Recalibration

Sometimes, when you're writing or preparing for a project, you stumble on an image, or a piece of music, that pierces you in a way that is surprising, perfectly aligned and perfectly timed. It is, in practise and reality, what the punctum is in theory.

By way of a preface:
I've had to step away from the studio for a while to return to a draft of 'Galore' that requires urgent completion before giving over to the good folks who have committed to making this film with me. I am trying to find the stillness and calm you need to make sense of revisions and changes to a piece of writing that has been with you for a long time and has been polished within an inch of it's life. I've been executing some changes that are revitalising the script after some time away, but these changes all lead to unraveling threads that, somehow, have to be interwoven once again. And these things are not easily handled without a bit of quiet and time.

Now, the problem is that I'm nothing if not distracted at the moment. I'm still in the madness of post-film release where your brain skips from the technical and concrete (distribution, delivery, promotion) to the realms of probability and hope (audience, screenings, marketing). And another pretty damned exciting project I'm working on - 'The Turning' (a portmanteau adaptation of Tim Winton's novel of intertwined stories with a pretty wild group of filmmakers, actors and artists helming) - has received some development and scripting money which has got me itching to start tearing up the pages. And, to extend the whinge, I am also fucken tired. So, quiet and time is a little difficult to put in place.

But... deadlines and deliveries must be respected (if not tormented, abused and occasionally ignored) and given that no project is closer to my heart than 'Galore', I am sitting here, in stillness and quiet, by the window, writing 3 w.p.m. and inching closer to the perfect, untainted film in my head. And in this state of mind, wandering through the great tiny vices website, I stumble across three images that could not speak more to me about the heart of this film than all the pages I've written. Each of these three images, viewed within moments of each other, pierces me and seems to recalibrate, in inexplicable ways, what it is I'm trying to do with this crazy fucken project. So, thank you, perfectly timed gods of the procrastinating image trawl...

image: Dai Oinuma

Image: Brad Harris

image: Aaron Wojack

I Need You.

"If you want movies to give you everything, this movie fails. You have to be there. I need you. I don’t want to show you. I want to really share something. It’s not easy. When you have a conversation, and you really want to understand the other person, it takes time and effort. It's the same with this movie."

Lucrecia Martel talking about La Mujer Sin Cabeza

The Mountain

"There is always a road when you get into the mountain."

Yiyun Li

Great Journals of the 21st Century

I still love journals. Mine gets neglected terribly and these days it's all words and no pictures. But it's still handled with love.

Through an illustrator friend I stumbled on the work of Portuguese illustrator/designer/DIY chick Rita Gomes. I'm not sure if this is exactly a journal, given it's solely dedicated to Sleater Kinney but, I'm gonna say it is and put it in as my current entrant in Great Journals of the 21st Century. More to come.

all the above images by wastedrita

Teenage Kicks, right?

30 Second Spruik

We're running around like blue-arsed flies as we embark on a limited release of 'murundak - songs of freedom' and I thought I would take a quick moment to abuse this blog with a bit of spruiking...

Attached is a link to the new website for the film - www.murundakdocumentary.com

And below is the trailer. Humble thanks.

Shoot Me Dead

"And there's kids playing guns in the street/And ones pointing his tree branch at me/So I put my hands up I say "enough is enough,/If you walk away, I'll walk away"/And he shot me dead"

Image: Mark Cohen
Words: Bright Eyes

Flash

This short doco on the great Mark Cohen shows him in the process of creating his strange, whimsical and beautiful street photography. To be honest, his approach seems to me to be kinda frightening and amusing. The elegance of his images does not in any way suggest the invasiveness of his approach. It certainly dispels the image of the unobserved street photographer loitering in the margins. It's reassuring to know that the photographer can be just as intrusive as the filmmaker, if only for that quick glimpse in time.

If you don't know his work and you could gather enough beneath the German voice over to interest you, here's a sample:

images: Mark Cohen

Carnivalesque

I so badly want to see this:



And I so very badly want to see this:



There is something carnivalesque in the air.

Red Carpet #2

Okay. So, we had our launch. I loved it. I hated it, too, for passing so quickly and for being so overwhelming that I can't remember much of it except for the initial desire to die when the screening began, the desire to drink my weight in free beer to silence my nerves, and, later, the desire to curl up in the corner with every one's kind words and scratch them into a pile like some creepy, aging rodent, and, finally, the desire to make the night last for ever - which, to be honest, we gave a pretty red hot go at doing.

There are probably only a handful of times in your life where you can gather all the people you love, dig, and want to hang tuff with, into one place and ask them to bear with you while you indulge in the rare opportunity of humiliating and exposing yourself. It's a rare and strange privilege. And this rare, strange opportunity went off without a hitch. Lots of love, emotion, generosity, party pies, free wine, beautiful folks, sleazy dancing, achingly lovely songs, heartfelt speeches, good yarns, great friends, grinning family. We got to share it all with the beautiful folks of our extended Black Arm Band family with who we shared the journey and the film along the way. One of the great night's of this strange little life.

Below is a random arrangement of shots taken by the pretty damned great photographer Leah Robertson: