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?

On smoking

A year or so ago, I was fortunate to do a week long workshop on my script 'Galore' with a screenwriting idol of mine: Mogens Rukov, the scandalous old Danish bastard who wrote the extraordinary 'Festen' , 'Reconstruction' and 'Arven'. Despite being outrageously brilliant and a fervent chain smoker, he is also skilled at making people cry by telling them on what page he threw their script on the floor in boredom and frustration. He was, in that week, full of wisdom and cynicism and a tobacco stained romanticism that was impossible to resist.

I thought of him recently as I was watching some thin TV-pop piece on why smoking should be banned outright in film, because so much of what he says is expressed in an analogy using either cigarettes or women as their central image. For Rukov, a cigarette is inherently cinematic. It is gestural, it is visual, and it, like the act of watching, is a pause in the 'natural stories' that we are all a part of and which, expressed in cinema, allow us to insert ourselves into the narrative. I cannot imagine the cinema without smoking, he said. Smoking, used as the visible breath of cinema throughout it's life up until the 90s, has all but disappeared from the screens of English speaking cinema. Thankfully, it's alive and well everywhere else. This, from one of my favourite films of recent years - La Leyenda del Tiempo, Isaki Lacuesta's beautiful intertwined narrative inspired by the life of El Camaron de la Isla - is the beginning of a much longer sequence that is one of the great smoking scenes (underage, too, to rub salt into the wounds of the cinematic correctional facilities):



To return to Rukov, below I have nabbed an edited transcript of a talk he gave during the week long workshop which expresses a lot of his ideas in intriguing, whimsical and demystifyingly dismissive ways. His idea of going through your dialogue and ensuring that at least a third of it ends in a question mark sounds almost glib and ridiculous but has become one of my most useful tools in writing. It certainly forces a greater sense of naturalism in dialogue and, for me, usually forces me into surprising ways to resolve verbal encounters through interrogation and revelation. Respect, Mogens.

Script writing shouldn't be heavy work. It used to be a fashion amongst intellectuals to say, "I've been writing a script for one year." At that time it impressed me very much. I must tell you if I hear it today, I would say to people, "Throw it in the dust bin. If you haven't written the script within a year it's because you are just bad. Three months should be enough."

You just have to have a foundation of the story. The story should be impossible to overlook. It shouldn't be complicated in any way. Everything should be simple. For example, Festen - it's a very poor story in a way, you know. It's about somebody arriving for a celebration and leaving the next morning. You just put them into this house where they're going to stay and celebrate. Why do you give them a room? Because they've got to stay overnight. It's not a piece of genius here. It's just taking it from nature. And what are they doing then? They're getting dressed, someone is fucking, they are gathering, saying hello and thank you, and then they're going to eat something. And then, during this fantastic movie that had such an impact in the world, they're talking about the soup! Because that is what people do. That is what I call the natural story. That is one of the elements you need when you make a simple outline for your story, to know which kind of natural stories you want to incorporate.

Natural stories
To make clear what a natural story is, for example I saw many people making a natural story over there - they went into the toilet. When you realise people are going into the toilet, you almost realise what they are doing in there. How do you know that? Because your brain is full of natural stories. In cinema, we activate people's knowledge about natural stories. For example, you and I are in the same toilet block and I go to the toilet. Do I lock the door, or do I leave it open? Maybe I leave it open a little bit, it will tell something about our relationship. Say you and I have met each other within the last three or four weeks, therefore I want to continue talking. If it was my wife out there, no, I've done enough talking to her. But to you, I'd like to continue. But I would not offend you by leaving the door completely open, so I'll leave it open a little bit, and I'll shout to you. Then I'll sit down and take something to read; maybe I will take a manual of script writing and everyone in the audience will say, "oh what a bore", or I will take a porn mag or I will take the Bible. Look how well I can describe myself by choosing one of these things. Originality is one of the worst things you can do, being original is so boring! Be simple. Take a little cliche and make a little twist. For example, take the Bible, open it and in it there is a porn magazine. That's a little bit funny isn't it?

I realise that many people write scenes because they think that something new or interesting should happen. [But] I want to have some order in my world. I want to have something I can identify with. The story is everything. I think we succeeded a bit in Danish film, and it started when we said story is everything. Not intention, I don't give a shit about intention. Intention is trying to force a story into a line, but the story refuses to be forced.

I don't believe in premises either. If people say, "Can you make a story about love conquering everything?" I can immediately say no. But I can probably make a story about an idiot coming to Sydney from Copenhagen and getting jetlag. I could make that because this is the kind of story that every dramatic story is like. In fact there's only one story we really can tell, and it's a story about a stranger coming to town.

