Galore Post Script #1 - Darkness

Delayed post... forgot to put this up a couple of weeks back. My brain is broken.

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I arrived late in Sydney last night. This morning we walked into the sound mixing stage at Deluxe for two weeks of mixing 'Galore'. And, for the first time in months, my mind seemed clear enough to write some new words. This massive, beautiful dark space allowed some of the tangles of thought - looped around the block of mind totally filled with all the layers of making 'Galore' - to clear out for the first in months.

These past months have been like a process of distillation. I have no doubt there may have been infinite things to reflect on here while shooting, cutting and finishing 'Galore'. There have been all the anticipated highs and lows and battles and dances and moments of levity and transcendence and glimmers of agony and bliss and terror. But, because all the constituent elements were poured into the distillery months ago, I've felt like I couldn't add anything new to the mix. No new thoughts, new writing, new reflections. No space to step back or think or critique. Just constantly bubbling away with those same elements, refining and purifying.

Here, hopefully is the point all that returns again.

So, here's what happened. Over a summer that was scorching everyone outside, we sat in a dark room, surrounded by whirring, straining fans, sweating our arses off, moving swiftly towards a fine cut. Every now and then, there would be a moment to run to the pool, or sit at the bowls club and clean up a few beers, or catch up on elusive sleep. But mostly it was a density of Galore world emotion and images. For the most part, it was bliss. There were lessons learnt and experiences traversed that are for another time and place, there were some insane challenges; but the final film is closer to what we set out to achieve than I ever thought would be possible. That alone, whatever happens, has to be a beautiful thing, ey?

Original compositions were scored, existing music was licensed, foley was created, dense layers of sound and atmosphere were created. Shots went to FX and were moulded into entirely new images.

At the same time, family life continued on. Things fell apart and were placed back together. Long nights got longer the more self destructive and exhausted we all got. There were salsa parties and sleazy nights in the usual bars, music festivals and afternoons on the hot concrete of the Fitzroy pool. There were feasts whenever an actor came to town, or when we were all feeling a particularly strong yearning. There was a shitload of wine, denial and madness.

And that, I suppose, is post production in an independent film. Don't know how my internal organs are coping or whether my family are all that keen on me anymore or whether I'll work in this town again (does anyone?)... but we did honour what we set out to achieve and, hopefully, stayed true to the ideas that so many people put so many long months and so much blood, sweat and tears into realising.

Fuck, it looks nice to see it on the vast screen of the mixing stage while I sit here and write and try not to say dumb things while they work. Rob Mackenzie, who is mixing our little flick sits in front of me. He's most recently come off sound editing Wong Kar Wai's 'The Grandmaster' so his halo is glowing in my eyes. And the ever incredible Emma Bortignon, Galore's sound designer, who has spent weeks and weeks creating a rich complex design, sits alongside me, so I know all will be fine, just fine.

And in the back corner, lingering in the dark are the composers, my oldest, shadiest collaborators, Christopher O'Young and Flynn Wheeler who have written music that seems to have come from the page.

So all, again, surrounded by the hum, surge and shatter of the sonic world of the film, feels for a while, perfect. Perfect.

Hiatus

I like to drop out. Every now and then for a couple of months, I like to disappear; forget everything and everyone by going someplace else, where life is still. But in recent years, this hasn't been possible. Work mounts, projects entrap, life encircles. But this past month, I got to drop out for a while. At last. At last. It was the sweetest salve imaginable.

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.

Meandering

On location while shooting 'Murundak - Songs of Freedom'

True to the river source of the word "meander", we've spent the last two months meandering, wandering, looping back and forth on our selves, drying up and flooding again, as we finish off two projects - one new - 'Dirtsong' for the Melbourne International Arts Festival - and another old - 'Murundak - Songs of Freedom'. We travelled back and forth across the deep north, to some beautiful communities and to some places beyond description.

Below are a few select images from the last month's shooting for Murundak.

