Journal of Lost Months

Girls and Cigarettes #3

Memo from Bresson #2

"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."

Faulkner by Cartier-Bresson

This is a photograph that Cartier-Bresson took of William Faulkner.


I'm not sure if you realise but a distant galaxy actually exploded at the moment that the shutter was depressed and these two men merged into a single searing, blinding point of light and were never heard from again... True story.

Memo from Bresson #1

"Your camera catches not only physical movements that are inapprehensible by pencil, brush or pen, but also certain states of soul recognizable by indices which it alone can reveal."

Instant Novel #4

Fishtank

A photographer I love, Rachael Cassells, did a series some years back called 'Seven Year Lament' that shot using a lot of dim tungsten and sodium vapour. I assume she was shooting on daylight film as the tungsten creates a very beautiful, tobacco stained amber that seems to define the world of her characters.

above images, Rachael Cassells, from 'Seven Year Lament'

You rarely see this quality of light in cinema, and I often use these images as a reference for 'Galore', a feature drama I've been developing with undulations of success over recent years.

But, recently, I caught, after much anticipation, Andrea Arnold's 'Fishtank' which floored me. I loved just about everything about it. But I particularly loved the fact that one of the film's pivotal scenes used exactly this quality of light to reveal the young heroine dancing for her mother's boyfriend. It is pretty fucking sublime if you ask me. Of course, the scene, and the film, goes pear-shaped, but we're just talking about the light, here, ok?

This was Rachael Cassells' quality of light, looking every bit as intense and beautiful as I hoped and imagined. It's made me even more resolute to use this approach in 'Galore'.

Stillness and bliss

We're nearing the end of making 'murundak'. I've blogged about it before. It's a feature documentary that follows a group of singers known as the Black Arm Band who are singing up songs of Aboriginal resistance, and taking these songs and stories out to as many audiences as they can. It's been so complex to tell the many layers of this story - character, history, songs, contemporary context - that it has been hard to do too much else in the last year or so... but, included below, is a small reminder of the moments of stillness and bliss you get along the way.

This rushes outtake was filmed at around this time last year. We had finished shooting some observational material for 'murundak' and wandered our way toward an abandoned rail bridge to get an elevated shot of the area around Nitmiluk. The quiet and stillness began to slowly fill with the dense sound of wings and cries and, as we climbed higher, we saw the sky darkening with the nightly migration of flying foxes from down river. I've looked at this shot numerous times - an anchor point for the kind of awe you should get every now and then when faced with both the natural world and the moving image - while editing and, even now, it creates a sense of intense calm for me.

Excuse the mutterings and discussions behind the camera and focus on the skyline.

Ebbs and flows

Most often immersed at work, I have become quite shit at seeing films at the cinema as much as I want to. I take some classes at the film school every now and then and we show everything on DVD, never on film. I don't know of any cinema clubs or geekfests that are showing anything but digital versions of all the rare finds. The accessibility of beautiful old bits of film on DVD or over the web is a beautiful thing, but I definitely miss the tactility of spooling something up. It is the tactility that an artist like Tacita Dean employs in her projected 16mm. It's a sculptural, aural addition to the film itself to experience, at the edge of consciousness, a small humming machine, clicking and whirring in the corner, or behind a pane of glass, with light that ebbs, or dissipates towards the edges depending on the intensity of the globe...

A few years back, a friend and I - while working at an organisation with a large film archive - collected as many flickers and chinagraph sworls, countdowns and light pulses from the beginnings of 16mm reels, as we could get our hands on. Below are a few of my favourites... (and I note the irony of having these as a low res digital file)

This weekend past, we used this archive as a basis for making some interstitial film sequences for an event called 'Seven Songs' which brought together artists like John Cale, Sinead O'Connor and Meshell Ndegeocello with some of the artists of the Black Arm Band to perform a suite of seven songs each. These seven songs - which in the end were covered from artists as diverse as L7 and Bob Marley - were made up of:

First song
A song to covet
A song to share
A song by Leonard Cohen
Two songs of their own
A song to leave behind

The idea of covering a song doesn't really have an equivalent in cinema. But, for our interstitial films, we brought in scenes - thinking of them as quotes, or covers - to play in between songs. Along with the flickering lights, ebbs and flows, countdowns, we screened scenes from Millenium Mambo, Simple Men, Mirror, Last Life in the Universe, Beau Travail, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, La Haine, Samson and Delilah. It was a small, good thing. Nothing flashy or showy, but kinda like playing your friends a song from your favourite album. They were, it's true, a bit overshadowed by the stadium filling performances of Cale, O'Connor et al.

