego. Director of photography: Zygmunt Samosiuk. Décors: Teresa Barska. Costumes: Jerzy Szeski. Editor: Lidia Pacewicz. Music: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Pachabel.

Sound: Jan Czerwinski.

Cast: Grazyna Dlugolecka [Ewa Pabralynska], Jerzy Zelnik [Lukasz Niepolomski], Olgierd Lukaszewicz [Count Szczerbic], Roman Wilhelmi [Stanislaw Kozielski32], Marek Walczewski [Plaza-Spalwski], Karolina Lubienska [Ewa’s Mother], Zdzislaw Mrozewski [Ewa’s Father], Mieczyslaw Voit [Cyprian Bodzanta], Marek Bargielowski [Horst], Jolanta Szemberg [Aniela], Zbigniew Zapasiewicz [Priest], Wladyslaw Hancza [Dr Wilgosinski], Jadwiga Choinacka [Leoska], Janusz Zakrzenski [Editor], Zbigniew Koczanowicz [Chief Clerk].

Synopsis: In turn-of-the-century War­ saw, Ewa Pabralynska (Grazyna Dlugolecka) lives with her parents and two lodgers, one Lukasz Niepolomski (Jerzy Zelnik), an anthropology student.

Lukasz and Ewa fall in love via tender letters. Failing to obtain a divorce from his estranged wife, Lukasz suddenly departs. Learning he has been shot, Ewa quits her secure job and nurses him back to health in the country. Lukasz ups and travels the world, Ewa working as a seamstress and dumping her unwanted baby in the outside toilet.

Lukasz’s friend, the wealthy Count C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

Szczerbic (Olgierd Lukaszewicz), takes Ewa off in pursuit of Lukasz. Failing to find him, Ewa is blackmailed by Stanis­ law Kozielski (Roman Wilhelmi) into luring Szczerbic to bed, where she kills him. Kozielski steals all the Count’s money and Ewa descends into prostitu­ tion. She is momentarily saved by Cyprian Bodzanta (Mieczyslaw Voit), who runs a collective for fallen women on his vast estate. She is lured away by Kozielski’s lover, Plaza-Spalwskia (Marek Walczewski), who says Lukasz is awaiting her. He isn’t and she is again forced to sell herself. When Kozielski and his gang attempt to rob and kill the now wealthy Lukasz, Ewa warns him moments before gunfire ensues. The police cart Ewa and the others off to gaol. Lukasz comes to free her, but she dies in his arms. n 1975, critics grabbed hold of The Story o f a Shi after the ‘problems’ of Contes Immoraux, lavishing it with praise and call­ ing it a return to the peak of his earlier works. This viewer was of a strongly-different opinion then and would not have revisited the film had not this series of articles been undertaken. Twenty-three years on,

it seems an even lesser film, an infu­ riating, regressive, inexplicable sidestep by a major pioneering direc­ tor.

Clearly, many of the film’s prob­ lems stem from its being based on a 1908 novel by the acclaimed Polish writer, Stefana Zeromskiego. The script is a debilitating race through too much plot with far-too-sketchy characterization. Apart from trou­ bling descents into caricature (particularly the slimy, eaves-dropping Jewish landlord Ewa boards with and robs), too many scenes are

inexplicably curtailed just as interest builds. For example, when Ewa returns home half-way through her tortuous ordeals, her mother screams, “ Get out you slut.” The father fortuitously (or ludicrously, depending on one’s taste in Victo­ rian melodrama) arrives home. He threatens to kill his wife (a chilling moment) and ushers Ewa into his study. But Borowczyk cuts to a new scene (of Ewa as a cashier some time later) in a seizure of dramaturgical coitus interruptus.

Few would disagree that the story is an absurdist parade of increas­ ingly-degrading situations, Ewa’s descent plotted by someone excited by the kinds of perversities that can befall a woman. One suspects, though, this bent is more the novel­ ist’s than the director’s (though Borowczyk’s Lulu has the same dis­ turbing quality).

Zeromskiego (or Zeromski, as most English critics name him) wrote at a time when socially-minded writ­ ers believed that the more cruelty they could visit upon their heroes/heroines, the more power­ fully they could argue for social justice. Thomas Hardy’s Tess o f the D ’Urbervilles: The Story o f a Pure Woman is a classic case.

However, by the time Borowczyk made his film, feminism had already achieved much and the escalatingmisery technique had become seriously outdated. Borowczyk makes no attempt to grapple with the issue and appears, most of the time, to just go through the motions, utilizing the rushed, picaresque style of so many television mini-series.

Tom Milne takes a differing view: Respecting the Incredible welter of incident to which Zeromski subjects his heroine, so faithfully that its absur­ dity is magnified tenfold by the confines of a film script, Borowczyk has in fact reduced its contrivances to such extremes of artificiality that melodrama becomes mélodrame, an operatic extravaganza in which one plaintively pure soprano is heard pit­ ting itself against the basso profundos of totem and taboo.33 Viewed today, The Story o f a Sin connects in no obviously meaningful way with the issues of now. It looks even more an object of a forgotten past, belonging in a glass museum case in the same way as many of Borowczyk’s beloved objets. It has none of the resonance of an Eliza­ beth (Shekhar Kapur), whose tale of mid-16th century English sexual pol­ itics speaks eloquently of the present, delineating a major shift from the patriarchy to an emerging strain of unemotional, even cruel,

female power. That is not what the feminists of the 1960s and ’70s prophesized but it is exactly what Borowczyk predicted with the Erzsebet Bathory story in Contes Immoraux. Why, then, his bizarre retreat to viewing woman as power­ less pawn of man but one year later?

True, Ewa’s am our fou for Lukasz Niepolomski is common to all eras, and the desire of men to wish to save (and control) women has waned lit­ tle. One of the most powerful moments in The Story o f a Sin is when Lukasz offers Ewa’s gaolers his entire fortune to free her, as if men keep seeing wealth as power, and an aid and a weapon where women are concerned. But they are right to do so, a rapidly-increasing number of late-’90s women placing a man’s bread-winning ability as their num­ ber one factor in choosing a mate (love, as with Queen Elizabeth, being placed well down the list).34 Also intriguing is Borowczyk’s interest in a character with so little strength. M ost would sympathize with the abandoned Ewa and her unwanted child, but not when she lures Szczerbic to his death. Why does she not flee? She is a murderer by choice, despite the film’s heavyhanded attempts to convince one otherwise.

On top of that, the film is stylisti­ cally ordinary. Apart from Borowczyk’s trademark hand-held shots, and the often brilliant use of sound and music (especially when he layers two passages from Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s Violin Concerto in E minor), it seems as if surrendering idiosyncratic style was the price to pay for getting this con­ voluted narrative on screen. Some key moments are even played in list­ less wide-shot, with little narrative or filmic interest. This is especially true of the scene of Ewa and Lukasz in the snow, where the dialogue car­ ries all the weight and the image none. Lukasz begins: “Diderot says, ‘Happiness and decency exist only in such countries where the law recognizes instincts.’ He’s right. In Japan, girls have baths in front of men.”

“That’s in Japan.”

“Japan’s a great society. Could a girl here have a bath with men watch­ ing? Shame’s only an invention like clothes.”

“A girl’s blush is an invention, too, now?”

“I’ll give you proof. In the lies des Pins, missionaries ordered girls to wear loin cloths. But they kept taking them off. Animals, too ...”

“We’re not animals. Nice example from the lies des Pins!”

49

“I want to teach you anthropology.

Women’s shame is the invention of man.”

In the canon of great Borowczyk, one can cite from The Story o f a Sin only the scene of the baby’s birth and death, as horrifying and disturbing a four minutes of cinema as has ever been achieved. The Story o f a Sin is more likely to be remembered as a film which introduces or extends ideas and images that would find fuller flowering elsewhere: the use of photographs and paintings to indi­ cate preferences in lovemaking (cf Les Héroïnes du Mal), a girl lying near-naked on a bed of rose petals {La Bête), the corset and bedpost (ditto), the black dogs {Goto, Idle d’amour and Héroïnes), etc.

Apart from the glorious, colourrich scene in a park, where children play and Lukasz and Ewa share a rare moment of happiness, the film is that murky brown so beloved of Pol­ ish directors (Wajda, Zanussi, et al).

Only the momentary flashes of quirky montage, some playful moments with theatre of the absurd (the Roman prison where everyone screams out instructions to others: pure Godard) and the surrealist imagery (Ewa’s dream, with its layer­ ing, of Magritte-like men and pistols, and the little girl laughing when Ewa faints at work) hint at the director of Goto, Idle d ’amour and Contes Immoraux.

