Tremors #1

"Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor."

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

The days, they fly...

Over three years, we've been working on this documentary film. As other projects come and go, as life ebbs and flows, working on 'murundak' has been a constant. It has also been, at times, the most blissful, inspiring thing I've ever been involved in and, at times, the most difficult. Now, nearing the pointy end of things, it's all about making the film feel effortless and natural, while the days, they refuse to slow for you. Instead, they hurtle along...

Life is Immense

Image: Joakim Eskildsen

"What's it feel like? Fireworks. Or Blindness. Yeah. It's like that. All of that. But bigger, too. Immense. That's what it is..."

Archives #1

Watching film or video reportage of current affairs these days is a bit of a visual black hole. The same shots, sequences and structures rolled out night after night. Short turnaround documentary fills the hole in terms of allowing viewers to engage more deeply with reportage of events, but you have to wonder when and how the visual component of reportage became so damned lazy and by the numbers.

Currently, we are ploughing through acres of archival material as part of editing the feature doco murundak - songs of freedom. We are not using a lot of archival material but we want and need to find just the right material so that it feels visually intertwined with what is a primarily observational film.

By accident - having nothing to do with the film we are making - I came across this iconic old movietone reel from the 1945 armistice celebrations that erupted on the streets of Sydney (as elsewhere) at the end of WW2. As I watched it, I couldn't help but wish for the kind of craft and lyricism and storytelling in this inspired little sequence. Without Jack Davey's hammy newsreel voice over, the images capture a moment in time directly, emotionally and with an immediacy that brings the events into your lived experience in a powerful way. The shot of the 'dancing man' (who is either Frank McAlary, Ern Hill or Patrick Blackall depending on who you believe) has become a visual touchstone for the time, and deservedly so; it seems to be so entirely about the joy and release of that moment that it couldn't have been constructed through the most elaborate of fictions.



And from almost 60 years later, here, in Jem Cohen's apocalyptic 'Little Flags', is the antithetical statement to this peace time newsreel, by a filmmaker who creates the 'news' (in the Ezra Pound definition of the idea - "literature is news that stays news"):

The Desert #4

Just a couple of weeks ago, on April 7th, George Nissen, inventor of the trampoline, passed away aged 96. How many broken wrists and forearms, how many stolen kisses and fumbles under the gauzy shade of the trampoline mat, how many welts from the pinch of the springs, how many long hot days spent talking about superheroes while waiting your turn, how many minor power struggles resolved over a timely double bounce, how many kid brothers sent hurtling, how many exhilarated grins at the first successful backflip, how many endless afternoons of nauseau and sea legs do we have to thank this man for?

He spent the first half of his life championing and promoting his invention. One of his marketing stunts involved him bouncing on the trampoline with a (pissed off and slightly humiliated, you would imagine) kangaroo; another secretly constructing a trampoline on top of one of the tombs surrounding the Giza pyramids to get the incredible photograph above. Oblivious to it all, we envied the kids who owned trampolines and felt elated at those long suspended moments hovering above it. There is always an uncomplicated bliss for those of us, far out on the periphery, who reap the rewards of the madness, obsessions and steely resolve of inventors, salesfolk, visionaries and artists.

The Buoy Archives #19

I hid this Buoy Archive deep in another post. Here is a reposting of this little handmade romance put together with a treacherous Bolex and some dodgy audio recordings.

The Desert #3

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

Toni Morrison

Substitute x for film/video/song/photograph/sensation etc.

Substitute n for see/here/feel/experience etc.

The Desert #2

The Desert #1

"We have to give it our all. We have to squeeze water from the rocks and from the desert too."

Roberto Bolaño, '2666'

Church of London

The quite brilliant Church of London design company were commissioned to create new artwork for a release of a collection of Almodovar films. I love it when a poster for a film is like a whole new layer to a film and the way you perceive it, think about it, feel about it. To me, this collection of posters is something pretty special.


And, finally, my favourite...

Here are a few more beautiful posters from C.o.L for some damned fine films:

Street Spirit

One of my favourite photographs. This one, by Mr Tod Seelie:

Kathleen Hanna recommends...

