Oceanic Confessions

Confession: back in the day, I used to plaster up photocopies of shipwrecks and my own mediocre oceanic poetry on the city walls at night. I think, for a moment, the empire literally shuddered as I smashed the state through my images and words of maritime disaster. Heaps punk. Or not, depending on how punk you think oceans and shipwrecks are... but, damn, for a period that was what it was all about for me. People dragging themselves from the ocean. Survivors. Immensity. Around this time June of '44 were releasing oceanic themed albums, the Shipping News formed from June of '44 and released two epic seafaring records, and Dirty Three's Ocean Songs and the Boxhead Ensemble soundtrack to Braden King and Laura Moya's Dutch Harbour could be heard burbling away in the loungerooms of inner city Melbourne. Now it's all cowboys or discos with the kids, but since my heart is still verging on the oceanic, and, again, in the spirit of excess, I thought I'd leave out one of my old posters...

Faces

"Show us their faces. Tell us what they said"

Don DeLillo, 'The Names'

A couple of weekends past, as part of the Melbourne Festival, we watched Dean & Britta perform '13 Most Beautiful - Songs for Andy Warhols Screen Tests'. You might have already seen it. 13 of Andy Warhol's screen tests with, for the most part, songs composed to accompany them. At around 3 to 4 minutes in length, each screen test was given a musical shape. What was really incredible however, was just how intense a viewing experience it was. It was moving and immersive and verging on the transcendent. On the way home, I kept thinking about how the opportunity to gaze into a face for that length of time is reserved only for lovers and for the cinema. Someone told me many years ago - and I've never been able to remember who it was or find the source of their quote - that David Cronenberg said that his perfect film would be 90 minutes just following a person's face in close up. I don't know if that's true but I've never liked Cronenberg's films and I wanted to like them a whole lot more after hearing that. Other filmmakers who I do love seem to make precisely that kind of film. I'm thinking of the Dardennes Brothers 'Rosetta' or Hou Hsiao Hsien's 'Millenium Mambo' or Reygadas 'Battle in Heaven' or Zoncka's 'Little Thief' or Bresson's 'Mouchette'. The opportunity to linger on a face as it moves from emotion to emotion or from place to place is that rare privilege. If anything, I think my desire for this kind of film makes it difficult for me when it comes to writing. I seem almost happier to see a character in stasis than to propel them somewhere. I'm curious what will be revealed on the face in those moments of stillness. Just don't tell my script editor.



You can watch the trailer also at the pretty damned nice distributor site for Plexifilm and buy the DVD there. I am curious how the DVD translates. There was something very balanced and right about the projected faces flickering away high on the theatre wall and the haphazard snaking of amp leads and microphone cords on the stage below as the band performed.

We also watched this film/performance only a week before the opening of Dirtsong, which was a vast performance by the Black Arm Band with a background projection of a feature-ish film (80 mins or so of extracted goodness) assembled from fragments that T and I shot and edited for the performance. More on Dirtsong in time, but there was no doubt that seeing '13 Most Beautiful' allowed us, in the midst of a month of daily 18hr edit sessions to settle back, be inspired by this immersive kind of film portraiture and rely on simplicity and clarity and stillness.

Mix Tape '99

I saw that MYC are reforming to do a gig at the Arts House in Melbourne this week... reminded me of the old zine mix tapes. Here is another one...

Meandering

On location while shooting 'Murundak - Songs of Freedom'

True to the river source of the word "meander", we've spent the last two months meandering, wandering, looping back and forth on our selves, drying up and flooding again, as we finish off two projects - one new - 'Dirtsong' for the Melbourne International Arts Festival - and another old - 'Murundak - Songs of Freedom'. We travelled back and forth across the deep north, to some beautiful communities and to some places beyond description.

Below are a few select images from the last month's shooting for Murundak.

(L)Steven Pigram, (C) Fitzroy Crossing, (R) Ursula Yovich

(L) Emma Donovan, (C) Mark Atkins, (R) Dan Sultan

And some from Dirtsong:


Our little crew, crammed most of the time in the back of a 4WD, ended up becoming the one beast, wordless and working like maniacs, responding easily to silent gestures, and rarely faulting. When a small crew like that is working that seamlessly, it must be the same feeling you would get from a football team* that knows where every person on the field is by feel and drills and familiarity.

On, or at least, just beside the Road

At one point, we were in north eastern Kakadu, filming by a waterhole. Our sound recordist**, Chris O'Young (also a composer and the writer of Fatherland) stopped us all to record an atmos.

While we stood there in silence, fifteen or so of us including our subjects, the place itself opened up. This is probably one of my favourite things to do. As you sit behind the camera, things seem to close down into smaller and more precise lines of vision, your eyes trying to pick out details and it is almost as if your breath and vision starts to constrict. Then, suddenly, you are asked to stop and record an atmos. Nothing special, just a silent hum of the surroundings. And, as you stand there, over the minute or two required, your eyes open up again and you begin to feel again the depth of wherever it is that you're standing.