A stranger comes to town
When I heard this from a British producer: The only story in the world is 'a stranger comes to town', I thought, that sounds interesting, but is it true? When I re-thought the whole dramatic production of the Western world, I realised it wasn't so stupid - a stranger coming to town. If I think about Hamlet, he's coming from Wittenberg and he wants to go back to Wittenberg, and he doesn't know what has happened at the castle in years. Medea, she's from another town. And even if you have a character who is in his or her town, it can be useful to treat this character as a stranger in their town. Reading your scripts, I realised that you have done like I have done; we have a father, mother, two sisters, and they know each other, so why should they talk together? There's nothing to say to each other! It's much more interesting to have a son coming home from abroad after two years of absence, and he can say, "Did you love my real father, or do you love my uncle?" We make this mistake where people are familiar with each other.

Treatments
A director came to me with 30 pages of treatment. Do you ever write treatments? They are the most boring thing to write and to read. I think that you take a lot of fantasy out of your film writing a treatment. I am sure that the treatment is mostly intended for producers and institutions. I never write treatments. I refuse, because when you have written the treatment, you have written the scene, but you haven't written the scene. I find the step outline much more useful.

So he came to me with 30 pages of treatment, and I said to him, "This is the most boring story I have read in ten years." And he answered, "Yes I agree, it is really boring." But there is one character who is really interesting; it is a woman who is too much. She's a little bit nuts, she's interesting, so let's make eight to 11 sequences about a women who is too much. And we sat down and said, what could the main headlines of these sequences be? And what I said about scenes I will now say about sequences. You've got to make some order in this world, in your film. It's not an hour-and-a-half story that's developing; no, there's bits and pieces of the world and you put them together. All films are made in this way, bits and pieces put together. For example, a Hitchcock film - most of his films have sequences of 11-12 minutes. It's easier to think in this way instead of a two-hour movie because you just have to write an 11-minute movie, let's say eight 11-minute movies, and you can begin to think that a movie has waves. So instead of thinking of a whole movie, you can say we have this and this mood and we can introduce this and this characters, each in a wave. I remember when I was sitting with Visconti's screenwriter - I met her when she was 82, and she was fresh and fantastic - she said every Visconti movie is built in seven sequences. I think it's a very nice thing for you to think that a sequence is a unity, a scene is a unity and a film is composed by these kind of sequences.

Dialogue
If people know each other, if they're not strangers, essentially they don't have a lot to talk about. We know it from our long marriages - after 24 years we didn't have to speak together because she knew everything I knew and I knew everything she knew. So let people talk about something they don't know. You're not going to decide what they're going to talk about because they're talking from their situation and location. I read boring scripts where I can feel that scriptwriters want them to talk about particular things. I don't care what the scriptwriters want, I care about seeing a film where the characters up there want to talk about this. They should want to know something, because dialogue is not conversation, that's a great misunderstanding. Dialogue is interview. I interview you about what you feel, what you have experienced, and in a good scene you see one character is the interviewer and one the interviewee. So if you see a piece of script and there're no question marks at the end of the dialogue, it's a bad script. It should be at least one-third question marks.

When you have long dialogue you must change aspect on the topic. For example, we're talking about fishing, or love, but we change the angle or aspect. I talk about my love for you or her love for him, but after three or four sentences you talk about another kind of love, my love for my dog, or dogs' love for each other. And after three or four sentences you again change the aspect. You do it because the whole film is about giving an impression of the whole world. You know that expression, 'you've got to laugh and cry in the same world'? Why? Because living is partly laughing and partly crying, and when you see a film you want to see the whole of life, the whole world. You don't want to see something that is invented by art people; you want to meet your life.

Characters
How do you make a character unique? I don't know and I don't care. There is no characterisation, I believe, just the actions of the character in the story. Everything is this person reacting, and what you are going to do is to challenge the character with the story. You are not being God of the story. You are challenging yourself with the story - what if this and this happens? How are these two characters, a man and a woman, entering a cafe? That is what films are about, it's these simple things, it's the world that is expressing itself.

You know, you and I are sitting in a cafe, but one of the first things that will happen will be that I'll call the waiter and say, "Please, could we have a bottle of red wine?" And depending if we know each other or if I want to seduce you, I would say a cheap one or an expensive one. I don't need to sit down and say, "You are looking beautiful." No, I can say, "Give her the best wine you have. Are you sure this is the best? I want a better one!" And how would I dramatise that you are not interested in me? If I ask you if would like a red wine, and you say, "No, I think I'll have a cup of green tea." If you invite out a woman out and she says she wants a cup of green tea, then you know you're going to have a long walk home.

Original text can be found here.