That said, the film remains high on the list of most who admire only early Borowczyk, and the director himself seems not unpleased with his work (as revealed in his interview with M ax Tessier for Ecran): Zeromskiego turned the courtyard bal­ lad into a meaningful description of Man. The characters of the novel and their fates are so true that, like itself, they have struck roots in the minds of several generations of Polish readers.

[The Story of a Sin ...] was a long time

ago, and still today, considered to be a ‘minor’ work of Zeromskiego, and many have criticized your choice to make it in Poland.

This question of knowing if it was or wasn’t “the worst book of Zerom­ skiego” is complex. People generally cite two or three contemporary critics of the author who were very bourgeois and reactionary, and for whom, from the moment of the publication of this novel in instalments in a magazine, the alarm bells went off.

People said this book wouldn’t interest the readers, but that is wrong.

Still today in Poland one reads him and one even cries. It depends really on the manner in which one reads.

As for myself, I have no wish to bore the viewer in outlining the social

50

theories of Zeromskiego, whose ‘progressivism’ is, in any case, very clear, but I preferred to look into the hidden contents of the novel. There are critics who demand the contents of film be didactic, etc. That doesn’t really bother me, but I preferred to practise in a different way. Every good film is didactic in one manner of another.

What interests me is, for example, the history of morals. One can vulgar­ ize the knowledge of certain historical periods that is really a bit marginal.

What really matters is whether or not it is a question of melodrama!

If I made this film after a long absence, it is because, as I said at Cannes, I wanted to finally make a film for the Polish public who wouldn’t know any of the films which I made in France. That appeared to me be a slightly absurd situation and regret­ table.35

Borowczyk returned to France that same year to make the film that fin­ ished him with critics and which remains banned in most countries today, the surreal masterpiece, La Bête.

1 This is the second most prominent credit on the film.

2 Monthly Film Bulletin, Borowczyk: Cinéaste Onirique, et al, give the boy’s name as André. But there is nothing written or spoken in the film to support that. Perhaps André is the boy’s name in the short story.

3 Quoted in Carlos Clarens, “The Artistic Pomographer”, Film Comment, January-February 1976, p. 45.

4 Most books cite 14 minutes, but the version on the Italian tape is only 8.

5 Carlos Clarens, op. cit., p. 46.

6 This is the title on the Italian video.

7 “Julie, ma cousine, avait seize ans, j’en avais vingt, et cette petite dif­ férence d’âge la rendait docile à mes commandements.”

8 See footnote 2.

9 Tom Milne’s synopsis in the usuallyreliable Monthly Film Bulletin (June 1977, p. 121) is fanciful. Fie says André [sic] has “learned the joys of oral sex from Parisian prostitutes”. The boy actually tells Julie he visited Madame Claude’s every Wednesday with his friends. This is clearly a childish boast; he could never have afforded it nor would he have been allowed in.

The odds are the boy is little more experienced than Julie, if at all.

10 Meaghan Morris, “Contes Immoraux”, Cinema Papers, No. 5, March-April 1975 . P-56 .

11 Martin & Molloy, FOX FM, 14 July 1998.

12 This author has so far been unable to locate a copy.

13 There isn’t the space to go into it here, but Borowczyk’s true spiritual father is de Sade.

14 Tom Milne opts for the old woman

being Therese’s aunt (op. cit, p. 121); others have suggested she is a grand­ mother. The film gives no clue.

15 Georges Bataille, in particular, has written extensively on this topic.

16 Tom Milne, op. cit., p. 121.

17 This may sound as a swipe at the Poles, but it isn’t. Anyone who saw as many Central European films as this writer did during the 1970s (courtesy of the great Erwin Rado’s Melbourne Film Festival) would know that Central European filmstocks of that period had a desaturated look, rather brown and sepia-like.

18 Meaghan Morris, op. cit., p. 55.

19 Kerri Sharp, “Flaky Flands Make Light Work”, Headpress, No. 18,1998.

20 This a powerful surrealist effect used

by Borowczyk in several of his films

(most notably in La Bête), and also by such directors as Georges Franju, with whose work Borowczyk’s has much in common.

21 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who, to simplify their work outra­ geously, discuss (among other things) how capitalism creates, con­ trols and satisfies desire for profit. In Schizophrenia and Capitalism, they argue only the mad are truly free because capitalism cannot influence/corrupt them.

22 See Michelangelo Antonioni’s reflec­ tions on this in Blowup (1966).

23 Of all cinema’s many attempts to recreate The Three Graces, Borow­ czyk’s is the most striking.

24 Meaghan Morris, op cit., p. 56. There is no evidence whatsoever that the man Istvan kisses has ever been any­ where near a cupboard, though Morris’ imagination matches scenes in several other Borowczyk films.

25 Sue Adler, “Enticements to Voyeurism”, Cinema Papers, February-March 1985, p. 23. Borowczyk was interviewed in French and the interview translated by Adler.

26 Erzsébet Bâthory certainly takes mat­ ters into her own hand, but has never been a pawn of men.

27 Tom Milne, op. cit., p. 121.

28 Carlos Clarens, op. cit., p. 47.

29 Anonymous, Continental Film Review, April 1976, p. 9.

30 The credits on the video copy are impossible to read accurately. The opening preamble reads something like “Przedsfeblorstwo Realizacji Filmow ZESPOLY FILMOWE Zespot TOR przedstawia film”. Unfortunately, type­ face limitations also make it difficult to render here all Polish letters accu­ rately.

31 English-language terms have been adopted, given the problem outlined in the above note.

32 Most reviewers refer to this character as “Pochron” (itself a word play on “funeral”), but, after being nameless for most of the film, he clearly refers to himself as “Stanislaw Kozielski” (or so the subtitles have it).

33 Tom Milne, “The Story of Sin [sic]”, Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1976, p.

7934 There have been several polls pub­ lished in the Australian national press to this effect, the most recent in Sep­ tember 1998.

35 Max Tessier, “Entretien avec Walerian Borowczyk”, Ecran, 15 September 1975. PP- 64. Translation by Paul Kalina. ©

The next instalment will examine La Bête (1975) and La Marge (1976), followed by ones on Interno di un Convento (1977), Les Héroïnes du Mal (1979), Collections Privée (1979), Lulù (1980), Dr. Jekyll et les Femmes (1981),ArsAmandi (1983), Emmanuelle 5 (1987) and Cérémonie d’Amour (1988).

wÊBÊÊKÊÊÊÊÊÊÈÊËÉÈËÈUÊBÊÊÊÊÈÊÊÊÊÊtlÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊKÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊm C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

al l t h o u g h t s y o u m i g h t h a v e had about stock film in t h e p a s t .

m

A W A R D - W I N N I N G F I L M . NOW P L A Y I N G SYDNEY: (02) 9954 4255

MELBOURNE:

Brad Hayward talks to Paul Kalina about the making of his début feature, Occasional Coarse Language, a rom antic comedy based on the trials of 22-year-o ld M in Rogers (Sara Browne).

HOW LONG WAS THE FILM IN PLANNING AND PRODUCTION?

The only way you can make something for such a little amount of money is if it happens fast. The things that don’t cost money come out of a script: charm and wit and spontaneity. The whole idea was to not spend too much time stuffing around, trying to capture some energy, keeping the ball rolling.

The whole thing was really put together on the momentum theory: that if you can get the ball rolling and to a certain speed, you can’t stop it.

I wrote the script in three days. We spent about five weeks on pre-produc­ tion, including the casting and putting the crew together, and shot it in 17 days. The editing was probably the longest process, about three months all up.

IB r

Had

y o u a p p l ie d to h a v e t h is o r

ANOTHER FILM FUNDED?

At the time, the FTO [NSW Film & Tele­ vision Office] was running the Young Filmmakers’ Fund, and the AFC had the New Screenwriter’s Scheme. I applied for both, but didn’t make either. I was able to put together about $20,000.

Trish Piper, the co-producer, liter­ ally put $10,000 on her Diner’s Club, she sold off some bits and pieces and came up with the other $20,000.

Even $40,000 wasn’t enough to do

52

the whole film, and that’s where the still montages, the Web pages and the David Letterman footage came from.

We had to find practical, creative solu­ tions to get the film to a length where it worked as a feature, and these were very inexpensive to do. The stills sequences we shot on a 35mm cam­ era; they literally cost $200 each. We scanned them into the editing suite.

We shot on film, but our aim was to get a rough-cut at least on Betacam. We were able to do that for not a lot of money.