Ok. So I saw the trailer for The Runaways and it looks awesome; like the best kind of guilty movie pleasure. Then I read on ex-Bikini Kill goddess/frontwoman Kathleen Hanna's blog that she loves it (quote: "The Runaways movie is fucking awesome") and now I really want to see it. If it's awful, don't tell me yet. If it rules, tell me so I can get to fever pitch.

In the meantime... check out the incredible golden catsuit and bleached bleeding video tube colours of this clip of The Runaways live in Japan, 1977.

And here is a bunch of Maoist Propaganda films set to Bikini Kill's 'Rebel Girl'.

Photography, Hunting, Restlessness, Records, Archery and Stillness

A handful of thoughts to escape from the restless, confused territory of editing the feature doco 'Murundak':

I read recently (and apologies to the author/blogger that I wrote this note down without referencing and now can't recall where I read it) that Henri Cartier-Bresson relayed to Fred Ritchin (author of After Photography) that there were 4 essential books for a photographer to read. One of these is Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery. As someone with a restless mind, I love the thought of activity, creativity, production emerging from pure stillness, intense contemplation.

“Should one ask… how the Japanese Masters understand this contest of the archer with himself, and how they describe it, their answer would sound enigmatic in the extreme. For them the contest exists in the archer aiming at himself—and yet not at himself, in hitting himself—and yet not himself, and thus becoming simultaneously the aimer and the aim, the hitter and the hit. Or, to use some expressions which are nearest the heart of the Masters, it is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved center. Then comes the supreme and ultimate miracle: art becomes “artless,” shooting becomes not-shooting, a shooting without bow and arrow; the teacher becomes a pupil again, the Master a beginner, the end a beginning, and the beginning perfection.”

In a rare vinyl recording posted by Ted Barron on his great record collector's blog Boogie Woogie Flu, Cartier-Bresson talks of how the photographer approaches the world around him, and, most interestingly, of the act of forcing chance, an intriguing way of approaching the act of interpreting the world through a camera (still or moving, in my mind):

"We have to know what to, be clear, on what we want to say. Our conceptions, our, what we think of a certain situation, a certain problem. Photography is a way of writing it, of drawing, making sketches of it. And in the form, things are offered to us in daily life. We have to be alert and know when to pick the moment which is significant. Then, it's just intuition. It's instinct. We don't know why, we press at a certain moment. It comes, it is there, it's given. Take it. Everything is there, it is a question of chance, but you have to pick and force chance to come to you. There's a certain will"

Fiction filmmaking is mostly artifice. It is almost the reverse of the documentary photographers approach where chance is everything and to force chance allows a small moment of structure and precision. In fiction filmmaking where everything is a construction of reality, the more you can introduce chance, the more likely you might be to capture something elusive, enigmatic and 'real' in the most ambiguous meaning of the word. I like the idea of a half-constructed reality where so much - performance, movement, emotion, image - is left to chance, collision and possibility so that the filmmaker, the moving image photographer, has to return to relying on their instincts and senses as to what demands the moment of capture.

Cartier-Bresson's approach to photography and the world around him recalls to me the ideas around traditional hunting that Barry Lopez describes in Eskimo culture of the Arctic islands in one of my favourite books 'Arctic Dreams' (thanks to the esteemed Ross Gibson for tipping me onto this book and this passage):

All of ones faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it, one so absorbing that you cease to talk with your human companions. It means to release yourself from rational images of what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is.” And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships — fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven’s distant voice — become patterns. The patterns are always in motion. Suddenly the pattern — which includes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking through, these particular plants and smells — takes in the caribou. There is a caribou standing in front of you. The release of the arrow or bullet is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration.

Update

Laptop Editing.

'Galore' Draft finishing.

'Murundak' Rough cut viewing.

Music video cutting.

'The Warmth' Draft finishing.

Budget preparing.

Promo creating.

Image researching.

Brain hurting.

