Solitude #1

“I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Image:  Neta Dror

Words: the ever ponderable Henry David Thoreau whose guidance I always try and fail to live by...

Faces and Light #1

It's pouring down with rain outside and Australia is going nuts with jingoistic celebrations of the Anzac spirit and whatever else that means in these days of endless wars. I locked myself away with a bunch of flicks and some books to pore over references for some films in the pipeline. As the day came to an end I stumbled on a way to spend a few hours that I deeply enjoyed. I was looking for references for facial lighting that I like - where the light doesn't feel too sculpted or unnatural - and where faces, in stillness, have a painterly quality. So I spent those hours just staring at faces in films. Hundreds of them. Turns out that I found a shitload of lovely references. Here's just a small handful.

Forever

Rules #1

escape rigidity

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regain lost innocence

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create structures that constrict

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evade structure through subterfuge

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undermine fear

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embrace sleeplessness

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be childlike

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seek out quiet and chaos equally

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keep eyes wide

Brutal Words

Slack Jaw

This might just be one of the most beautiful film posters I've ever seen. Created by the pretty damned incredible UK artist Peter Strain. I'm slack-jawed with awe. And I want it. I have a birthday this year. Just saying.

Disguises

Although the shoot might still be a way off yet, I've been doing some more wandering and location scouting for my flick 'Galore'. I've done this before a couple of times, thinking we were accelerating toward shooting but a production setback or another project got in the way. So I get a bit nervous thinking of these trips as 'recces'. Really, it's just wandering and thinking and looking. Maybe it's going to be too elusive to capture on screen, but the areas in the outer southern suburbs of Canberra where the film is set, possess, for me, a singular sense of space and some of the most beautiful expansive skies I've ever seen. It's a rich and strange landscape disguised as a completely normal and banal suburbia. I'm dying to finally throw some people in the places and spaces I imagine for the film and actually shoot a scene or two... Slowly, slowly. In the meantime, here are some shots. Click on the image for a bigger version. 

Digital Memory

So, a recent visit to my Mum's house offered up a strange burst of memory. In a small pencil case, she had gathered together a bunch of the hand held 'game and watch' consoles we had all played as kids and stored them in a drawer where they lay untouched. My brother and I found some old batteries and charged them up. I played a few of them - 'Fire', 'Donkey Kong Jr.' were alway my favourites - and immediately my fingers remembered what I had not. My fumbling mansize digits aced the games as if a day hadn't elapsed in the decades since I last held them in my hand. Bodies can always compress time, senses allow the years to collapse in ways that our minds refuse to, no matter how strong the desire. Of course, like any burst of childhood memory, the warmth and terror of a crippling man sized nostalgia followed. So I buried it the way I normally do. I took a photo to kill and then falsify the real world emotion. In any case, thanks Mum.

Fear

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

 "And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos"

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg

Words stolen from the sublime title of the pretty damned sublime novel by: John Berger

Ten Things about Tarkovsky

Today would have been Tarkovsky's 80th birthday. This has prompted a lot of intense, often lovely and frequently laboured pieces of writing about the brilliance, austerity, singularity and poetry of his vision. I don't want to add too much to all those swirling words with no place to go. So, instead, here is a list of ten things that I love about the old dog.

1. I love that whenever I show 'Mirror' to first year film students, that there is always one or two of them that are profoundly angered.

2. I love each and every forest scene in 'Ivan's Childhood'. Tree trunks, leaves and the natural form of the forest floor as architecture, as screen division, as emotion, as staging, as beauty, as threat.

3. I love his love of faces, of the ways that he lingers on them in the deepest states of melancholy or revery.

4. I love that, in Tarkovsky, fire is not just a visual elemental motif. Fire is as elemental as it is in the real world. It is elemental!

5. I love that every film feels like an emotional biography, whatever the subject, story and setting.


6. I love that he would talk about his own ways of making film in ways such as this:

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it. ”

and this:

“When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part.
What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?”

and this:

“I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.”

7. I love this polaroid in particular, among his many beautiful polaroids:

8. I love his films. I love everything about 'Mirror'. Everything. And I love that even though it is flawed, 'Ivan's Childhood' will always be one of my 'top' films because I cannot think of any film that when I first watched it, made me swoon, catch my breath and roll my eyes in disbelief. And I love that, while I might love other directors and other films more, that images from each and every one of his films, still chase me, still haunt me, years after first seeing them. I love that his films refuse to be forgotten or ignored.

9. I love the fact that he seems to me to be more truly audacious, more truly visionary, more truly and essentially of the properties and mysteries of cinema itself, than anyone else I can think of.

10. And, finally, I love that his top ten list of films was as follows:

1. Le Journal d'un curé de campagne
2. Winter Light
3. Nazarin
4. Wild Strawberries
5. City Lights
6. Ugetsu Monogatari
7. Seven Samurai
8. Persona
9. Mouchette
10. Woman of the Dunes

Landscape #2

Landscape #1

from Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Words Are Unnecessary #2

Tomorrow night - Wednesday March 28 - at the Melbourne Cinematheque, one of my favourite films of all time, Antonioni's L'Eclisse is playing. I first saw this film when a friend and I started a nerdy cinephile film club at uni and hired in 16mm prints to show in a small room to an audience that usually consisted of three of us, rarely more than six. It wasn't elite. We desperately wanted more people to come along, but I think we invited social death with the complete lack of hipness of the films we bought in. We hired in L'Eclisse after having our tiny minds blown by L'Avventura in a class on Italian neo-realism (a class that was almost certainly more responsible for damaging my brain with cinematic purism than any other). Nothing quite prepared me for how much this film would get under my skin.