D id

y o u o r ig in a t e on 1 6 m m ?

Super 16.

Why

a f t e r b e in g r e j e c t e d , d id yo u

PUSH ON WITH THE FILMING?

I thought that if the experts are putting these romantic comedies together, with these budgets, stars and all the right ingredients, and people still aren’t going to see them, then they don’t really know how to make a com­ mercial film. It’s a numbers game and, with all the best intentions in the world, it still doesn’t come off.

That meant we were in with a chance, and that’s all we ever had.

That’s why we kept going, and I liter­ ally had to put the blinkers on. Despite the rejections, the “no”s, the “you’re crazy” from so many people, what kept it going was the good-will from every­

one around us and the enthusiasm the script generated. Everyone I gave the script to, except the official bodies, thought it was fantastic and that we should do it. We literally put the blink­ ers on and kept going.

W er e

y o u in s p ir e d b y t h e s u c c e s s of

a film l ik e

Lo ve and O ther Ca ta str o ­

ph es [E m m a -K a t e C r o g h a n , 1 9 9 6 ]?

My model was The Brothers MacMullen [Edward Burns, 1995].

I used to think, “My God, how do you become a film director?” I thought I could never, ever aspire to it, but 1 just had to take a more pragmatic approach to it and think, “You become one by doing it.”

I guess a lot of no-budget films end up expensive home-movies. There’s about six shooting around Sydney at the moment and I’m sure it’s the same in Melbourne. Very few make it to the big screen. What we tried to do is not make it two people in two rooms talk­ ing. We tried to give it as much production value as we could in order to maximize our chances of getting dis­ tribution. We did that by making Sydney feel like a character in the film, giving it some exterior locations, trying to open it up a bit, keeping it bright and colourful and fun and energetic, as well as having a bit of heart that an audience can latch on to.

D id

y o u m a k e t h e film w it h an a u d i ­

ence

IN MIND?

To get a distributor to look at a film, that’s all they want to know. It doesn’t happen all that often that an Australian film is made for a younger female audi­ ence. A distributor could instantly see that it can market the film to that audi­ ence and that, I guess, is what was attractive about it.

That wasn’t a conscious decision when I wrote it, but it was afterwards.

That’s why it’s reliant on music and spontaneity. I guess a lot of films are made without an audience in mind, or you don’t quite know where the audi­ ence is.

I’ve encountered quite a lot of resistance from people saying, “Why did you make a commercial film?” - as a criticism. Well, the aim of the game is to have people see your film.

At

w h a t s t a g e d id

Ro a d sh o w

t a k e on

THE FILM?

We went backwards and forwards to the funding bodies quite a few times.

We shot the film blind — we couldn’t afford rushes or anything — so, when our $40,000 ran out, what we had was a box of processed negative. That’s all.

1 literally tramped around to every post house in town with my box of neg.

Lemac in Sydney, which we hired the gear off, kindly offered to telecine the C I N E M A PAP ERS • JANUARY

1999

negative on the proviso that, if we got money, we’d pay them back. Suddenly, we had six Betacams and we got to look at all these crazy rushes for the first time.

I thought, “No one will give us an editing suite for a couple of months to cut it, so why don’t we try to grab a few days somewhere and we’ll do a trailer.” So, once again, I knocked on doors. Spectrum Films kindly gave us four days on Lightworks. 1didn’t have an editor, but eventually found my way to Simon Martin, who was just finish­ ing /A Little Bit of Soul [Peter Duncan,

hand the highest.

D id R o a d s h o w

g e t in v o l v e d in a n y

ASPECT OF THE POST-PRODUCTION?

No, they said, “Here’s the money, go and finish it.” First to be paid were cast and crew, then facilities.

It’s an 84-minute film with 33 songs. We had to go back and recut the film with the music we could afford. We had to replace every song except one, and that was quite scary because we literally had to reinvent the film and keep the essence of what Roadshow liked about it. We had to edit the film twice.

19971-

Wa s

We cut a two-minute trailer out of a film that wasn’t even edited, which was quite strange, and went back to the funding bodies again, but didn’t have any luck. Feeling quite dejected, I went knocking on doors again, showed the trailer, and a place called Screenland offered us three months on the system — once again, “If you never get your money, that’s fine, but if you do pay us back.”

Three months later we’d come up with a rough-cut, went back to the

FILM FROM A WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE?

funding bodies with the finished film, still no luck. What I needed was advice, because I didn’t know how to get a dis­ tributor. I didn’t think you could just call them up and they’d come along and see your film. But that’s exactly what they did. Roadshow held up its

C I N E M A P AP E R S • JANUARY

1999

it d if f ic u l t f o r y o u to w r it e a

there are a few issues that are quite common. The whole smoking thing; how many times has everyone tried to give up? Perhaps the romantic angle. I think if there’s a little message in the film which is good for women, it’s “Feel good about who you are and how you look; that’s all that matters.” That, I think, is what they respond to.

You open New Idea and there’s Melanie Griffith’s diet; on the cover is

Ally McBeal accused of being anorexic.

This hypocrisy about, on one hand, getting rid of the weight and, on the other, this is how you’ve got to look, is just rammed down women’s throats continuously. It must be so hard when you get to 17 or 18 and having this thrust down your throat. What I like about Min is she’s not beautiful, she’s lovely in her own way, she’s got a bit of weight on her. She’s kind of the way most of us are.

older women respond to it, especially the 40- to 45-year-olds who have a fan­ tastic time with it, even more so than the younger ones.

Min whinges the whole way through the film, so it’s quite amazing that people put up with that, but still really like her and have some empathy with her situation.

do y o u t h in k t h a t i s ?

I suppose that at some stage every­ one’s life falls apart in a crazy way but

Nick Bishop who played him is the most experienced actor, a NIDA gradu­ ate. I had a great scene where he was doing a Zen headstand and there’s a little conversation between him and Min with the camera upside down. I wanted to get him in a little bit more. I like the way he subtly gets up Min’s goat and then she lets fly at the end.

She can’t take it and he has no idea.

[W]hen reading about people like Buñuel and Truffaut, I started to see that they had doubts about themselves and that really they weren’t that different to me.

I find writing dialogue easy. It’s pretty thin on plot, it’s a dialogue-driven film, and I guess the bit of plot pulls out of the dialogue. But I literally had nothing to do with it. I sat down and had no idea what I was going to write. That opening monologue came and it liter­ ally just sprang from there. The tag of the preceding scene would lead to the next one. I don’t know, I guess I must have a feminine side or something.

The amazing thing is how much

W hy

CORRECT SHAGGER.

Da v id

w a s a v e r y t r u t h f u l m a le

CHARACTER; HE’S A POLITICALLY -

Ca n

yo u ta lk a b o u t yo u r ow n ba ck ­

ground?

You HAD NO FORMAL FILM

TRAINING, DID YOU?

I guess I’m totally outside of the sys­ tem. The AFTRS [Australian Film Television & Radio School] isn’t too far from where I live. I couldn’t afford to go there because I have a couple of kids and that wasn’t an option. But I saw the library and I thought, “This is tremendous, this great reference library about every film you’d ever want to see.” I just started hanging out there. So, while all the students were being students, I’d be in the library and I’d watch films by blocks of directors, and then read the biography of that director. Basically, I just worked my way from A to Z, everything from Anto­ nioni to you name it. It was a crash course in film history.

I still had that feeling that you couldn’t just be a director. But when reading about people like Buñuel and Truffaut, I started to see that they had doubts about themselves and that really they weren’t that different to me.

It gave me a bit of strength to, well, why not have a go?

I read as much technically as I could, so it was literally an intensive crash course in filmmaking and film­ makers.

I’d always loved movies, but it had never occurred to me that you could just go out and make a film until I read this article by Phillip Adams. I don’t always agree with what he says but I love the larrikin in him. It was a fantas­ tic article about getting off your arse and having a go, that Australian trait of having a shot in the face of adversity. I felt really inspired by it, and that was a turning point for me. ©

53

D R E a m I © U R H R A + Z E N I E PER E Y

THE

great new frontier for animation which effrey Katzenberg, formerly at was basically to take the technique of Disney, is a partner with Steven animation and start to use it to tell Spielberg and David Geffen at something other than cartoon fairy­ Dreamworks SKG, the major new tales made for little children, toddlers. studio with the 1998 hits, Saving Pri­ We kicked around a number of ideas. vate Ryan (Steven Spielberg), Deep Steven Spielberg said, “Why don’t you Im pact (Mimi Leder) and Antz (Eric do the Ten Commandments?” Like Darnell and Tim Johnson). most great ideas, you don’t have to Dreamworks’ big Christmas-New hear it twice to know that’s it. So, Year hope is The Prince o f Egypt before we actually even started (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner Dreamworks as a company, we had and Simon Wells), an animated musi­ agreed that [...) it would be our first cal about M oses (voiced by Val movie. Four years later, here we are.