The Weather

Very proud of this little music vid flick thingo for Canberra band Kempsey... You might dig it. If you do, let me know what you think. All made over a few nights with a crew of two, 50mm lenses and some hellraising. A million thanks to everyone involved for all your time and patience.



If you're having trouble viewing, you can also see the clip here -

www.daybreakfilms.com.au/kempsey_theweather.mov

The band are doing some new tracks and demos and there should be a proper single release and video release in a month or two. Until then, I'll just hide it here in the wilds of the blogworld.

Process #1

I love this blog. It's by American photographer Zoe Strauss, who takes searing and beautiful images from the margins of US society. The blog is a kind of open-for-business-creative-process-in-construction blog that lays bare the process of selection, exclusion, refinement that forms such a vital part of an exhibiting photographer's work.

I'm always obsessed with process: With the banal mechanics involved in trying to create something material. Blogs like the one above are, to me, one of the great joys of freaking procrastinatory interwebness, as they make immediate what we used to have to glean from post-production, post-humous interviews by which time the true horrors and boredoms and frustrations and levities and joys of process are long forgotten.

Old Fitzroy #1

We began shooting last week for Dan Sultan's clip 'Old Fitzroy' which has become a great excuse to go and film with a number of folks we've crossed paths with, places we know well and things we've wanted to capture visually after many years haunting the streets of the new and old Fitzroy. You can still see the traces of Old Fitzroy and you will still meet up with or collide with some of the fixtures who aren't going anywhere no matter who moves in next door or what new changes go on around them. So, here are a few images from the first day or two of shooting. Many more to come...

Cinema Life, Cinema Death

This interview, between David Walsh and Bahman Ghobadi, was conducted in 2006 when Ghobadi screened Half Moon - one of the incredible series of films made for the New Crowned Hope festival - at Toronto Film Festival. The original article can be found here.

David Walsh: It seems to me the presence of death is everywhere in this new film.

Bahman Ghobadi: I never live in the present. I’m always thinking about the next 10 years or 20 years of my life. I’m just afraid. But the only time I’m not scared is when I make films. In my life so far, I’ve experienced so many different kinds of death. Private death, and death as the result of political events, of repression. The deaths of my family members. Death in our culture has a magical concept. And at the moment I can see the strength of the Middle Eastern culture. Every day I’m waiting for death and I’m very anxious.

DW: I wonder if artists are especially afraid of death, and art is a way of freezing time, of keeping something alive?

BG: I agree with that. As an independent filmmaker, I also want to look at it in a different light. As an independent filmmaker, I want my film to be seen in the right way. But also when I come to a big festival like Toronto and Cannes and other festivals, I can see the death of independent filmmaking at these festivals. And I’m quite afraid of that. I usually think and ask myself, what should we do? But I also make a lot of points to the audience and try to draw them in. There is a type of death for the audience, if independent cinema dies, that I’m afraid of. And I think if this film does not get the right distribution, the film will be worse than death, for me.
I live cinema, I breathe cinema, all my life is about cinema. And I haven’t really enjoyed my life. And I don’t even enjoy filmmaking. Now I feel that I’m an addict of filmmaking. Maybe that is why I’m afraid of death. Maybe I torture myself and have a lot of hardship.

DW: With the increased aggressivity of the United States, is the internal situation of Iran changing? Does the government impose more censorship as the US threatens war?

BG: Obviously, the problems are related to one another. Since the election of the new president [Ahmadinejad], everything is changing and they have started to seize all the satellite dishes in Iran. It’s in this situation that three days ago my film was banned. I never expected that. And now they are accusing me of being a Kurdish separatist.

DW: Is it because of the scenes of the brutal Iranian police?

BG: The police, because females are singing in my film, but mostly because of the map that’s seen [with “Kurdistan” on it].

DW: The woman in your film is hiding because presumably she could not sing in public.

BG: In Iran, women are not allowed to sing in public. My film is about that. I censored myself and I cut a lot of scenes that I thought the ministry would not have liked. But now that they banned the film, I’m disappointed with myself. I live in a country where we are not allowed to show musical instruments on television.
I made this film for the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. And I live in a society in which women are not allowed to sing publicly. And I could not even show one-third of what I wanted to show. Just because I’m afraid of censorship. And now I’m saying: Why didn’t I do it? I should have shown everything.

