A list, of Sorts

The end of the year is always spilling over with dozens of film, music and literary critics listing their top tens/twenties/fifties/hundreds. These kids have time on their hands and a year full of notes and knowledge with which to create their lists. I only wish that I felt that, in any given year, I had seen enough or read enough or listened to enough to feel like I was anywhere near an authoritative position to foist a list on an unsuspecting overfed public who spend a week over the new year getting drowned with righteous compilations of 'can't believe you never copped this slept on work of genius' type lists.

But, lists, in themselves, like blogs, are basically self-serving affirmations of taste and authority. Having said that, I do always scour the lists of the critics I dig and make little reminders to myself of albums to buy, books to read, films to watch - so there is a little bit of froth with the fat. So, in the interests of self-service, and given my already declared preference for Borgesian lists, here is my overdue list of 'tops' for 2011. It's late, I know, but sheesh, I had waves to catch and sand to conceal in my folds. Many of these things are not necessarily 'of' 2011 (I am still catching up on lists from the mid 2000s). Many were made before. But for me the things below began to exist in 2011 when I got them in my fat little hands and they burnt my eyeballs, or broke my heart, or made me weak, or despair, or inflate, or run.

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Hail. One of the few things on this list that was actually made in 2011. I wrote about this film already. Directed by local bru' Amiel Courtin-Wilson, in collaboration with a bunch of folks who are equally responsible for the film's creation, this is one of my favourite film things of the year. It is a beautiful, pristine, messy, reckless film that was also made with a spirit of genuine adventure. It is wildly ambitious, mythic, violent, lovelorn and more interesting than the sum of most other local films that came out. 


La Teta Asustada. XXY. Alamar. Madeinusa. Los Viajes Del Viento. El Vuelco del Cangrejo. La Niña Santa. Watched in 2011. This was my year of trying desperately to catch up on the crazy riches of recent Latin American film. I loved each of the listed films - coming from places as varied as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru - for different reasons, but what they have in common is a love for cinema that doesn't resound with the dull thud of cause/effect storytelling, and which allows for the reveling in detail, in atmosphere, in character and in place, for the sheer love, spectacle, wonder, beauty or terror of it. La Teta Asustada by Claudia Llosa and La Niña Santa by Lucrecia Martel, in particular, still haunt me and make me realise that you can keep loving cinema, even as so many national film cultures seem to be intent on beating the life out of it. It makes me proud to be a film nerd because the riches are still there to be mined for unashamed cinephiles.


The Savage Detectives, a novel by Roberto Bolaño. Read in 2011. In mid 2010 I read 2666. This book by Roberto Bolaño blew my mind a thousand times over. I have since read just about everything else he has written (well, at least, most of his novels and some of the poetry... the guy wrote a hell of a lot of stuff!). It is, for me, thrilling to read something that conceals the secrets of the world in all its brutality, and, in an age of lazy writers and dumb artists who proudly profess to ignore the work of those that has come before, it is a wild ride to be immersed in something written by someone who has an intellect and a lyricism that is beyond anything most writers can ever hope to be, touch or know. The Savage Detectives contains, to my mind, more heart and beauty than his other work. Listless and romantic but still full of madness and violence and countries imploding with political chaos. And lots and lots and lots of talk of poets and poetry. 


Pedro Costa's Fontainhas triology - Ossos, In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth. Watched in 2011. Because it kicks ass, has balls of steel and is bolshy as hell. It doesn't give a fuck about what film should be and is true only to the spirit of the director and his relationship to the place and people he is filming. Amazing, searing. Also, it is pretty hard damned work. And, sometimes, that is a good, honest thing.


Mono. Live at The Forum Theatre. I got to film it... it was amazing. I watched as one young guy dropped his head and wept for minutes and minutes as final chords surged and swelled into a massive roar of feedback. Epic.

Loves of a Blonde by Miloš Forman. Watched in 2011. Made in 1965. Somehow I missed this in my voyages of film nerddom until January of this year. Sexy, funny, bold and brilliant. Wish someone would make a film like this around about now.


Cat Power. Live at the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine. One of the better concerts and weekends of my life. A few months later, we got to show our film 'murundak' and stage a live show at this incredible theatre and I swear it still hummed with the joy and beauty of that night. Cat Power is what a musician should be. Breakable, soulful, brilliant, batshit crazy and beautiful as hell. Like a star. An actual star. Not some paperweight face/talent with nice skin and no ballast.

Encounter - Essays by Milan Kundera. Incredible. In particular, Kundera's essay The Painter's Brutal Gesture - On Francis Bacon was my piece of writing for the year, although it had been published in other forms before. More on this essay in a post to come about humiliation and performance (don't be scared). I can think of very few pieces of writing that have taken me apart from the very first passages. This is an amazing exploration of a painter I love by a writer I love. Neither emerge unscathed by this messy confessional essay that is equal parts brutal and beautiful.