Kilmer) and his adoptive brother, When asked if his Jewish heritage Rameses (Ralph Fiennes). Bringing had influenced the choice of story, astonishing new techniques to the Katzenberg answered: screen, The Prince o f Egypt is also Our heritage is something we all carry one o f the rare animated features with us and something I have a sense aimed at a wide audience demo­ of pride about. But the story was graphic, where adults will hopefully picked because it genuinely is a great be as enchanted as children. story. [...] The fact that it has great val­ When asked at the Australian ues and meaning to many people on press conference where the idea had this planet is a wonderful added bene­ come from, Katzenberg replied: fit, but it is not the reason that we set About 3000 years ago in ancient Egypt! out to tell the story. (...]

[Laughter.]

I hope we have made a movie that The genesis of the project actually audiences will connect with on many started before Steven Spielberg, David different levels. If there are values of Geffen and myself actually undertook faith in this film for people to take the task of building the first studio in away from it, then that’s a great 65 years. We were talking about what accomplishment. But it’s not why the we all would like to achieve. {...] I film exists. People will be able to come explained how l thought there was a

I

54

in and simply get transported back thousands of years in time to enjoy one of the most remarkable stories that has been passed down for dozens of generations.

With its audacious new techniques, an impressionistic visual palette and a stirring recreation of an ancient time, Katzenberg certainly sees The Prince o f Egypt as a new dawn in feature animation, as he explains to SC O T T MURRAY. In 1984, when I arrived at Disney, I had no connection to animation. I didn’t study it, I wasn’t an aficionado of it, I barely remembered seeing it as a kid.

At Disney, somebody said, “So, you do movies and television ... and, by the way, over there is animation. Figure it out; it’s a problem.”

As with any job I’ve ever been given in my life, I threw myself into it.

That began the journey of re-discover­ ing Walt Disney’s formula, Walt’s path, his genius. All we did at Disney was go back to the master and retrace his steps; we didn’t invent anything.

I fell in love with animation and it became a genuine passion for me, but it was only a part-time job. I had to go off and build this huge film and televi­ sion studio. So, when I left and we had

this idea of starting a studio, my hope, my dream, was that I would actually be able to do this thing that I had fallen in love with full-time, not part-time.

When

d id y o u d e v e l o p t h e v is io n t o

TAKE ANIMATION BEYOND FAIRYTALES FOR CHILDREN AND MAKE FILMS DIRECTED MORE AT ADULTS?

That came part and parcel with leav­ ing. When I was at Disney, I loved the cartoons and the fairytales, the tradi­ tions and heritage. I embraced them and flourished. It’s not like it was an issue for me; it’s not as though I found it limiting or frustrating. I enjoyed it very much and I think there is still huge territories to pursue in that genre... for them [laughs].

At Dreamworks, 1wanted to move on to a new continent. Every step had to be a first step, every place a new challenge and experience. I felt we should be pioneers who took the tech­ nique of animation and redeveloped it, finding a style, a look and a whole set of tools that would be unique to us.

We took the best of traditional ani­ mation - the acting that’s done by our animators, which I think is world-class - and re-defined the way actors lend their voices to a movie. The realism that we went for in the acting,, as in the visuals, had to be 1

C I N E M A P APERS • JANUARY

1999

The Queen (Helen Mirren) and her baby, Rameses.

We also

Moses and wifeTzipporah (Michelle Pfepèrj.

<1

embraced new ani­

our active characters and put them into three-dimensional environments

mation tools, many of

we built. Our camera can go where

which we invented and

bur directors and lay-out artists want

developed specifically for

it to go, which has a profound impact -

this movie. We actually

on the look of the movie. You actu-

had to figure out how to

ally feel as if you’re on the inside of

do some of these ideas

the environments, as opposed to just

that were interesting us

observing them which, in the past, is

conceptually, because

all that you could do in animation.

~

The biggest leap of all, though,

the tools to do them didn’t actually exist. |

was to pick a story. To me, you cpuld M

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1988], We couldn’t explain tpanybody what we were doing then,

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C I N E M A PAP ERS • JANUARY

1 999

55

sleep at night these days. For a hun­ dred years, movie audiences have always found it. There are so few examples of it not being the case, that they were in fact the flukes. We could be a fluke, but I hope we’re not.

Th e P r in ce o f Eg y p t h a s a n a d u l t TONE IN THE PERFORMANCE AND DIALOGUE. IT IS A SHOCK NOT TO HEAR ACTORS PUTTING ON SQUIRREL-TYPE VOICES, APPROPRIATE THOUGH THAT MAY BE FOR CHILDREN’S FILMS.

It has that in common with Antz.

W h ic h

is a t y e t a n o t h e r en d o f t h e

SPECTRUM THAT YOU DESCRIBED.

AGE OF ANIMATION ON CINEMA SCREENS CAN ACTUALLY INCREASE?

Well, they’re hard to make, they’re very people-intense and there’s a lim­ ited talent pool, so I don’t think all of a sudden you’re going to start seeing ten of these films a year. It will take a decade or more to grow that talent pool, assuming that some others have the same insane ambition that I do.

There are two other companies who have tried to pursue what it is that Dis­ ney does, with varying degrees of success. Anastasia [Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, 1997] was a decent success,

Yes, and I hope it will be the true of our next movie, El Dorado. It is about two rogue stowaways on Cortez’ ship as he sails to the new world. They jump ship and arrive in this Shangrila, the mythical city of El Dorado, the city of gold. I hope that we will be successful in embracing a very rebellious tone.

G iv e n

t h e l o n g - h e l d n o t io n

CHILDREN, DO YOU THINK THERE WILL BE A RESISTANCE FROM ADULTS TO VISITING THE PRINCE

Eg y p t ?

Oh, sure. It’s 70 years of ani­ mation being one-way. You’re asking, “Can the world take the 70-year tradition and percep­ tion of animation equalling cartoons, fairytales, happy meals, school box, lunch-boxes [laughsj1 and, in one snap of a finger, say, ‘No, it’s completely different from that. That’s not what it is.’?” I think that’s a very hard thing to do. It’s a real challenge. And therein lies both the excitement of it and the risk.

I only can say that, having done it because it’s too late now to re-consid e r- it has genuinely been a privilege to make this movie. This is one of those times, whatever the film’s fate is, I feel we did our best.

a very nice movie, but they did head right into, “Let’s have a fairytale with all the [merchandizing] stuff’, and I don’t know whether they’re going to continue to pursue that or not.

Today, there are basically four com­ panies making animated movies.

You’re going to be hard pressed to find more than five or six movies a year coming out. It is a pretty daunting thing to do. It took us four years to get these two out.

Bu t Dr e a m w o r k s

is a l r e a d y a

Do YOU BELIEVE THE POSSIBILITIES FOR

MAJOR STUDIO AND THAT HAS CHANGED

TELLING STORIES THROUGH ANIMATION

a s it u a t io n

ARE MORE LIMITLESS THAN THROUGH

DOMINATED.

l iv e - a c t io n ? in

A fter

a l l , t h e t e c h n iq u e s

A a/ t z a n d Th e Pr in ce of E g y p t

imagined that they took away from one another. They existed out there, and I guess in a pure, pure sense they were competitors with one another, but not really.

No t

c o m p e t it io n , s o m u c h a s t h e a n i ­

m a t io n

PASSION-POOL BEING GREATLY

INCREASED. THE MONEY AND DESIRE FOR MAKING SERIOUS ANIMATED FEATURES HAS DRAMATICALLY ALTERED. It ’S A POTENTIAL NEW DAWN FOR A WHOLE NEW AREA OF CINEMA.

[Katzenberg pauses, then taps his hand on a wooden sidetable.] Knock wood.

Knock wood. Let’s hope you’re right.

OF ANIMATION AS BEING FOR

of

exceeded people’s expectations, both came out within two weeks of one another, but I don’t think anybody

are

LIGHT-YEARS APART.

I guess I would say “No”, in that I believe there are as many styles of liveaction movie-making as there are styles of animation. But I would agree with you on the differences. If you took all animated movies ever made in the his­ tory of mankind and added them together, it would not represent 20 per­ cent of the output of live-action movies in one year in Hollywood. Live-action has been exploring thousands of differ­ ent kinds of stories for decades and decades. Animation hasn’t even begun.

IS THERE A CHANCE THAT THE PERCENT-

D is n e y

h a s fo r s o lo n g

I don’t look to Disney as our competi­ tor. It’s not a David and Goliath story as much as people would like to pigeonhole it as being. It would be true if we were pursuing their business, but we’re not.

Disney is going to continue doing what they do brilliantly. They did it for fifty or sixty years before I went there and in the five years since I left.

We’re going off into such completely-different territory that to compare the two would be like com­ paring There’s Something about Mary [Peter and Bobby Farrelly] and Saving Private Ryan. Yes, they were two phe­ nomenally successful movies, both

A ntz is a p o s it iv e s t a r t .

We had fun making it, a ball.

Working with those actors was great. Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson, the directors, did a stunning job. They are as gifted as any people I’ve worked with. How’s that, out of the box? Boom!

And look at the people on Prince of Egypt. Brenda Chap­ man is the first woman director in [feature] animation.

I’ve worked with Brenda for over ten years. She gave The Lion King [Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994] its heart.

She gave this movie its heart.

If you find anything tender and emotional in this movie, it is probably because so many brilliant women worked on it. The two producers [San­ dra Rabins, Penney Finkelman Cox] were women, as was one of the direc­ tors and one of the co-heads of story [Lorna Cook], and one of the three designers [Kathy Altieri], In other words, so many women were in places of major decision-making. They’re the ones, I think, who put the heart into it, whereas Simon Wells [co-director] is a brilliant visualist, storyteller and dramatist. He did a fantastic job direct­ ing Val Kilmer, as did Brenda with Ralph Fiennes. Steve Hickner [co-direc­ tor] made the movie get to life with all his big ideas. It was a wonderful com­ bination of talents.

IS ANIMATION A MORE ORGANICALLY COLLABORATIVE PROCESS THAN LIVEACTION?

Without a question; not even close.

There’s nothing else in the world that I’ve discovered that begins to touch that.

The only thing genuinely unfortu­ nate about this film would be if it were seen as a singular enterprise, because, all over it as I am, and I’m sure you’ll hear or have heard some stories, I am just a participant. Yes, I am a driver,

every day giving people the strength to take risks and have the courage of their convictions and their insane ideas. If Steven makes a movie, it’s a Steven movie. I can’t say that that’s the case here. It would be unfair.

IS THAT ANOTHER REASON YOU LOVE ANI­ MATION?

To me, that’s the fun. When I lived in New York city, I would sometimes go down in the dead of winter to the Caribbean. Suddenly the plane door opens and you walk out into the Caribbean air, where the scent com­ pletely envelops every pore of your body. There is something about it so enrapturing and enveloping.

I feel that every day when I drive in the gates of Dreamworks. I feel like I’m on a tropical oasis.

YOU ARE NOW A PARTNER OF A MAJOR STUDIO, RATHER THAN SOMEONE MANAG­ ING ONE. DO YOU FEEL IN ANY WAY LIBERATED?

It just may be the nature of who I am, and I know I’m partners with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, but I really feel as if I work for them. They don’t make me feel that way, but I make myself feel that way. They are my men­ tors. They are smarter, more successful, more talented and defi­ nitely richer [laughs]. They’re incredible guys to work for.

At

th e p r e s s c o n fer e n c e, and to d a y ,

YOU MENTION SPIELBERG WITH AWE IN YOUR VOICE.

Well, he is a genius! I actually do believe that if we can ever return from some other place and look back a thousand years from now, he’s Shake­ speare. Do you know what I’m saying?

He’s in just some other place. In his­ tory, from time to time - Beethoven, Monet - there are people who come along who are just off the charts. Now I’m not sure anybody knew it at the moment that they were there, or maybe they had some sense of it. I actually imagine that’s who Steven is.

Every day is a new revelation. If there’s anybody who wants to question whether or not that’s possible, I would say, “Pretty much every week some­ thing else comes along that confirms that likely it’s the case. More so it’s likely than it’s not [laughs].” For me to have someone that incredible as a partner... I just pinch myself. And, believe me, I’m not shy about wanting to utilize this genius in any way I can to help me be better.

At the press conference, a spokes­ woman said, “Dreamworks decided not to do any consumer products.

There are no Red Sea shower curtains, no fast-food tie-ins or Moses burgers. They felt it would just not be appropriate.” @

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RANKING the TREASURES®

In

t h e s e c o n d p a r t o f h i s r e v i e w of t h e m a m m o t h

R a n k r e t r o s p e c t i v e , BARRIE PATTISON l o o k s at THE WORK OF NOW-FORGOTTEN BRITISH FILMMAKERS. ne of the most interesting aspects of the collection is to see how many star perform­ ers, later appearing in American films, figure here, among them Muriel Angelus, lead of Preston Sturges’ first movie; Brian Aherne; Claude Rains; and two Richard the Lionhearts, the admirable Henry Wilcoxon from De M ille’s The Crusades (1935) and Ian Hunter from the Errol Flynn The Adven­ tures o f Robin H ood (Michael Curtiz, 1938).

Lilli Palmer grows from bit player (remember Peter Lorre flicking ice-cream into her cleavage in

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 Secret Agent}), through femme fatale in Rosm er’s 1936 kids adventure in the Rockies, The Great Barrier (aka Silent Barriers, 1937) and Albert de Courville’s Crackerjack (1937), her ingenues in Maurice Elvey films, to her touching refugee registering against the seri­ ous competition in The Rake’s Progress (aka Notorious Gentleman, Sidney Gilliat) in 1945.

Britain was a staging point for many European filmmakers whose work shows up in the collec­ tion: Mendes and Viertel. Italian Carmine Gallone made the musical My Heart is Calling (1935) with Polish couple Jan Kiepura and M arta Eggerth. The celebrated German director Karl Grune did Pagli-

acci (aka A Clown Must Laugh, 1936) with Richard Tauber. Czech Karel Lamac filmed They Met in the Dark with Jam es M ason in 1943. Holly­ wood directors included Raoul Walsh, whose O.H.M.S. (aka You’re in the Army Now, 1936) is a brisk, simple-minded adventure with John Mills and Wallace Ford as a gangster hiding as a mem­ ber of a Canadian (!) military family joining the regiment and battling the straw hat lot on China Station. Rex Ingram’s Marseilles-based Baroud (aka Love in Morocco, 1933) is more exotic and less disciplined.

H

ill a n d

F

orde

E lvey

prisingly stylish and has some soBritish gags, such as M ax Miller marching in on the end o f the line of

Sinclair Hill was once a force in the British cinema. H e handles Jessie Matthews in the 1931 The M an from Toronto but his Britannia o f Billings­

M aurice Elvey particularly, veteran of 200 productions, has remained a shadowy figure till now, though his

gate from 1933 is more interesting.

The plot drags when dad Gordon

treat World War I appears correct, and his record includes Berlin and Hollywood stints and work continu­ ing into the ’5 Os. The recent Pordenone retrospective, which included his The Life Story o f David Lloyd George (1918) and the best

Aufland Hussars and announcing, “ I am not what I seem” , to have La Laye riposte, “ I congratulate you.”

Elvey’s 1940 For Freedom intriguingly anticipates Newsfront (Phillip Noyce, 1979), mixing newsreel and actuality, as in the scene where Will Fyffe tells his crew to swing their searchlight and we cut to the beam crossing the front of Buckingham

version of Hindle Wakes (1918), was a revelation.

Back at the London School of Film Technique when Elvey taught us, he passed for an amiable oldstager. We wondered about all his then-inaccessible titles. I thought myself very enterprising to hustle up one old D.I.N. standard copy of his Conrad Veidt film, the 1933 sound Wandering Jew, for him to comment.

H ow much more interesting dealing with him would have been if we could have had our hands on these.

N ow we can watch the scene Elvey described, of Jan Kiepura doing the British Cinema’s first num­ ber to playback in his My Song for You in 1934, Harker and Loraine in music hall in 1934’s Road House or Claude Rains and Faye Wray in 1935’s disturbing The Clairvoyant.

Elvey’s now-totally-forgotten 1935 H eat Wave, a banana Republic musi­ cal comedy which is funny and lively, can more than hold its own with Rene Clair or Hollywood produc­ tion-line items.

Even this fragmentary selection of his films covers an amazing range.