DW: The scene of the banned women is an extraordinary moment. The film refers in passing to the fall of Saddam Hussein, there is a reference to the Americans “shooting at anything that moves.” And of course there’s a reference to the Turkish military, there’s the Iranian police. All these forces are shown to be brutal and oppressive. It’s a sensitive question. There is also the presence of the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq, which in my opinion is a puppet of the US.

BG: I don’t want to talk about this because of the situation the Kurdish people are in right now.

DW: What’s the relationship between art and music and a very difficult political situation?

BG: Everything is related to everything else. All aspects of our lives. From daily living to the instruments that the artists get. And to the trauma that I have in my head. I have never been so afraid of going back to Iran as I am right now. And I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. If they are going to bomb Iran or not.
Instead of thinking about my next film, I’m thinking about how I can get enough food for my mother. We are all waiting for something to happen. The Iran-Iraq war went on for eight years. In those eight years we fell behind more than 80 years. And we can easily envision a more disastrous time. I’m thinking about these things and how I can save my family.

DW: You realize today is five years since 9/11?

BG: That was the worst day of my life. The day that I saw that on the news, I was in the capital of Kurdistan in Iran. I was waiting for the United States to nuke Iran and Iraq at the time. I was afraid for almost two weeks.

DW: Obviously, the US has launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both have been disasters. But precisely because they’ve been disasters, they’re planning some kind of new attack on Iran. What do think would be the consequences if the US dropped bombs on Iran?

BG: It’s too awful. I can’t think about it.

DW: Why is there a ban on your film, and is there any way to get it reversed?

BG: I called the Minister of Culture personally last week and asked him please not to seize or ban the film. Just take out what you want, I said. But then he said, even if you take out 20 minutes of it, it won’t be helpful because it’s the “soul” of your film that is about Kurdish separatism. But I said, it’s my baby. It’s not about separatism. I’m Iranian. I don’t want even this much separatism from the motherland. But do I have the right to talk about the problems that face our society?
If I only want to say what the government wants me to, then I have to be a government employee, not a filmmaker. We are filmmakers. It’s my job to film everywhere I want to. The government is not a filmmaker. Our job is to ask difficult questions, the most difficult.

DW: And that’s what I think is the strength of your filmmaking, it consistently asks the most difficult and painful questions. The heart of the film is neither separatism nor anti-separatism. The heart of the film is a feel for humanity and a hostility to oppression in all forms.

BG: I cannot stop. I have to make my next film in Tehran. Even if it is made underground. Because I am afraid of death, I have six projects in mind. Before I die I want to have 20 films under my belt.
I’ll be in Toronto every year from now on, not every two years.
We have to fight for the rights of female artists. This is the truth of our life. This is reality. It’s about self-expression, it’s about soul. People in Iran are suffocating. There is little freedom.

Suspense and Silence

"Suspense is trying to build but the stillness and silence outlive it."

Words: Don DeLillo
Image: Zoe Strauss

The Time The Place

A while back, we made a feature concert film for Motor Ace, the well adored band of a friend and collaborator of ours, Patch Robertson. Patch composed the music for our flicks 'Love This Time', 'Muscle' and a few other bits and pieces along the way. The film, picked up for distribution some time back by Liberation, has finally been released on DVD. Now, Motor Ace fans can stop emailing me, demanding and pleading for copies. We're happy the little fella has finally been released into the wilds. You can buy it here if that's your bag.

This is the trailer:

The Edit Room #3

"I think the image of the eyes facing forward and the ears facing sideways is metaphorically indicative of how we confront visual reality as opposed to aural reality. The visual seems to be direct and confrontational: You look at what's in front of you, and what's in front is seen and apprehended with a measure of intellect and emotion. And it's seen all at once, in a single grasp--let's call that the front door. The visual material knocks on the front door, and when somebody knocks on the front door, you sort of adjust your clothing, go to the door, take a deep breath, say, "Who's there?" and open the door. Whatever meeting occurs will have an element of formality to it, because it's somebody who came to the front door.