Jersey Shore seasons 1-3. Watched in 2011. Yes. Screw you all. I loved it. I am not much of a reality TV guy, but if I am going to watch people humiliate themselves, I want them to be kids who embody more contradictions than seems possible. Family values co-existing with complete emotional apocalypse. If I have to watch housemates get into fistfights over loyalty and lies, I want to see them then sit down to a Sunday roast and tell each other how much they love and care for the other. I saw more genuine human drama and learned more about the human condition (I. Am. Serious.) in this car-wreck of a show than in ninety percent of the films I saw this year. Plus, they all get paid a mint, so I don't feel so horrible about the wildly exploitative nature of the show. My appreciation for this is not ironic or token, by the way. I really do love it in a life-deprived art guy kinda way.


Wuthering Heights. Andrea Arnold destroys all with her new film. I had only just seen Fish Tank, which is even higher on my list, a few months earlier, so I was floored by this brutal, witheringly harsh and impossibly beautiful period re-telling of the canonical tale in a taut, 4:3 frame. I watched this in a stunning cinema in Valladolid and walked out a different person. Love and class war are both infinitely brutal.


Crazy, Stupid Love. Romantic comedies are the vicar's nuts. Or whatever the expression is. I love them. When they're good. When they suck, they actually steal a little piece of your soul and deposit it inside Katherine Heigl's soiled smalls for her underpaid housekeeper to launder. I loved this film. Sure, I was hungover as hell when I watched it, but it's a) funny, b) charming, c) big-hearted and d) cynical as hell. People seem to have forgotten that for a romantic comedy to work, it has to be cynical and it has to be charming. The leads have to have charisma (note to Australian rom-com directors) and the romance has to flail with futility in the face of the overwhelming impossibility of love. We know the relationships are never gonna last until after the final credits so it was kinda lovely to see the filmmakers pre-empt that.

So, now, confessions. I basically didn't see any of the other films that made people's top tens. I seem to have managed to go 12 months without seeing just about anything new. La Quattro Volte, Tree of Life, Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene? Haven't seem 'em yet. Le Havre, Turin Horse, Certified Copy, Drive, Beginners. Nup. So, take this all with a massive mound of salt. And as for new books, forget it. But I did finally read Anna Karenina this year and it blew my mind. And Levin, man, did he lead me down a merry path of Marxist disillusionment, heartbreak and failed ambition. Thanks for reading. This self service is now complete.

Hail

“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”

Antonin Artaud

This often excerpted text of Artaud's may be slightly undergraduate to throw around but I wanted to lay it on the line as a preface to writing about the feature film Hail directed by admired friend and fellow traveller Amiel Courtin-Wilson. I hope, in what follows, these words of Artaud's find a safe place to settle. It also allows me to lay bare that what I've written below is an awkward declaration of love for an extraordinary film that justifies a rambling response that is, like the film, equal parts emotion, intellect and gut response.

Hail is the first narrative feature film for Amiel Courtin-Wilson who has created a vast body of short works and long form documentaries that haunt the margins of fiction and documentary. His work has always drawn on the impulsive, the visceral and the poetic to create uniquely cinematic spaces that are not quite "narrative" and not quite "non-narrative". There is an undercurrent within his work that demands the audience open their eyes wide, whether it is through experimental works that explore elderly swingers parties, teenage drunkenness, the splintering effects of violence, or the faces of people being choked to the point of unconsciousness; or through longer documentaries that interrogate the world with an intimacy and immediacy that can be equally harsh and delicate. As a filmmaker and as a person, the director's intellect is probing, demanding and confronting. All that you could hope for in this day and age of vapid, dumbed-down 'story' dogma. So, Hail has been anticipated with curiosity and hope by those who know and admire the ways Amiel works and the direction in which he seems to be hurtling.

I saw the film, some months ago now, at a slightly nerve wracking opening night at the Adelaide Film Festival in which producer Michael Cody delivered the screening copy (with an incomplete but still sublime sound mix) half an hour late for the milling audience. A final mixed version will be screened in a week or so at the Sydney Film Festival before it's release.

Despite the modesty and intimacy of the narrative and production, Hail, throughout, feels epic and expansive. It tells the story of Danny, newly released from prison, who returns to life and living with the love of his life, Leanne. They are an aging tough nut couple who, in gesture and speech, reveal lives of hardship, but who relate with tenderness, humour and a deep attraction to one another that is youthful and intoxicating. As soon as you see Leanne leap into Danny's arms on his return home, you know that this love is potent and complex and distinctly unlike the dreary, implausible monotone of so many realist romances set in the criminal world. The film follows their lives in moments that are alternately distilled into single images of lyrical beauty or that ramble along in visually loose, meandering sequences of talk, laughter, pleasure and menace. However, it is when characters from their past start lingering on the edges of their world that we realise how fragile both their love and Danny's grip on reality is. To a certain extent tragedy feels inevitable and predictable - all that precedes sets us up for the fall - yet, the ways in which the film spirals into violence, anguish and, ultimately moments of transcendence, is startling, distinctive and immersive. A decaying soundtrack and image, moments of levity, images of incredibly intense violence, all map out the internal horror of a man who, without love, turns to vengeance with wildness and savagery.