Here is how the cinemateque notes describe this film that has probably attracted more abstract and intellectual synopses than just about any film save for Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad:

Antonioni’s definitive film is an uncompromising & moody exploration of alienation, ennui & the “atomic age” starring Alain Delon & Monica Vitti. An unflinching yet poetic examination of the spaces, places & temporalities of modernity, Antonioni’s actors & characters are ultimately abandoned as the vehicle for presenting his truly contemporary vision (epitomised by the remarkable depopulated final sequence).

Startling on first release even after the bold experimentation of L’avventura & La notte, this film occupies a crucial position in postwar European cinema. With Francisco Rabal. Camera operator Pasquale De Santis, produced by Raymond & Robert Hakim, & music by Giovanni Fusco.

35mm print courtesy of the British Film Institute.

And all of this is in the film. And a lot more. More still as interpreted and extrapolated by the cinematheque notes written by Christopher Sharrett. Yet, for me, despite all of the ways that Antonioni unravels post war narratives and creates a cinema of architectural grandeur and the fallibility of Roman bourgeoisie, what made this film something extraordinary was the drama of silences, of looks and glances, of love promised, unfulfilled, defeated and betrayed by intelligent but inarticulate men and women. Also, like anything with Monica Vitti, there was also the joy of the moments in which her performance reflected on itself; moments in the mirror, mugging at someone, grinning despite herself, revealing the chaotic and occasionally joyful energy underneath. For all it's austerity and it's examination of 'ennui' in the 'atomic age', it is the precision in which love emerges in and around the spaces of the city that will always make this film something truly extraordinary. I love it. I love it. And, of course, both Vitti and Alain Delon are complete fucking hotties and Antonioni is unable to create a frame that is imperfect. So, um... if you're in Melbourne and you didn't run a nerdy film club and get to see it on a scratchy old print in a dusty university backroom, go see the damned film.

(There is a sad coincidence in that the script for L'Eclisse, like L'Avventura before it, La Notte  and many other masterful works of writing after it, was scripted by the almost unsurpassable Tonino Guerra who passed away this last week. A eulogy that lists the staggering scope of his work is here.)

Words Are Unnecessary #1

Brothers

Family is pretty important, huh? I got three brothers and I would crush the living shit out of them with my love. I'm lucky in that we all get to hang out when we can and I'm very fortunate that I also get to work with one of my brothers who is a musician and composer from time to time. So, a brief spruik. He just did this pretty lush deconstructed score for a fashion film for Romance Was Born and Dion Lee Line II. It's different from a lot of the stuff he does usually and I think he kills it. I am totally fucking biased though. Who knows, though... you might dig it.

dirtsong

A few years back, I travelled with T around a large number of different communities in Aboriginal Australia filming for the Black Arm Band show 'dirtsong' which has, up to now, only ever played in Melbourne for two nights. I might have mentioned this before, but it is one of the things I am most proud of, due primarily to the intimacy with which we worked, the resulting immensity of the images, and the importance of the show and the songs themselves. During the live performance, about 70 minutes of film - a kind of lyrical accompaniment to the many different songs that were written in 13 different indigenous languages - played in inky black and white on a vast 16m x 9m screen. I've never seen images I've taken or been part of capturing projected so large. It is immensely strange that the larger the image, the greater the sense of intimacy you feel when watching them. (So much is lost with the shrinking of the cinematic experience - but that is another post for another day...)

So, the point of this blog post is a little bit of self indulgence - like all blog posts - but also, for once, information; this weekend, to close the Message Sticks festival in Sydney, dirtsong will be staged once more, two years after its inception. Many of the original artists have moved on, one has passed away, but many will perform the songs that they wrote for the original show and I imagine that the songs will be just as spine tingling now as they were then. It's a beautiful thing for your work to be able to accompany something that feels so special... I imagine it will feel like an honour for a very long time. While the films - which act as a kind of conversation and mediation between the singers and songs and the lands and cultures from which the songs emerge - don't really work without the songs, below are some stills from the screen grabs. The images we took were often vast landscapes, sometimes intense moments of connection between an individual and the camera, sometimes intimate moments observed in community, or tableaux staged for the camera. We got to film some incredible things in places I had never imagined I would be able to go but like all filmmaking, all image-making, I now feel like there is a thread leading me back to where the images were taken...

Reflection

“My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action in the viewfinder. A reflection on the subject precedes it. A meditation on finality follows it, and it is here, during this exalting and fragile moment, that the real photographic writing develops, sequencing the images.

For this reason a writer’s spirit is necessary to this enterprise. Isn’t photo-graphy ‘writing with light’? But with the difference that while the writer possesses his word, the photographers is himself, possessed by his photo, by the limit of the real which he must transcend so as not to become its prisoner.”

Abbas