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...

Delicate World

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”

 Words: Anaïs Nin (Diaries Vol 1. 1931-1934)

Image: mine

When Minds are Blown #3

In 2001 - a particularly great year for cinema, for festivals, and for me as an audience member - I saw a handful of movies that blew my mind. I thought that I had reached some kind of zenith and that, forever after, I would be on a slow downward slide of disappointment. Turns out that it was partially true (really, 2001 was a great year for cinema going for me). That is, until Fatih Akin's Head On. I love this film. I love everything about it. It is flawed, of course, but it has more essentially human experiences coursing through the first five minutes than a decade of the films surrounding it.

I also, being partial to a drink, love a film that doesn't shy away from the the messy extremes of self destruction. I also, being partial to love, love a film that doesn't shy away from the messy extremes of romance, of falling in love, of sex, jealousy and obsession. I also, being partial to music, love a film that doesn't shy away from the life or death relationship that many of us have with the songs that make our lives worth living. This is a violent, messy, destructive madness of an experience, and it is tender, vulnerable and as romantic as a film can be. I love it.

Hearts and Darkness #1

Throughout the Melbourne Festival, our little rabid crew are turning our day jobs into night and day jobs and shooting a couple of dozen short films with visiting artists and performers. We've already finished a couple - on Russian Art superstars AES+F, on Tom Tom Crew, photographer Daniel King - and many more are underway. But last night, after 12 hours of cutting, I went out to film with a favourite band of mine who are also guests of the festival: Mono. 

Hear them now, as you read and look.

These Japanese instrumental superheros are as incredible onstage as they are in their recordings. Staged in the dimmest of light (making filming hover around the borders of impossible), they create, from stillness, a slow transcendental build to chaos and disorder. It's perfect. And I watched people weep while feedback roared from the speakers, so they are clearly doing something right. Hearts. Darkness. Perfection.

 

 

 

Meet Me Here #2

 

A single song

I'm in a state of perpetual awe and wonder when it comes to music and musicians. You would think it would be easier to learn to play an instrument than try and be a filmmaker but, for me, the attempt to make films is an attempt to get as close as possible to what I imagine - naively? - to be the purity at the heart of music. I don't seem to hear lyrics as easily as many people do and so songs as stories are not as powerful for me as others. But I do love the rhythm, swagger or strut of music and, at it's best, the rhythms of cinema, through editing, performance style, dialogue or movement, hits these rhythms and struts in the same way. Yet, also, like good cinema, a song suspends time, stops that shitty urgent acceleration of life, for a handful of heartbeats and lets you feel stillness in a way that, I think, most closely approximates the immensity of nature. For this reason, I find myself either lured into music that is, in itself, stillness, or music that is so chaotic and urgent that it also stops time in it's midst. One decelerates, the other accelerates, but both take you out of the actual rhythm of life.

One song I return to again and again for deceleration is the song 'Cruiser' by Red House Painters. I've written a scene around this song in one of the films I am labouring away on as the first moment between two lovers unfolds around the duration of the song (8 mins). It is really just one chord progression played over and over (and over) while Mark Kozelek mournfully sings over it, but something about this song is so profoundly cinematic in the way it gently, repetitively, eases you into a dreamstate of narrative. Likewise, the song 'The Way' by Bonnie Prince Billy or any of the late 90s tracks by the Perth band Blue Tile Lounge. There is a gentle violence to these songs that simmers like any good film narrative. They all make me hungry for cinema. And strangely, in the same way, Cat Power's cover of The Highwaymen's 'Silver Stallion' just makes me want to make moofies so bad it hurts.

On the other hand, there is the jagged lilt of songs like 'Pentagram Ring' by Chavez or 'Do You Like Me' by Fugazi or the stupidly youthful joy/melancholy of songs like 'Cute Without The 'E' (Cut From The Team)' by Taking Back Sunday, 'Travel by Telephone' by Rival Schools or 'Not Turning Off' by Spoon. These songs make you want to run with any bolt of energy you can grab hold of... So rarely do you find a similar thing in film - perhaps the aforementioned 'Head On' by Fatih Akin - in which the loud/quiet/loud of these songs and the same pulse-quickening abrasive impulse is translated into cinema.

A band who decelerates through abrasion is My Disco. In my mind, I have an entire film set to their album 'Paradise'. Song by song. I don't quite think it is the kind of film I will be able to get up any time soon, however, so it is sitting very firmly on the backburner.

In the meantime, as I work on the script with 'Cruiser' at it's heart, I can only hope the band will ultimately let me use it in the flick.

A piece of dialogue currently in the script (who knows where it will end up) goes like this:

TOBY
What? Is it a Scottish song?

Shona laughs and shakes her head. She presses play. A slow, plaintive song begins to play. Toby looks at her and adjusts the headphones. He bows his head and listens intently. Shona watches him. A man’s mournful voice sings out in Toby’s ears.

SONG
“Purple nights and yellow days
Neon signs and silver lakes
LA took a part of me
LA gave this gift to me...”

Toby looks up at her.

TOBY
(perplexed)
S'about LA?

MAGGIE
Singers never sing about what they seem
to be singing about. And this song, though
he would have never knew it, is all about
me. Listen...