While normally I am fascinated by process in film, the reception of Hail so far has strongly favoured discussion of Amiel's process and I think, in many ways, this emphasis can work counter to an appreciation of the singularity of the film, grounding it, as discussions of process always do, back into the working world of production and creation. While I watched it and later considered how strong my response was, I tried to make an effort to distance myself from what I know of Amiel and of the charismatic lead in the film, ex-con Daniel Jones, so that I could try and see it, really see it, as a film in and of itself. The reason for this is that I wanted to appraise as honestly as I could the ways in which Amiel and his collaborators have tried to construct a filmic language specific to the telling of this story; to try and understand this without a knowledge of all of the ideas and processes behind it; and to see the film only from the audience perspective within the dream-darkness of the cinema. However, this was difficult as I knew from his early work (can we ever see film in a vaccuum?) that it wasn't going to be realism, or lyricism, or something else familiar. It would be gut and intuition that would kick at that realism and lyricism and, in doing so seek to find a way to get closer to the real and the lyrical. And, in fact, that was precisely the case. This film, Hail, is one of the single most exciting films I have seen to emerge from Australia. It is muscular, ambitious, defiantly singular in its voice, and refuses to pay any dues to the incredibly conservative storytelling trends that are gnawing away at filmmaking in this country. Because of this, it will probably have a hellish time with distribution and, because of this, it will probably be a landmark film. But, most importantly, and the thing that is most exciting, Hail uses Amiel's unique approach to filmmaking to create an experience that is harsh, visceral and elemental but strives for a sense of emotional and visual elevation that is rare and easily dismissed in this filmmaking culture. And, it is this ambitious approach that calls to mind Artaud's demands to 'break through language in order to touch life'; to find a place where physicality, emotion and intellect coalesce and collide and reach for something deeper and more essential. The film is an assault on the senses. And like any assault on the senses it leaves your ears ringing and spine tingling. Whether I can successfully distance myself from the process and the filmmaker or not, this is incredibly fucking exciting.


Some years back, when I first saw the Dardennes Brothers' Rosetta - a film I love unreservedly - I wrote at length about the visceral qualities of the film and the ways in which the 'bodies' of the film, literally and figuratively, collided. I started the piece of writing in this way:

"the visceral quality of the film is the result of a specific approach to narrative and to performance that is concerned with an intimate exploration of the body, its physical articulations, and the limits of its endurance."

Hail, is, to put it mildly, as visceral a film as any I've ever seen and, like this earlier film, is fascinated by physical limits - the points at which we snap and break, at which we bleed (and die), and at which we allow ourselves to soften enough to love. The film takes in extremes of physical violence and the most tender of touches, people hurtle and lunge and recoil, and they are delicate and still. The darting eyes of Danny tear strips off the audience as they reveal the violence beneath the surface, we linger on fingernails in the water, hair in the wind, the coldness of breath, teeth bloodied and broken, burning hair, the most loving sexual interplay, drunken staggering. These things would stand alone as startling images, yet intertwined, they reveal all the complexity, violence, fragility and beauty of a life lived in extremes.

Hail is ambitious. For this, I love it. I love that it revels in precise and pure images, that it allows the elements to thrash around the edges of the narrative, that it strives for something reckless and messy as a way to distill something deeply emotional. I love that it is, at moments, on the verge of falling apart and that it hurtles between sequences with a lightness of touch that is difficult to trace or define (enormous kudos to the images of Germain McMicking and the editing of Peter Sciberras for all of this). I love that it was made here, in our little community, that it punches far above it's weight and that it feels like a a major distillation of talent and form for a handful of people who've fought for a long time to make films in their own way. And, finally, I love the fact that, as dark as the film is, as violent as it is, it seems at all times to be in love with its characters, in love with the possibilities of its form and that, it seems, the film had to use a new language, both familiar and strange, as the only way to express this love.

Finally, at the end of this rapturous, loved up reception on my part (after which I'll probably wake with a sore head, a sheepish grin and a walk of shame), a return to Artaud:

I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.

Artaud, letter to J.P., Sep. 28, 1932

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If you are interested in the process and the approach behind this film, below is an interview with Amiel from the eve of his premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in which he discusses a number of elements of the film.

And, here are some stills from behind the scenes. Epic.

Hail

Damned fine filmmaker, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, who comes from around these traps, is up and running with his film 'Hail'. In a small filmmaking community, it seems there is never enough time to support each other's flicks but I am rapt that this film - which has creatively emerged out of his short film 'Cicada' which screened in Cannes last year - is going to get made and I wish I had cash to throw at it to make it easier for them. Amiel has mostly been working in documentary in recent years but there is little doubt he is going to direct something visceral, vital and pretty incredible. Kill it, sir.

image: Amiel Courtin-Wilson

If you're inclined to tread the boards, they are doing an open casting call - I think it's a case of non professionals and non actors preferred - and there is information and regular progress posts here.