Sound tends to come in the back door, or sometimes even sneak in through the windows or through the floorboards. Remember, the ears point out the side of your head and take in a 360-degree spherical field. And while you're busy answering the front door, sound is sneaking in the back door. It's in the house as much as anyone who came in through the front door, but you're not as aware of it, and so its presence is more of a conditional presence--it tends to condition the things you are consciously aware of. The strange thing is that you take the emotional treatment that sound is giving, and you allow that to actually change how you see the image: You see a different image when it has been emotionally conditioned by the sound. So sometimes you will swear that you actually saw something that never, ever happened on the screen or in the soundtrack, but is the unique combination of the two inside your head.

Also, for some reason that I don't fully understand, I am very emotionally moved by the space around a sound. I almost think that sometimes I am recording space with a sound in it, rather than sound in a space."

Walter Murch in conversation with Tom Kenny

The Edit Room #2

The Edit Room #1

Deep, deep, deep inside the edit room.

It only has four white washed walls and an old timber floor, a couple of monitors and some buzzing boxes made of polished steel, but there is a whole lot of swirling chaos, strange improvised thought processes and figurative pens strung out of chicken wire disguised as narrative structures, all contained within that small cosy space.

Editing: What is it like when you're dealing with 160 odd hours of observational footage, multiple characters all deserving of their own feature length film, historical insights, musical numbers and profound emotional peaks. A maths equation. A cypher. A prose-poem. A tangle of blackberry bushes at the back of my uncle's farm with their sting and their cursed sweet fruit.

What does Murch say:

It's a fractal situation. How long do you hold this shot? Is that look redundant given the fact that the character gave a similar look just before? You don't see all these things immediately. They reveal themselves over time. Looking at a first assembly is kind of like looking at an overgrown garden. You can't just wade in with a weed whacker; you don't yet know where the stems of the flowers are. So you have to gently go through and discover, "OK, that's a weed, that's a weed, there's a flower." Then you start to see the outlines of the garden, and you discover that it might look better if these flowers were over on the left side where they'll get more sun. Then you start transposing, and things start to get interesting.

A Fistful of Trouble

This is one of the pearls of the internet. 1930s Pulp writer Lester Dent's strict guidelines for writing a 6000 word genre story. Screenwriters can use the guidelines like the Tao Te Ching. Meditate on rules like: 

"First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble" 

and 

"Second 1500 words - Shovel more grief onto the hero"

I like the thought of Erick Zonca writing a 6000 word treatment for The Little Thief with these rules in front of him. Or Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis discussing the rules while writing their 6000 word treatment (neatly broken into 1500 word elements) for Beau Travail. James Gray is an adherent I'm sure. Jacques Audiard, too. Hell, probably Judd Apatow. Everyone should be.


Lester Dent came up in an extensive article published by the Guardian in which a group of writers were asked their ten rules for writing fiction. I've got an ascetic love for restrictions and rules, even as I refuse completely to adhere to any of them. So, here are some of my favourite rules.


Geoff Dyer. Rule #6


Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.


Will Self. Rule #10


Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.


Margaret Atwood. Rules #1-#3 and #7

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

Zadie Smith. Rule #3 & #4


Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.


Elmore Leonard. Rule #1


Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

Colm Toibin. Rule #3, #4, #5 and #7


Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.

 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.

Jeanette Winterson. Rule #1

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.


Andrew Motion. Rule #4


Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.

AL Kennedy. Rules #1, #7 & #9

Have humility. Older/more ­experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. ­Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.


Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.

Roddy Doyle. Rule #1-#3

Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph ­–

Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.