There have been projects like Gus Van Sant's 'Psycho' I suppose, or maybe Hal Hartley's 'Flirt' ('covering' his own film in three ways) and maybe projects like Asian Dub Foundation's rescoring of 'La Haine' or a live performance of 'The Tracker' soundtrack by Archie Roach; but it does seem like a missed opportunity to not have an understanding that we can 'cover' film in the same way that implies a love of the original work and not plagiarism. To 'cover' something in the film world is seen as stealing, as plagiarism, not as love or tribute or dedication. I wonder how this can be shifted? I wonder what you'd have to do to ensure an audience your 'borrowing' or 'recreating' is not outright theft. Even the disdain heaped on American remakes (witness the grudging nods of consent and approval for 'Let Me In') is a good sign of this ingrained belief that once something is rendered into an image it is forever complete... it can't be remade or remixed or rejigged in new ways for new audiences or new viewing experiences.

Instant Novel #3

This image alone is an instant novel but, to me, it is also the lovers half of Faulkner's 'Wild Palms'. Now if I could only find an image of a fictional raging storm flooding New Orleans...

Instant Novel #2

Instant Novel #1

On Seeing #1

Emile Zola declared, "In my view you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it". But in spending so much time photographing things in one way or another, I spend a lot of time wondering if I have, in fact, lost that ability to really see. Everything has become a minute calculation of space or movement, an echo of a past image or a mental snapshot of an image to come.

Weaponry

"I see a camera as a sort of weapon for good and bad purposes. As filmmakers, we can uncover, expose and effect social change; but the medium can be used as an exploitative device that adds to our problems. Filmmakers don't take enough responsibility for the images they put on the screen."

Jay Rosenblatt

Quiet, Wordless

Girls and Cigarettes #2

Yearning #6

Fellow travellers at Yeah Right, Jono Hill and Tim Mummery have recently finished this beautiful clip for Khancoban.

Yearning is an elusive and difficult human state to capture on film but there is a simple beauty to the way this clip allows a small, fragile story to unfold about the space of yearning between two people. It seems effortless, light, organic and deeply felt, which is about as good as you can get when you know the difficulties in making this damned film stuff work properly.

Later this year, we'll be unveiling a large new collaborative venture with these good people and some other like-minded film folks. More to come on this.

A New Manifesto

A few years back I came across Xiaolu Guo's film 'How is your Fish today?'. I'd read one of her books at that point - '20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth' - which I dug, but I was taken aback by the light, playful and inventive approach in the film, which danced easily between literary, documentary and cinematic forms. Insanely prolific, she has been published in numerous forms since the age of 14 and had written 8 novels prior to directing her first feature film (although she had previously directed documentary film 'Concrete Revolution'). This past week, the Melbourne Film Festival screened her new flick 'She, A Chinese' which, to me, was one of the festival highlights. Lightweight, handmade, sexy and ambitious. As much as it was intimate in character, it was expansive in journey and landscape, following the heroine from a remote village to a life ultimately lived in London. Like her novels and her films it has a literary episodic structure, playing with the separation of titles, reality, dream and fiction, using the interruptions of chapters to make leaps across time and space.

from 'She, A Chinese' (2009) dir: Xiaolu Guo

The language of the film seemed aligned with contemporary creativity in a way that makes the increasingly homogenised approach to narrative in film seem ancient and anachronistic. It was as if it was a result of that same urgency that fuelled Godard to issue his battle cry of the New Wave when The 400 Blows was selected for Cannes in 1959:

"...we attack you for your betrayal, because we have opened your eyes and you continue to keep them closed. Each time we see your films we find them so bad, so far aesthetically and morally from what we had hoped, that we are almost ashamed of our love for the cinema. We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent; in other words, things as they are. Today, victory is ours..."

And, increasingly, this is how it feels. 50 years on and the sparks that might have flown around cinema in the past have cemented into a dull monolith of entertainment. Cinema, in it's inventiveness, it's language and it's storytelling is falling behind the energy fuelling most every other expressive form as a result of the loosening of rules sparked by social creativity across the web, and a constant oneupmanship in playfulness, provocation and depth in and between most artforms these days. Yet, in filmmakers like Xiaolu Guo (among many other emerging filmmakers who could care less about that monolith) there is a sense of something more vital finally emerging in cinema. Something that does feel urgent, that does feel mobile, expressive and personal. Like the nostalgic that I am, lingering still in films of the 50s, I look to another piece of writing from '59 to make sense of and express what must happen (simultaneously aware of the dumb irony that I'm using the words of filmmakers from 50 years ago to best describe the cinema to come):

"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary. The young filmmakers will express themselves in the first person and will relate what has happened to them: it may be the story of their first love or their most recent; of their political awakening; the story of a trip, a sickness, their military service, their marriage, their last vacation… and it will be enjoyable because it will be true and new… The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love."

So, energised by 'She, A Chinese', I nerded online to see what Xiaolu Guo has been up to other than churning out novels and films and this is what she’s up to... A Manifesto... You might dig it.

While the full manifesto can be seen here, I've included an extract below. You can also see a newer addition in part two of the manifesto. Nice.

NOTES TOWARDS A
METAPHYSICAL CINEMA MANIFESTO

Sometimes it is difficult to know if you have died. We have woken up to our own death. The death of cinema. Who are the undertakers? We know the finger points to that peddler of dreams. Hollywood tells us we are alive, although we sense our own death. It wedded us to story telling as God, and the God squeezed out our life.

But, there can be life after death.

We call our filmmaking metaphysical cinema. This expresses our rejection of classical story telling that merely serves the dream machine function. ‘Story’ in this sense is a dangerous force, since the audience becomes a passive consumer of the
cinema, which shrinks and reduces its potentiality. It ends up as any other industry product. The so-called narrative keeps being interrupted by the voice of propaganda, the voice of the pseudo objective mass media, and by the alienated individual status of
being.

Narrative is important to us, but its function is negative. Metaphysical cinema wants to reveal a world beyond narrative. Our method is this —instead of looking at the object in the scene, we look to the shadow it casts. The shadow is the more basic reality: the emotional vision is written on those shadows.

Time and space in fragments, point of view: call this the fabric that makes up narrative reality. Metaphysical cinema is about the transformation of narrative reality. It uses narrative as a tool, not as an end. The psychological attitude that is revealed in
classical narrative is that story is destiny. That story-telling is everything, that we as humans are defined by our stories, and our identity is given by story. This is close to the enticing but fatal idea that identity is given by history. We - the Metaphysical Syndicate - say no to this kind of empire of the story. We say no to storyboarding where a voice is no longer a subjective voice; where a voice ends up as a non-reflective, unexamined manipulation of a God’s Eye view.

You might ask—has this not been done before? Of course, it has been done partially, and in various ways. In the 50s and 60s, European cinema explored this visual potentiality, but it stopped in the 80s when the industrialized cinema of Hollywood
came to dominate the global business.

So what do we support? We – the syndicate -- support a mosaic, reflective, plural-voice narrative. This is born from a post-industry mode of production, from a world of broken fragments of memory and recounting. Therefore, amongst the dust of the production power of mainstream cinema industry, our innovation is a cinema which:


1. is guerilla in style, not hiding our humble financial status. We refuse the producer-managerial production structure and studio professionalism. We embrace amateur cinema and the author.

2. takes in and uses all kinds of materials – documentary and TV footage, fictional conventions, text, home video, photos, tape recording, archives. We use all those possibilities in weaving our new narratives.

3. constructs its own comrade-based independent distribution network – through internet, film festivals, educational circuits, street events, bars, cafes, any venue where the Hollywood cinema doesn’t have final control of the product.

4. promotes a cinema of non-perfection. We do not want a mediocre perfection or technical perfection. We prefer a provocative and fresh cinema with ‘mistakes’. The mistake is unavoidable, so we incorporate it with cautiousness and a spirit of self-criticism.

Finally, in contrast to the mode of operation of Hollywood – in which the viewer enters and is swallowed by the dream -- our cinema is the awakening of a lucid dream. A controlled abandon, a sober pandemonium, our vision is that of a crazed honesty falling headfirst into reality. The syndicate costs nothing except for the energy of those who chose to make the journey.


Written by Xiaolu GUO, Steve BARKER and Metaphysical Cinema Syndicate - 2010
This manifesto was written during the making of PANDEMONIA in London, Angkor Wat, Tasmanian and Tian Mu Mountain

Old Fitzroy #2

A while back, I mentioned a clip we had been shooting with singer Dan Sultan in and around the streets of Fitzroy. It was one of those rare pleasures where everything seems to unfold just as you hoped it to and you don't want to change a frame.

We were helped out by lots of friends, locals and folks we've crossed paths with throughout the years while haunting these parts. Humble thanks.

Here it is... Hope you dig it.

Cheeky promo: if you like Dan's song, he and his band tour like madmen - they're in London right now but back on these shores soon - and you can find our more at www.dansultan.com

Cheeky self-promo: Dan Sultan is also one of the subjects of our soon to be released doco murundak featuring the Black Arm Band which you can follow via facebook here or find out more about here.

Girls and Cigarettes #1

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.

The Writer's Job #2

“The Innuit peoples’ word for storyteller is ‘Isumatulq’ – the person who creates the atmosphere through which wisdom reveals itself”

Barry Lopez

The Writer's Job #1

“The writer’s job is not to be brilliant, or to be the person who always knows, but it’s to be the one who recognizes the patterns that remind us of our obligations and dreams”.

Barry Lopez

30x30

Part of the purpose of small, weightless projects like the films and videos in the Buoy Archives is coming up with excuses to keep filming something, anything, during the months and years of battling with scripts and funding bodies and distributors and apathy and wages and rent and the allure of bars. Sometimes, it's a flare of energy, or a challenge to inactivity, or a camera appearing at hand, or boredom at dawn, and sometimes it's giving yourself an excuse to hang around while other people just do their thing. Sometimes, also, it's an emotional or formal challenge to yourself. In the case of 30x30, it was thirty 30-second shots taken while compañero Glendyn Ivin made his music video/film 'Paradise' for Magic Dirt's noise project Roky's Room.

Paradise, a pretty damned fine piece of noise vs beauty can be viewed, in part, here. The rest, which is mostly made up of close ups of centrefolds on fading magazine pages is a little bit too genitally raw for vimeo but word has it that Glendyn is going to do a DVD release at some point.

Okay, so filming a friend filming their own film might not be earth shattering, but, it's not the first time it's been done and, for a moment, we can all just pretend I'm Chris Marker and Glendyn is a music-video-Tarkovsky and that people love observing the drama of stillness and shadows and silence and that all is right and good with the world.

30x30 from Daybreak Films on Vimeo.

Bury Me Standing

A friend introduced me to Isabel Fonseca's book 'Bury Me Standing', a book that plays out like a lyrical documentary in your mind. Fonseca, compelled by Roma culture in Eastern Europe, uses long periods of time living and writing with Roma families as a jumping off point to explore 'gypsy' culture, it's romanticism, scholarship and the day to day realities living within a marginal culture that is widely misunderstood and largely scorned. From the epigram that gives its weight to the title - "bury me standing, I've been on my knees all my life" - to the descriptive evasions of the usually exoticised nomadic lifestyle, Fonseca's book has played across my mind for a long time since reading. Maybe that is why I love Joakim Eskildsen's photographs of Roma culture from Finland to India, Russia, France and Hungary and everywhere in between.

When I'm writing I use photos a lot, both as the starting point and an anchor. These photos could, at any time, be the most powerful of both. It's as if any single photo is the jumping off point for an epic drama. Viewed as a whole - what is below is only a small selection of what you can find in Eskildsen's book or on his site - they are a sprawling, intertwining tale told across families, generations and continents.