Mix Tape '01

Astruc's Curse

"they were in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all. each foreseeing a night of drink, perhaps of love. how many youths have come home cold and dead from just such nights and just such plans."

p38 'Blood Meridian' Cormac McCarthy

Only days away from a due draft, still lost in the throes of untangling and retying the threads of the script, the only consolation is to pretend the process is much harder than it actually is. There is no fun, no intensity, and ultimately, no genuine achievement in the act of writing without pretending it is, at least, a little bit, in the realms of life or death... Even though much of the day is, in truth, spent passing long periods of time staring out the window, moving from keyboard to pen to paper scraps and back, making elaborate stocks and pastes, delving the depths of the web for inspiration/distraction, watching favourite old films to see what can be elegantly/secretly stolen ("We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence." - Krszystzof Kieslowski), and reclassifying CDs and book shelves. Still, it is epic and bloodthirsty and worthy of legend.

In reality, outside of the glare of the spotlights, this past week has, in the face of the approaching deadline, been spent working on another project in the Torres Strait of the Northern tip of Australia. It is another project in our long term collaboration with the Black Arm Band, an ensemble of some of Australia's greatest indigenous singer songwriters. This one will involve a vast, illusory, dreamlike backdrop to a new suite of songs sung in language for this year's Melbourne Festival. So, in pursuit of this, T and I took off with one of the new Canon 5D Mark II cameras and a few lenses and spent time finding a place between photography and moving image. This fricking camera is all over the web now, with people blogging and testing and ranting but it is truly something extraordinary. It is certainly as close to the Camera Stylo as I can ever imagine holding in my hands.

With Astruc on my mind and this incredible new tool in my backpack, it is certainly hard to imagine how the process of writing will not be affected by the intimacy and immediacy of what this camera makes possible and, of course, how it will affect all that I hope to make. Which just takes me another step closer to the brink in the final days of drafting.

"... in good spirits, scrubbed and combed, clean shirts all".

On Staring #4

Elevation #1

A couple of years back I was lucky enough to work with artist Lynette Wallworth in editing and creating some of her film installations commissioned for the New Crowned Hope festival.

Apart from the joy of working with Lynette, I had a vicarious, sycophantic joy in being involved in her work as she was one of only a few visual artists to be commissioned for the festival, a celebration of Mozart's 250th anniversary, alongside a handful of mindblowing films: Paz Encina’s 'Paraguayan Hammock', Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 'Syndromes and a Century', Tsai Ming-liang’s 'I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone' and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 'Daratt', Garin Hugroho’s 'Opera Jawa', Teboho Malatsi’s 'Meokgo and the Stickfighter' and Bahman Ghobadi’s 'Half Moon'. The films were all commissioned as so-called operas for the 21st Century. Nice.

Tsai Ming-Liang is one of my favourite filmmakers and his contribution to the festival was a killer. Sure, his films aren't for everyone and they are far from a ripping yarn but there is something pretty sublime about his combination of dark, twisted humour, melancholic yearning and uncontrollable desires.

This sequence from I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is, to my mind, one of the more mysterious and transcendent moments in films I've seen.


Like the sequence of the floating books in Last Life in the Universe...


...or the militant superwoman scene in Suleiman's Divine Intervention...


there is an intense, playful elevating magic in this moment. I've tried to feature animals in a couple of short flicks and that was hellish but, man, how do you wrangle a giant moth?

Lost in space

Hosted on the great, great Euro Screenwriters site is this little gem (click through to get to the goodness):

Could the 5 minute film school be like the Tao Te Ching? Each lesson a point of meditation and distillation of thought, action and inaction? Either way, they should market the hell out of it and sell it for a couple of bucks. They could make a mint.

Also on this site is a great list of interviews with screenwriters, including Jean Claude Carriere, Richard Price, Paul Schrader, Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Sergio Donati.

There is also a page of notes about directing (Truffaut: "Film lovers are sick people") which happens to include one of the best Klaus Kinski rants about Herzog (for me My Best Fiend is one of the great films about madmen/filmmakers):

Now I absolutely despise the murderer Werner Herzog. I tell him to his face that I want to see him perish like the llama he executed. He should be thrown to the crocodiles alive! An anaconda should throttle him slowly! The sting of a deadly spider should paralyze him! His brain should burst from the bite of the most poisonous of all snakes! Panthers shouldn't slit his throat open with their claws, that would be too good for him! No. Big red ants should piss in his eyes, eat his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts! He should get the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy! In vain. The more I wish the most horrible of deaths on him and treat him like the scum of the earth that he is, the less I can get rid of him!

Klaus Kinski - On The Importance Of Maintaining A Good Actor/Director Relationship

Also great for a procrastinating writer is this page of inspiring quotes to keep you at work including this infamous gem from Hemingway:

"The first draft of everything is shit."