Beijing Explosion

So, for a couple of years now, I've been developing the film Fatherland with Beijing based collaborator Chris O'Young whose screenplay it is. I've mentioned this project before. The film is set between the austere Beijing home of a recently returned Australian Chinese man and the backalley clubs of the burgeoning punk and hardcore scene in Beijing. Chris is amazing at capturing the deep emotional tension of family but we have spent a lot of time trying to get a real sense of the atmospheres, faces and settings in and around this movement and the clubs, streets and houses that are its backdrop. There is nothing as horrible as when a film sucks all the life out of an intense and energetic movement. So, for a while a few years back, we were listening to internationally known bands like Hang on the Box and Subs trying to get a sense of the scene as it was evolving but it was difficult to know what the good oil was. But, just recently I came across the photos of Matthew Niederhauser, a Beijing based photographer who has, in the last couple of years, taken some incredible photos and portraits in clubs like D-22, Mao Live House and Yugong Yishan. He has now compiled these photos into the book Sound Kapital. It looks damned fine. I like gifts.

This is Niederhauser's site.

Here are some of the aforementioned pics.

Hedgehog. photography by Matthew Niederhauser.

Joyride. photograph by Matthew Niederhauser.


Girl Kill Girl. photography by Matthew Niederhauser.

Subs. photograph by Matthew Niederhauser.

Guai Li. photograph by Matthew Niederhauser.

 

live at D-22. photograph by Matthew Niederhauser.

Dement. photograph by Matthew Niederhauser.

Reconstruction

Over at his blog, compadre Glendyn Ivin linked through to this kinda lovely short, Nuit Blanche. Hyper-stylised and brimming with every imaginable kind of artifice and trickery there is still, amid the chaos, a beautiful and very real moment of connection between the two onscreen lovers. One of the pleasures of watching this short for me, though, was the resonance in my mind, as the short played out, of another film from my viewing past, Christoffer Boe's 2003 film Reconstruction.



Of course, this happens frequently. You watch a film and become immersed in it or are transported by it, while at the same time, feeling the shivers of pleasure of a past experience, real or onscreen. And, in this case, as I watched, in Nuit Blanche, the slow motion track in on the lovers, surrounded by splintering glass, imagining in that moment that their fleeting love would destroy everything around them, I was reminded of sitting alone in a darkened room in Roseville, escaping for a couple of hours from a film workshop, stealing a viewing of the low budget Reconstruction in the projection room, and being completely surprised by this film about which I had heard or seen nothing.

The film features one of my favourite Danish actors, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, as Alex, a man who imagines a romantic connection with a woman that then appears to dissolve the world around him - his real lover no longer recognising him, his apartment disappearing, his friends and family, now strangers, disturbed by his insistence that they know each other. Although a simple premise - that the moment of falling in love changes the world around us - this film so beautifully unravels this idea into a world that uses the deftest touches of cinematic and literary trickery without ever betraying the very fragile emotions at it's heart. As it turns out, the screenplay was written by Boe and Mogens Rukov (about who I've written in the past) and was the first film produced out of Nordisk Film's 'Director's Cut' financing scheme which also turned out Jacob Thuesen's great drama Accused. I forgot how much I loved this film and now I need to see it again. Urgently.

"It is a film, it is all a construction. But even so, it hurts."

From Reconstruction

Happiness #3

Apichatpong asks: "Are we drunk on something?"

Yes.

The opening shot of Millenium Mambo.

The final shot of Chop Shop.

Just about every moment of Isaki Lacuesta's La Leyenda del Tiempo.

Any and every page of Barry Lopez' Desert Notes.

The final passages of the Raymond Carver short story Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes.

The opening chords of 'U-Mass' by Pixies.

The fact that a bigrecordcompany allowed me to use the opening chords to 'U-Mass' by Pixies in one of my little flicks.

The final resound of Skull by Sebadoh.

The Tim Rogers lyrics: 'you woke me up just to check that I'm alive, we talk to each other as if we're five'.

The sound of just about any g-funk track coming from a passing car.

The thought of my old '82 Urvan - the red curtains and brown vinyl seats, the dodgy wiring and switch ignition - wherever it has ended up in the world.

The madness, humanity and audacity of Danish screenwriters.

This scene.

This movie.

This fragment of Eduardo Galeano's writing:

The Function of Art / 1
Diego had never seen the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it.
They went south.
The ocean lay beyond high sand dunes, waiting.
When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking, the ocean exploded before their eyes. And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it.
and when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: "Help me to see!"*

The mix tapes a friend of mine gives to me at my birthday, year after year.