The sci-fi Transatlantic Tunnel (1935) was known, but here we also find his operetta Princess Charming (1934), with lantern-jawed Captain Henry Wilcoxon defending Evelyn Laye from the revolutionists. It’s sur­

Palace on a royal occasion. There’s an ending covering the battle of the River Plate, with actual participants re-enacting their material, mixed in with animated diagrams and factual coverage. Powell and Pressburger’s film must have drawn on detail like “passing commands through a chain of men” as communications are destroyed.

Lilli Palmer crosses Elvey’s path twice, as a sympathetic Austrian wareffort driver, commenting, “ I’ve been told frozen virtue is no asset” , to her snobby chum in the stoic, 1943 The Gentle Sex, where Elvey had to go and get Leslie Howard out of bed every morning to justify his splitdirector credit.

Palmer is also the star of his 1943 Beware o f Pity, where she lights up her scenes in a Stefan Zweig account of the Austro-Hungarian world in decline, with plausible Vetchinsky decors and a great cast: Cedric Hardwicke, Gladys Cooper, Ernest Thesiger. Young officer Albert Leiven, forever buckling on his sabre, is manoeuvred into a betrothal with crippled heiress Lilli. It is a film of surprisingly missed opportunity which should have been one o f the collection’s highlights.

It reminds us that even diligent movie-watchers had only an indis­ tinct notion o f this director’s output.

Harker accidentally gets market-cafe wife Violet Lorraine movie stardom while son John Mills enters the Speedway races but we do get a detailed look at filmmaking of the period, a comic foreign director, a British Acoustic soundtrack projected on screen next to the one by one ten image, rushes and the Hammersmith Gaumont premiere.

claim to have made the first film to

Walter Forde also undertook prestige movies like the 1934 Oscar Ashe musical, Chu Chin Chow, with Fritz Kortner and Anna May Wong, no less, all with disappointing results.

S aville Victor Saville raies as the most ambi­ tious contender, someone able to transport his skills to Hollywood, like his contemporaries Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins, 1964) or Tim Whelan (Rage at Dawn, 1955).

Saville would go on to make his best film, South Riding (1938), for Korda and produce the Robert Donat Goodbye Mr. Chips (Sam W ood, 1939) and the Mickey Spillane series o f which Kiss Me Deadly is the one remembered now. Later a producer, he said that he was too lazy to keep going on the floor and direct, but the ’30s was a period when he was one o f the most active British filmmakers.

Saville did a sound version of the celebrated Hindie Wakes in 1931, best in its opening scenes of the Lan­ cashire Mill closing down for the Hindle Thrift Club excursion and the Blackpool pier entertainments. Millhand Belle Crystal (then the hot new British star) and owner’s son John Stuart go off on a dirty weekend but get found out, as the staginess of the repertory theatre standard sets in, with only the confrontation with parents Edmund Gwenn (always excellent) and Sybil Thorndyke, inge­ niously staged on the family stairs, having film form. The original end, with Belle asserting her indepen­ dence, rings better than the tacked on happy-at-the-machines final shot.

Saville’s Evelyn Laye-vehicle, Even­ song (1934), is stodgy even with Fritz Kortner and Emlyn Williams along.

George Arliss in The Iron Duke, also 1934, fares no better, but these are spaced by lighter, more appealing films. It is virtually impossible to find any continuous line in his work or indeed that of any of the directors Michael Balcon pressed into service.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

W

alls

Even less accessible have been the Aldwych farces, written for the stage

by Ben Travers and filmed by star and director Tom Walls, heading up a stock company including silly-ass Ralph Lynn with his monocle (“That young man with the glass eye” ), bumbling Robertson Hare, who sug­ gested he could have been funnier than the top bananas, and the charm­ ing, middle-aged Yvonne Arnaud.

These are a particularly intriguing study for movie enthusiasts, all but filmed on stage, well into the team’s association with the talkies, in 1934’s A Cup o f Kindness and the celebrated The Cuckoo in the Nest (1933), which still plays better than the 1950s re-make. We can watch Walls’ limited command of film form develop from shots of the cast stand­ ing in a line in the studio, delivering Travers’ unfunny dialogue: arresting the ruffian for shooting at him, cop Walls is told, “ I only acted in self defence” , and comes back, “You’re a rotten bad actor.” They progress through the Limehouse mystery of Stormy Weather (1935), and particu­ larly in Foreign Affairs (1935) Walls can be seen on a steep learning curve.

This latter is a prototype of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Frank Oz, 1988), with Walls and Lynn, operating as a team quite winningly for once, a pair of swindlers on the Riviera who are got off, in the French courts, when the appealing Dianna Churchill pre­ sents them as gallant British gentlemen overcoming a Germanic plot.

The group broke up soon after this, the old-fashioned nature of their material already apparent, but it is a curious, consistent body of work of a kind rarely found.

Tom Walls’ films fringe on the most rewarding of these, what you might think of as the Film Fun school of production. It is significant that to find a reference for this most characteristic school of British filmmaking, you have to turn, not to Sight and Sound or Time Out, but to a threepenny comic which shared their naïve clergymen, striped-shirted burglars, uniformed maids, tubby school boys and top-hatted dandies.

P inero The model in the early years of sound was the Arthur Wing Pinero play, The Magistrate, where the wowser official has to conceal his own low-life activi­ ties. Unofficial versions are dotted through the collection. Leslie Henson did it twice, in Victor Saville’s 1931

M ost curious of the batch is Vic­

The Sport o f Kings and again in Gra­ ham Cutts and Austin M elford’s Oh Daddy (1935), with a script credit to Michael Powell. It was filmed in 1934 as Those 'Were The Days by the admirable Will Hay, many of whose films are in the collection and could have stood the successful matinee treatment the commercial channels give Abbott and Costello.

The play was presented as late as the ’70s in London’s West End with Alistair Sim.

tor Saville’s 1935 Me and Marlborough, which is a (quite pass­ able) composite of costume adventure (“They’ll know better than to send British troops to fight in Flanders again” ) and musical, with Courtneidge in drag pursuing her enlisted husband to the frontline and springing Duke Tom Walls from treacherous French captivity.

M

H ulbert and C ourtneidge The style is shown better in the musi­ cals. Heat Wave is one, but as good are the films of Jessie Matthews and Jack Hulbert.

Hulbert is not remembered even as well as Hay, but he proves the most endearing of the comics, play­ ing much the same characters as Tom Walls - heroes of empire, reporters, men about town - but without the bombast.

There was always an element of self-mockery about Hulbert’s charac­ ters. In Forde’s 1934 Bulldog Jack, our hero is rung in to replace Athol Fleming’s Captain Drummond, injured in a battle with Ralph Richardson’s woolly-wigged master criminal, his success relying on the deception. In Tim Whelan’s 1934 The Camels are Coming which Hul­ bert, as he often did, also co-wrote; he’s the Squadron Leader whose reception in Egypt is a surprise. (“ He was only expecting flowers if he did­ n’t get there.” ) This one starts with a bogus Gaumont British news seven years before Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), incidentally.

Jack Ahoy (Robert Steven­ son,1934) is an amusing enough account of Hulbert joining the navy to win admiral’s daughter Nancy O ’Neil and stealing a (wooden) sub­ marine from bandits, with some nice

gags like the sentries arguing in Chi­ nese the merits of Garbo vs. Dietrich and the “My H at’s on the Side of my H ead” number. Stevenson’s 1936 Jack o f All Trades is a try for social satire, with out-of-work Hulbert passing himself off as a Paris branch manager. “I’ve always wanted to be a big businessman - look like the photo I sent my mother.” He blackmails meek Robertson Hare, in his best role (“If that’s what you look like when you’re worried, I wouldn’t do it”, Hulbert tells him). The ending shifts into passable treadmill slapstick.

Forde’s 1932 Jack’s the Boy (aka Night & Day) has his family consider Hulbert to be a waster, not knowing he’s secretly joined the police as a constable, leading to traffic chaos routines and a lively climax shot on location in Mme Tussauds.

Better again is Love on Wheels, directed by Victor Saville from a script by Robert Stevenson in 1932, with Hulbert doing a Dagwood Bumstead run for the morning bus with its singing passengers and con­ ductor Gordon Harker urging him to come on for swanky Lenora Corbett.

The location here is Liberty’s Oxford

Street store where manager Edmund Gwenn has him fired, but after the “Luncheon to Munch On” number he does a live legs window display for the Jewish, small-shop owner across the road, diverting the atten­ tion of the crowds - rhythmic edits all over the place, an acrobatic Swiss face slap number and a Bill Sykes social club where the rough-housing passes for Apache dancing.