(L)Steven Pigram, (C) Fitzroy Crossing, (R) Ursula Yovich

(L) Emma Donovan, (C) Mark Atkins, (R) Dan Sultan

And some from Dirtsong:


Our little crew, crammed most of the time in the back of a 4WD, ended up becoming the one beast, wordless and working like maniacs, responding easily to silent gestures, and rarely faulting. When a small crew like that is working that seamlessly, it must be the same feeling you would get from a football team* that knows where every person on the field is by feel and drills and familiarity.

On, or at least, just beside the Road

At one point, we were in north eastern Kakadu, filming by a waterhole. Our sound recordist**, Chris O'Young (also a composer and the writer of Fatherland) stopped us all to record an atmos.

While we stood there in silence, fifteen or so of us including our subjects, the place itself opened up. This is probably one of my favourite things to do. As you sit behind the camera, things seem to close down into smaller and more precise lines of vision, your eyes trying to pick out details and it is almost as if your breath and vision starts to constrict. Then, suddenly, you are asked to stop and record an atmos. Nothing special, just a silent hum of the surroundings. And, as you stand there, over the minute or two required, your eyes open up again and you begin to feel again the depth of wherever it is that you're standing.

As we walked away from recording this atmos one of our subjects said that, for a moment, it was like gulpa ngarwal, a Yorta Yorta word, she explained, for a timeless concept meaning deep listening. That is, a listening that is not your ears, but your eyes and skin and presence in the place. It is a listening that takes time and awareness. For a few moments in each shoot day, the dumb, clumsy fumbling of the film crew, usually tangled in leads, het up with deadlines and schedules and madness, gets a moment to glimpse this deep listening. More please.

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* The Daybreak Films football team colours:

** Sound Recordist Chris O'Young on the Kimberley coastline north of Broome...

Locations #2

Recently, I've been developing a script with composer and long time collab Chris O'Young. The script he's written is this sublime exploration of an insomniac Chinese Australian man who returns to his parent's home in Beijing to help with the reburial of his Grandfather after the required seven years. While there, he falls into the Beijing punk scene and discovers long held family secrets. It's a beautiful combination of lightness, energy and the sexual and emotional charge of new love (found, sleep deprived, in the Beijing punk bars), and a melancholy founded on the difficulty of connecting - truly connecting - with culture and family when life is lived as an exile.

There is a sequence he has written set in the cricket fighting markets that are scattered around Chinese cities. We'd talked about using these markets as a location because there is something so singularly bizarre about a gambling den centred around tiny fighting insects. When I first saw one of these while visiting with Chris in Shanghai, I could only make sense of them visually... through my camera. That is, I had so little idea of what was going on, of all of the gestures, the calls, the labels, the significance of the pin sized fighting insects as opposed to the thumb sized crickets, of who was running the place, who was betting on what, and what it took to declare victory... The only thing that made sense was the colour and the movement.



For the most part, the one thing that film allows us to do is to make sense of mysteries in the everyday. The desire to overhear a conversation, to better understand someone, to be a part of the underworld, or to rub shoulders in the penthouses; these are the most common elements of human drama in film. But there is also the strong desire to understand spaces and cultures that we see that appear foreign or unusual or mysterious but which we know must have some anchor points that we can tie ourselves to in finding a connection. I used to feel a sense of guilt about writing films for this kind of cultural or emotional travel/escape, but slowly I'm approaching the idea that, in trying to make sense of film, what else is there? In such an ephemeral form, skimming across the skin of human lives or glimpsing fragments of intensity amid raucous action or spectacle is all we can really do. If we do this in the same meditative state as you wander or travel, then we can find the moments of connection constructed for us in a way they can never be in the real world.



So, my first fleeting visit to those cricket fights, where I wanted to be in the midst of it, can be delayed for gratification on screen when those same impressions and emotions can be reconstructed but with an insider's knowledge, an intimate glimpse of what exists at those moments, as seen by fictional characters who we've come to invest in. It's the beauty of cinema realism. Where the mysteries of the everyday that we know to be true can be unravelled through the eyes of fictional characters whose very falseness allows us to be agile in what and how we wrestle with life.

Now, just gotta get the cold hard cash and get that flick made...