As we walked away from recording this atmos one of our subjects said that, for a moment, it was like gulpa ngarwal, a Yorta Yorta word, she explained, for a timeless concept meaning deep listening. That is, a listening that is not your ears, but your eyes and skin and presence in the place. It is a listening that takes time and awareness. For a few moments in each shoot day, the dumb, clumsy fumbling of the film crew, usually tangled in leads, het up with deadlines and schedules and madness, gets a moment to glimpse this deep listening. More please.

---
* The Daybreak Films football team colours:

** Sound Recordist Chris O'Young on the Kimberley coastline north of Broome...

Junk

i am a cinema junkie... my mind is a swirl of unmade films and I can't sleep...

Goddamn

Goddamn, this is awesome.

LeRoy Stevens has compiled an album of some of the best screams, howls and screeches from songs of recent decades.

Favourite Recorded Scream

This idea-as-album could only be pipped at the post by a compilation of handclaps (of the rock and roll type, not the evangelical type).

Hustling

What is filmmaking for the most part if not hustling? There is always a bit of lying, cheating, manipulating and thieving in trying to get the purest, the best, the most impactful, the most compelling images, whether documentary or fiction. In recent years, we've all cottoned on to this fact and so we don't trust the camera in the way that people might once have done so.

I am a huge fan of street photography from mid last century. People like Walker Evans and Helen Levitt (deep thanks to Ross Gibson for putting me onto Ms Levitt)and many, many later photographers who took their work as inspiration were engaged in a project that was equal parts visual poetry and social incision. People trusted them. But, not any longer.

I saw Helen Levitt's film In The Street which she made with the impossibly brilliant James Agee some years ago while working at ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image). For a few brief years, before they sent the toecutters in, a group of us were able to curate and write and programme for films and the moving image galleries in a way that really felt like something. A few brave souls continue to do so still. During those years I saw films (on film! flickering away on a projector in the back of the collections library) and videos by people like Peter Hutton, Matthias Mueller and Christoph Girardet, Peter Tscherkassky, Jay Rosenblatt, Joris Ivens, Sadie Benning (and the sublime O Panama by pops James Benning and Burt Barr) which blew my mind wide open. Films like Sokurov's Spiritual Voices, Gustav Deutsch's Film Ist and Jem Cohen's Buried in Light allowed me to forget my crazy love of narrative and surrender myself to all the other wonders and horrors that film makes possible.

Yet, despite how much I loved the poetic distillations of Sokurov or Deutsch or Cohen, or the crazed kinaesthetics of Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky or the purism of Peter Hutton, I always found myself drawn to the simple elegance of street cinema. Whether the latter day works of Jem Cohen and Adam Cohen or those early inspirational works by Levitt & Agee, Robert Frank et al, there was something so moving about the act of glimpsing the everyday through the camera that was both deeply moving and deeply unique to the form. No other art captures what a glance might mean cast across to the other side of the street. Or the flick of a wrist. An expectant gaze. The lilt of a walk. The simple beauty of the kind of work that someone like Helen Levitt created in turning from her stills camera to the moving image is something that it is regrettable to have lost even as I (kinda) celebrate people's increasing suspicion of their images being stolen away from them on the street.

Again, I've been thinking of this because of this crazy camera we now have in our pockets. Shooting HD on the Canon 5D feels like a renewal of poetic street photography and that strange mix of intimate images in public places seems like it might be possible again. It is a completely different visual language made possible through the lightness and immediacy of movement that you get with these cameras. I spent a long time wrestling with a bolex and shooting stuff while out and about, and the load-wind-expose-and-shoot is a brilliant discipline but is also a discipline that can never be truly intuitive or intimate. It has, inherent in it, distance and observation. The 5D on the other hand, can be truly intuitive and intimate while still using the complexities of the lens in it's relationship to the world 'out there'. Sure, it's not film but it takes a lot for a film snob to have to admit that it is getting impossible to stick to the argument about the mysteries of chemistry and the elusive qualities of light turned to celluloid. I just hope that the street photographers out there embrace these new cameras rather than all the ad' houses who seem to be at the forefront of posting their results online.

Ms Helen Levitt...

Part 1.

Part 2.

Overt filming

T and I are in the final stages of filming a new music documentary with only another month of shooting left after three years on and off toting around our dusty cameras. This past week we disappeared to Yolgnu country up in Arnhem Land to film with one of the artists we've been following who forms part of the Black Arm Band, a gathering of Indigenous protest singers. This time a year ago, we were in London being pulled up by heavily armed anti-terrorism task forces for 'overt filming' while following the Black Arm Band to Albert Hall. This time in a month we'll be filming a concert in Nitmiluk near Katherine Gorge for the anniversary of an important native title handover. Life is sweet and strange and hectic when 'overt filming' is your big dumb love.

Staring into Hell

"Never have I looked so directly into hell".

Werner Herzog (buy the T-shirt here!) is said to have remarked this after watching the eyeball searing Tierische Liebe (Animal Love) by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl.

A couple of weekends ago the US blogs were circulating details of a retrospective screening of Seidl's work at the Anthology Film Archives, and I wish anyone who caught a 'celebration' of his films the best of luck. I detest his films (with the kind of deep revulsion you feel after your brother shows you some evil coprophiliac webvideo that is burnt into your memory forever) but, at the same time, I love them for the fact that I can't escape their power or influence. Just before making my film Skin, I watched several of his docos back to back over one weekend as 'inspiration'. I came away needing a good scrub but also truly inspired by the visual rigor and discipline and unnatural beauty of his films. These elements of his filmmaking can be seen and appreciated once your eyeballs have been cleansed of the profound human misery displayed on screen, or provided you have long ago been desensitised in much the same way as his numb, dehumanised subjects.

His strange formal approach to mediating between fiction and reality creates a world of it's own that is austere and confronting in the way that it refuses to look away from the most brutal aspects of what it is to be human. In his fiction films (Dog Days in particular has never stopped haunting me and I remember sequences from this film better than most of my 'favourite' films) people are so casually brutal and their lives so devoid of warmth or tenderness that you would think his worlds were almost completely artificial nihilist fantasies. Except, that is, when you watch his documentary films and realise that they are almost indistinguishable from the 'fiction' films in which the same kinds of characters haunt and inhabit the screen.

His work is fascinating, if for no other reason, than process. Is it just the confessional nature of Austrian society that allows people to permit a filmmaker to capture their unnatural love for their pets, or their brutality toward themselves or their families, or their petty family squabbles and gripes, or their senselessly desire-free sexual encounters, orgies or otherwise? Or is his process truly exploitative? Can you look at his films purely for the purposes of formal beauty and extraordinarily precise filmmaking? Or is his project to make you complicit with or at least equal to the ugly almost inhuman humanity of his subjects? Is it exploitation or poetry or truth or just amazing sequences of emotionally apocalyptic images? I don't know. He confuses and baffles and terrifies and inspires me. So, I'm cursed now to watch every film he makes and, most likely, never to visit Austria again.

"Every film has its own laws, and none of them come easily to me. But extreme conditions rarely deter me. I believe that intense and extreme scenes and images can be created only under intense and extreme conditions."

Ulrich Seidl

Saturation

Touchstones

While writing, I always try to use musical touchstones, played in the background, that any words on the page have to try and measure up to. The litmus test being emotion.

But (further to my previous link to David Alan Harvey) when I falter or pause or procrastinate, these are some of the photographic touchstones I rely on.

Is what's on the page as steely as Boogie?

Is it as warm as Rachael Cassells?

Is it as unflinching as Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin?

Is it as evocative as Alex Webb?

Is it as expansive as Nuri Bilge Ceylan?

Does it have as much fun and swagger as Tod Seelie?

Yep, Rhys. Good luck with that.

Respect

I've used his photos countless times as references, I've loved his endless blogging, I pore over his books. And now he has an amazing online curated journal. Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey is one of the great documentary photographers and his lyrical treatment of light, energy, languour and desire within any place at any time is something to be in awe of...

Check it:
Burn Magazine

Vagrancy

What is saved in cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all of mankind. It is not art of the princes or of the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from single lives. Its essential subject - in our century of disappearances - is the soul, to which it offers a global refuge.

John Berger, "Everytime We Say Goodbye", Sight and Sound, June 1991, vol 1, issue 2, p. 17

Carried Away #1

True. I get really carried away with things. Particularly when I should be working on pressing projects or films or jobs to keep my meager little bank balance above the dotted line. One of my main distractions in the past has certainly been The Buoy Archives (the films, that is; which I stash away for no one to see except in those rare instances that they are not too shameful or self indulgent or revealing or confessional to tote around... as exemplified in earlier posts on this blog). Another more recent one is this blog. Another has been brief forays into film essays.

One of the greatest examples in my mind of getting completely carried away was an essay I wrote for Senses of Cinema many moons back about the brilliant, brief blaze of talent that was Bill Douglas. I am crazy for this guy and his films (recently given a long awaited re-release by BFI after Tartan's VHS distribution of the titles in the 90s). If you haven't had a chance to see his autobiographical series My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home order the DVD immediately. Hell, gimme a call and I'll lend you mine.

And so, in the spirit of getting nude, I expose myself here.

Fiesta

Melbourne Film Festival commences this Friday Night and in the space of one week, Claire Denis and Anna Karina are going to be in town to present their films.

What the hell is a filmgeekboy to do?