Pick of the batch is the 1933 Falling for You directed by Robert Stevenson and Hulbert. The stars are likeable, the numbers lively, and the staging convincing, offering a chase in the Alps without process photog­ raphy. There are surprises, like Hulbert doing an unexpectedly skil­ ful skates dance.

Hulbert is partnered in this with his real-life wife, Cicely Courtneidge - a competing reporters plot. Both were talented entertainers. Neither was young and glamorous when these films were made but we can’t help noticing that Jack was paired with attractive young co-stars while Coutneidge was given the likes of Edward Everett Horton as consort.

Courtneidge also made agreeable comedies on her own. Maurice Elvey’s 1933 Soldiers o f the King bur­ lesques the conventions of “Brown on Resolution” with Courtneidge as two generations of a musical family, a coffee-stand crowd sheltering on a wet New Year’s Eve that forms a Conga line that brings amiable drunks back to the family party, and the two Courtneidges doing “ Some­ thing About a Soldier” and “ Soldiers of the King” . Tim Whelan’s 1933 Aunt Sally has the star passing herself off as a French cabaret star for impresario Sam Hardy, with bogus Berkeley numbers. Charles Reisner’s Everybody Dance of 1936 has her impersonating a pillar of rural virtue between nightclub numbers.

atthews

More appealing was Jessie Matthews, her elfin charms jarring with her Knightsbridge accent. The earlier films shown are stiff, Albert de Courville’s 1932 There Goes the Bride, where Owen Nares appoints himself her protector against a pre­ sumed arrest, or Sinclair Hill’s The Man from Toronto of the same year, barely a musical with one dance num­ ber. Plot has Ian Hunter trying to avoid an arranged marriage, with heiress Matthews, but falling for maid Matthews in disguise.

Matthews hits her stride in a sus­ tained collaboration with Victor Saville. The Good Companions (1932) gives her a spot in the all-star cast opposite Edmund Gwenn, Mary Glynne, Percy Parsons, M ax Miller and a nervous, lip-rouged John Giel­ gud. It is one of the most ambitious of these with the J. B. Priestley best­ seller as basis and a climax where it looks as if Matthews’ bid for stardom will be destroyed when the theatre goes up in another spectacular fire raising, only to have triumph snatched from disaster.

Friday the Thirteenth (Saville, 1933) repeats the all-star format with multi-stories connected by a bus acci­ dent. It introduced Ralph Richardson.

Evergreen (Saville), a year later, is the best known, with a familiar Rodgers and H art score and a plot prefiguring Fedora. Over-produced and wading into an ersatz Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) ballet finale, this one tries too hard, an error corrected in the last of the Saville-Matthews collaborations.

First a Girl (Saville, 1935) is the middle version of the “Victor and Victoria” story and easily the best.

This one has Matthews among the midinettes twisting their butts in time with the fashion parade music at Martita Hunt’s showing. Matthews decides to be a show girl and puts on the outfit belonging to titled Anna Lee, in an unbecoming Marcelle perm, but Matthews gets bounced from the choir where her real-life husband, Sonnie Hale, is auditioning for Hamlet. In the rain, he gets a cold and her borrowed dress is soaked, so he irons it while his voice C I N E M A P A PE R S • J A N U A' RY 1 9 9 9

top-billed as the mysterious tribesman, towering over the cast, his songs reasonably motivated and him­ self badly presented only in the action footage where a college ath­ lete background should have served him well. Also in the ubiquitous Anna Lee’s expedition, we find romantic interest John Loder, the

gives out, suggesting that he send her in to do his drag act in the tacky, neighbourhood, 100-seat music hall where the goose herder and the strongman share her dressing room.

She is, of course, a hit and becomes a star, posing as a boy. Poker-stiff Grif­ fith Johns finds himself attracted to her, despite the fact that he’s not that sort of chap.

The contrast of the glum British opening and the location-shot Riv­ iera climax is a strong dynamic in itself. Script, numbers, design (Otto W erndorfs best outing) performance and handling combine to produce a charming, feather-light affair which is one of the gems of the collection and can compare with work done anywhere in its day. Excellence apart, it is surprising that this one has been allowed to vanish when it meets the criteria that ideologue critics have been promoting so vigorously over the last decades. The gender manipulation would sustain a Chi­ nese opera.

Matthews continued making lesser musicals with other directors, includ­ ing Sonnie Hale’s 1938 Sailing Along and, finally, the slack-paced 1939 Climbing High from the Stars Look Down team of Michael Redgrave and Carol Reed, till a medical condition made the characteristic high-kicking choreography, for which she was cel­ ebrated, impossible.

And that’s about as good as it got.

There are remarkably few stand-out items in this collection. Falling for You and First a Girl qualify.

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

H

urst

Add in Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1935 On the Night o f the Fire where Ralph Richardson is a side-street tuppenny barber who, on impulse, steals money he sees through an open win­ dow, only to find that wife Diana Wynyard is in debt for £70 to the smarmy local Manchester store man, startlingly well played by Henry Oscar. (“That’s a lot of money for a woman of her class.” ) Henry gets his and the net closes round Ralph. The surprise is that he becomes a doomed Jannings type and the street traders, rather than express class solidarity, form a muttering, cloth-cap lynch mob. The film pre-figures the destructive-impulse USA noir films, like Andre de Toth’s 1948 Pitfall and particularly Anthony M ann’s 1950 Side Street, strikingly.

The mix of actuality (pre-bomb­ ing Newcastle?) and studio street is striking, and it is fascinating to watch the talented leads struggle with working-class parts for which they are totally miscast. Miklos Rozsa’s little-known, first noir score adds impact. Till now, music in these has been largely nondescript. The direc­ tor’s other films, Ourselves Alone (1936) and The Mark o f Cain (1948) among them, are often routine.

Stevenson Also, let us not overlook the 1936 King Solom on’s Mines, directed by Robert Stevenson with extensive location footage by Geoffrey Bartas, who split the credit on Tell England (aka Battle o f Gallipoli, 1931) with Asquith.

The Rider Haggard standard gets its best outing with Paul Robeson

ever-splendid Roland Young and pipe-chewing Cedric Hardwicke (“ Quartermain - best hunter in Africa”). Back in the ’50s, when Lindsay Anderson made a splash by putting the boot into British cinema, one of his complaints was that it lacked positive figures until Henry V surfaced. In fact, these films are packed up with idealized heroes of Empire, Walter Huston in Vieterl’s 1936 Rhodes o f Africa, Leslie Banks as Sandy the strong, Sandy the brave (“hater of lies” ). The fact that such films were ignored must have con­ tributed to subsequent British film, including those of Anderson, having total lack of connection to this strong movie tradition.

King Solomon s Mines has the conviction of people for whom these adventures were a living and embraced tradition. We become involved as Hardwicke-Quartermain abandons his stand that, “There’s nothing across the river but devils”, swayed to plucky Irish-accented Anna’s belief that the treasure map will lead to her missing dad and that Robeson will guide them there (“You don’t get a snake on your stomach for nothing” ). The jungle battle just gets by, but the climax in the volcano cave with bubbling lava and tumbling rocks is terrific, showcasing Junge at his best. If this film had been in colour it would have rivalled the Zoltán Korda Four Feathers (1939).

It is more than sad that it was denied the generations of 14- yearolds for whom it would have been one of their great experiences of cin­ ema, till it becomes a cinephile relic which has lost relevance to the age group it once effectively targeted!

These films are the exceptions.

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...

The library also contains one silent film, Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926), in a passable tinted and scored copy, and two documentaries. John Betts’ R.A.F. is a routine recruiting film with nervous service types perform­ ing their daily round. However, Wings Over Everest is more intrigu­ ing, with an impressive sequence of preparations for the roof of the world flight outclassing the actual event, nicely sent up by the stiff upper lip delivery of the real avia­ tors. Footage appears to have been

used in The Camels Are Coming and the techniques of the busy Gaumont Instructional unit get possibly their most ambitious outing.

The library has Australian connec­ tions. Matheson Lang, Will Mahoney and Clifford Mollinson toured here and radio figures Athol Flemming and Glenis Lorrimer show up along with ’50s Rank leading man Michael Craig.

However, certainly 500 randomlychosen French, German or USA movies would have been more rewarding viewing (Italian? Span­ ish?). The ABC’s self-assessment as the defender of our British heritage figures. One can only wonder about the chain of circumstances that led to them putting to air Leslie Hiscott’s atrocious 1931 Night in Montmartre, with the sound of the studio floor creaking as the camera dollies, or Hugh Williams and the Knightsbridge-accented Parisiens actually delivering dialogue as ripe as, “ I want to take you away from all this.”

The best action cycle, the Ripping Yarns of Empire films, were done better in Hollywood: Lives o f a Ben­ gal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935), The Charge o f the Light Brigade (Michael Curtiz, 1936), GungaD in (George Stevens, 1939) and the rest.

Where are the equivalent of the vivid stories of blue-collar life that Cagney and Loretta Young notched up, or the ethical dilemmas of Fredric March?

In Stevenson’s 1938 Ow dBob, Will Fyffe is only tempted to daugh­ ter Margaret Lockwood’s wedding by free liquor. Tom Walls deals with foreign royalty and rivals alike by kicking them in the pants, after telling them to hop it. He skirtchases women 30 years younger than him, but cuts up when wife Arnaud has her own toy boy. Gordon Harker pushes a fat woman out of a phone booth and gives her the finger in Bri­ tannia o f Billingsgate or is first glimpsed in The Phantom Light (Michael Powell, 1935) spitting out of an open window. Anthony Bushell must be the cinema’s soppiest juve­ nile. We feel like cheering when Matheson Lang flings him off the Channel Ferry. These are presented as the audience involvement figures in their films.

Even in their day, who thought these characters would compete with Edward G. Robinson and Marie Dressier, Raimu and Hans Albers?

Of course, even a sample of this size can be misleading. The contem­

porary British Instructional Pictures register as having a different (more austere) house style. The Yard from which John Longden operates in Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) is clearly the one found in Thomas Bentley’s 1933 Scotland Yard Mys­ tery.

Other libraries hold Asquith’s sen­ sitive 1932 Dance Pretty Lady, or Arthur W oods’ gritty 1938 They Drive By Night to suggest diferent preoccupations in British film. Sev­ eral titles that might have been expected to appear are absent, pre­ sumably because the originals have gone missing.

N o matter what reservations we may have about the first cycle of British talkies, things get worse when we hit the war years and after. The British unions turn away the interna­ tional element which brought waste and abuses to many productions but also a lifting of craft standards. Cos­ mopolitan designers like Andrew Andriev, Erno Metzner, Vincent Korda, Alex Vetchinski and Alfred Junge had created a look even to much parochial British film, which was lost in the gloomy realistic clut­ ter of the ’40s. John Bryan on the Lean-Dickens films or contributing elegant studio Spanish to Arthur Crabtree’s awful 1946 Caravan alone continues, outclassing even the sur­ vivors of the original tradition.

Compare similar scenes from the decades, the race meets in The Sport o f Kings (Victor Saville, 1931) or Wild Boy (Albert de Courville, 1934) are so much more adventurouslystaged and involving than the ones in Crabtree’s 1947 The Calendar (one of the ex-cameraman’s better efforts), or Ian Dalrymple and Peter Proud’s 1948 Esther Waters.

Of course, because there was no body of established, published opin­ ion to repeat, once again virtually no critical activity has followed the broadcasts here. M ost local writers ignored the films. The television movie critic of The Sydney Morning Herald, in his familiar style, made up his own comic synopses for them.

The academics have yet to be heard from.

N o one seems to be nettle-grasp­ ing on how bad many are: Leslie Arliss’ turgid Vanity Fair rip-off, The Man in Grey (1943) or David M cDonald’s 1947 studio-regional The Brothers.

There were more non-starter leading men. Eric Portman or Cecil

Parker got by as character actors, but top of the bill? English films did throw up players of the strength of Laughton and Robert Donat again Stewart Granger, Alec Guinness, Jam es Mason, and the rest - but their triumphs would be in Hollywood productions. Ann Todd gives it a try in Robert Compton Bennet’s muchcensored 1947 Daybreak, coming on sweat-soaked, but who really thought matronly Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc were sex symbols?

These ’40s English films set about improving our character with feeble moralities like David M cDonald’s 1948 Good Time Girl. The Boult­ ings’ 1948 Fame is the Spur was taken as serious political comment.

The message content of such films include others like Compton Bennet’s The Years Between (1947) or the Boultings’ The Guinea Pig (aka The Outsider, 1949) had British crit­ ics proclaim the intellectual and artistic superiority of the product, at what was to prove a low ebb.

Sorting through this collection, one can, however, find a small num­ ber of films from the ’40s which do document changing values in an interesting way. Thorold Dickinson was the pillar of the specialist film movement in Britain and his early films, like the 1939 The Arsenal Sta­ dium Mystery with Leslie Banks, were often taken more seriously than they merited. \9 5 T sM e n o f Two Worlds (aka Kinsenga, Man o f Africa), however, sends African Albert Hall composer Robert Adams back to Tanganyika where Eric Portman, with solar topi and fly whisk, plans to clear the jungle to get rid of Tsetse fly and comes into conflict with authoress Catharine Nesbitt, who is on about the black soul.

Orlando Martins as a villainous witch-doctor registers. Stiff and stu­ dio-filmed, outside of some impressive bridge-building scenes, this one does query precepts for­ merly accepted and gets by as drama.

Technicolor, rare in the collection, is a plus.

Mr. Perrin and Mr. Trail, directed

by Lawrence Huntingdon in 1948, foreshadows The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith, 1951) with fussy schoolmaster Marius Goring, in character make-up, over-shadowed by war hero David Farrar, who plans to cure a boy’s yellow streak by putting him in the rugger team. The school where Edward Chapman explains, “Everyone here is a fail­

ure” , and the depiction of Farrar as flawed but aware, are unexpected, with Finlay Currie, giving a fatuous speech at prize day ignoring the drama we’ve watched, a surprise conclusion. Its atmospheric, deepfocus filming is also better than we would expect here.

Most unpredictable of all is Elvey’s 1943 The Lam p Still Bum s with the dread Rozamund Johns so impressed with war-time nurses that she aban­ dons her architecture job and signs on. She finds herself subject to archaic disciplines designed for 17-year-olds (‘Y ou ’re not allowed to address med­ ical staff direct and with your cuffs on”). Sympathy at first goes to her, but swings to matron Catharine N es­ bitt, aware that the pressures of the blitz will change her profession per­ manently but also conscious of the strengths of the disciplines she prac­ tises. This is something which Elvey, possibly alone, could grasp and he dramatizes it with skill uncharacteris­ tic of what was being done around him. They even come at Johns giving up magnate Stewart Granger for her brilliant career. The stark, rectangu­ lar, black-and-white world of Queen Eleanor’s hospital is recognizable from Elvey’s ’30s films and here more involving than in many of its other manifestations.

A pattern which would persist for another two decades is visible here, a handful of films where subject and talent fuse to produce something more involving than the stuffy for­ mula product done around it. British film would never find the voice that would sustain the half-century cycles of other national cinemas and carry it past the point where it would shrink to made-for-television thinkpieces. The English popular theatrical feature was slowly dying, even in its most widely-observed years.

A piece of this length can only consider a fraction of the material put to air. I’ve deliberately ignored later, better-known titles but there are fig­ ures and films mentioned here or omitted altogether which could stand serious consideration. Whatever their faults (and some of these films may deserve their trip to limbo), con­ fronting them in this quantity is certainly the most substantial and intriguing opportunity for historical film study Australian television has presented us in decades. ©

C I N E M A P A P E R S • J A N U A R Y 1999

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he historical accuracy of Shekhar Kapur’s film, Elizabeth, is a fluid notion, and one that the director himself openly encouraged. Certainly it plays havoc with the ‘established’ fact that Elizabeth I (played magnificently by Cate Blanchett) was a virgin throughout her life, by having her involved in a loving tryst with Sir Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes). It also compresses some of the more important events in Elizabeth’s reign into a seemingly short time-frame.

Not that it’s deliberately flouting known fact; it’s just ambiguous about when these events actually occurred. Elizabeth posits the idea that the Virgin Queen was a construct devised by Elizabeth as a substitute for the Catholic Madonna, an image that the people of England could look up to.

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But missing were some pertinent facts. For example, it wasn’t at all clear that the French Mary of Guise (Fanny Ardant) is, in fact, Mary Queen of Scots’ mother, a fact that makes sense of the former’s presence in Scotland. And other facts, such as the Flenry Vlll’s six wives and his subsequent offspring’s connections, were glossed over. Nevertheless, Elizabeth is still a magnificent film.

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan also has a revisionist tone. Some of the soldiers’ dialogue is too contemporary for WWII vocabulary, and scenes of American soldiers heartlessly gunning down surrendering German soldiers is a different picture to many other war films, where the Americans are the saviours, ultimately right and blameless, and the enemy immoral demons. TH

C I N E MA PAPERS • J A N U A R Y 1999

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