The fact that only recently have his mix tapes become mix CDs.

The single annual email a long lost friend sends to me that arrives on the morning of my birthday every year without fail.

The handful of pubs and bars that surround my studio that are full of good folks and cheap booze.

The thought of all the unmade and unwatched films, unwritten and unread books and unrecorded and unheard records.

The memory of the mayhem that comes with shared listening sessions of The Shape of Punk to Come by Refused.

This fragment of writing from Walter Benjamin's 'One Way Street':

Ordinance
I had arrived in Riga to visit a woman friend. Her house, the town, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, nobody knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted, each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and ever streetcar came towards me like a fire-engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should have gone up like a magazine.**

This photo.

The absent-minded habit my 4 year old nephew has of running his hand across the stubble on my chin when he is talking to me.

The stretch of road from the Hume Highway through the rainforests of the Burrawang pass down to Jamberoo and on to the coast.

The view walking down Rucker's Hill at dusk.

The memory of an abandoned week long trek through the Alpujarras that came to a halt in a small village that was almost impossible to leave.

And this Buoy Archive I made when I first fell in love with T.

*From 'El Libro de Los Abrazos' - Eduardo Galeano
**From 'One Way Street' - Walter Benjamin

Happiness #2

Apichatpong asks: "Are we drunk on something?"

My response is to watch a video of the collision of two major cultural artifacts:

Godzilla
Busta Rhymes

Apart from being mashup genius, this just makes me very happy.



It's humbling to want to be making films and then see, on a daily basis, the ease with which a seemingly endless supply of mashups and mashdowns appear on the web.

More happiness. ("one-and-a-two and a chicka-chicka-boom")



More happiness.



And so it goes. Der Untergang. Miley Cyrus. Spongebob. Christian Bale. The Shining. Ad infinitum.

Happiness #1

"To “happily accept” is something I question. Why are we happy? Are we drunk on something? Or are we getting used to this and becoming so numb that we don’t question things anymore?"

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Among Them

"As filmmakers, what we strive for is not to be above or beyond our characters, not to dominate our characters, and not to show them as role models or images. We try to preserve in them a dark side, and really be with them and among them."

Luc Dardenne

You Know You Got Soul

A bit battered and broken, we're back in the edit suite working on the feature doc after the madness of a music video shoot along the New South Wales coast line around Nambucca Heads. After flying into Sydney at dawn on the Monday, picking up our gear, lighting rig and generators, we drove up the coast arriving at dusk for a last minute lighting recce. Then, Tuesday was spent furiously driving from rainforest to clifftop, township to dusty road to hillside to wheatfield, locking in a dozen locations, a vintage car, hilltop farmhouse, movement, schedule and shotlisting, all from first looks at the environment and surrounds for a dawn shoot the next day. Then, over the following two days, in our usual fashion, we had a sweaty DIY hoe-down with T directing action, art directing and production managing, me directing shots, data wrangling, gaffing and gripping and Katie Milwright lighting, shooting and doing everything else in between. Huge thanks to Emma Donovan and her manager Vicky Gordon for their patience, to all the local mob around Nambucca who acted in scenes, loaned houses, cars and backyards.

This is our first soul clip. Although I was always a little indie punk kid, I have the hugest, weakest, secret soft spot for soul music and so it was a beautiful thing to be able to make a clip with Emma Donovan who has one of the best soul voices in the country. It was also a nice reminder to spend more time on the screenplay I have been dribbling over; a black comedy about a hopeless, dope addled, single dad whose one escape from his three sons who are, variously, a teenage Nazi, adultering apprentice baker and horny, hyper competitive nerd, is his nightly spot as a soul DJ on the local community radio station.

And, so: with all that downloaded into the strange, silent abyss of the online blog, here are some screen shots from the 5Dmk2 rushes lensed by Ms Katie Milwright. I'm particularly digging on the first shot - from a scene in a phone booth on the remote Scotts Head beach - which reminds me of an old favourite image by Rachael Cassells: