On Blu-ray - David Hare anticipates the new German edition of THE GOLD RUSH (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1925)

I’ve just ordered this German Arthaus 4K of last year's centenary restoration from Bologna of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. They very wisely dodged the 72 minute 1942 reissue with a new score and Chaplin’s own horrible, maudlin narration track. Like the wiser heads at Criterion ten years ago the decision was made to basically tell the Chaplin estate‘s insistence on solely supporting the 1942 abortion to fuck off. Happily in 2025 all parties re-proposed that choice.

This new restoration does several quite radical things. Apart from meticulous correction of jiitter, tears, emulsion damage and frame skipping, all of which were still there in the previous restoration, they made the fascinating and radical decision to print the frame right back to the full exposure aperture corners. This was originally cropped slightly to avoid consistent frame edge damage. Now as you can see in the video comparison clip, the exposed image is wider by maybe 5% and the full exposure is clean and visible. I think it’s fascinating. 

Anyway given German Arthaus/Canal has jumped the gun on Canal and Criterion who will release next year. I am happy to jump the gun with them. My order is due before December 31.

From the Personal Archive - Tom Ryan talks to D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus about their filmmaking - Part Two

D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus

In 2002 D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus spoke to Tom Ryan about their concert film, Down from the Mountain, and the art of low-budget documentary filmmaking. Part One of their conversation was published here on 2 November

PART TWO

Tom Ryan: Your work seems to have revolved around music and politics?

 

D A  Pennebaker: That’s kind of what we get access to. We would love to get access to large theatrical shows, but they go on stage and they don’t want us to be filming them dirty-handed, as it were, with our out-of-focus hand-held cameras. But, on the other hand, we can sometimes get backstage, as we did with Moon Over Broadway [their documentary about the Broadway play, Moon Over Buffalo].

I think that the problem the independent filmmaker faces is that he’s not a screenwriter, he’s usually not married to a famous movie star, he has none of things that studios want to put money into, so whatever he does he’s going to have to do on his own nickels. So it tends to be proscribed. You can get to the dancers, you can get to some musicians, though not all, you can get to politicians if they really don’t care what’s gonna happen to them. You learn to live with that and you make the best of it, and sometimes lightning strikes and you’re lucky.”

Chris Hegedus: I think that in the past when the process was a bit more expensive because we were shooting film and we were trying to raise money – not that it really helped – we would consider funding to shoot a film about a celebrity or a musician or a politician. But now that things have swung around and we’re shooting in mini-DV – startup is one of the cases of this – we’re able to go out without funding and explore subjects that programmers might not see as being interesting right off. I think that we may get into some subjects that normally we wouldn’t’ve.

DAP: We meet a different kind of person than the ordinary network executive or anyone working for a large-scale operation meets in terms of source material. We tend to meet musicians at the bottom of the ladder, and some of them are gonna be just as good at the bottom as they’re gonna be at the top. But they haven’t got there yet. So we get a chance to see things early on and, if we’re lucky, sometimes we get a ride. 

That’s kind of what we count on, because the big guys don’t have to do that. They can wait until the guy comes to them. That’s the only game in town when they get to the top and they don’t need us any more. But in the beginning we bring a kind of news value to incoming talent. 

 

Do you think that the whole “reality television” movement has brought the cinema  movement and the kind of work you both do into disrepute?

 

DAP: Mmm. That’s interesting. I don’t know what I think about that. I think that the 9/11 disaster was like a gigantic comet landing in New York. It wasn’t like the Zapruder footage which everyone thought was a one-off, an accident: that a guy with an 8mm camera happened to get a shot of the president of the United States as his head was being blown off. Even though he was surrounded by press, none of whom got it. 

In the case of 9/11, a lot of people got it, in different ways, in ways that are so astonishing that, if you could see the work being turned out by people who lived down in that area… We’ve seen things done by four or five people, and not just the French guys who shot the firemen stuff, without having any idea of how to structure or what they were doing. But they were so filled with the same anxiety that this thing drove into everybody’s brain… It was like, ‘How do I account for this? What have I done? Everything’s turned around.’ 

And the work hasn’t come out through broadcast. It’s not through any of the people that we normally expect to cover news. It was people who have these little cameras. And what I see is the dawn of a whole new documentary era in which people are going to happen to be there when something happens and don’t look for it on the evening news. 

You’re gonna get it in other ways, and what those ways are isn’t clear yet. Maybe on-line. Now it tends to be documentary films that people like ourselves make and try to smoosh into theatres when they can with a great loss of money for everybody. But they don’t have a way to get it into the lexicon, into the culture, because the studios are not going to take them on as film and because they can’t get to television. Television doesn’t want ’em. So they’re stuck with having to go in a weird way… 

But they’re doing it. And I think other ways are emerging and that you’re going to have an entirely new kind of documentary film which is not going to be at all what it’s been. And people are gonna get used to this and remember when documentaries weren’t as long and were about little penguins. They’re gonna be something that studio films can’t do and that television can’t do for the simple reason that they weren’t able to cover this event except from a distance. Not in the way that everybody, in their terrible angst, wanted it to be covered.

 

But your films have always been that kind of “guerrilla filmmaking”...

 

DAP: That’s because we had no other choice. What else could we do? Nobody asked us out to Hollywood and told us, ‘Hey, there’s 500 dancers in there. Go help yourself.’ You get used to doing what you do and you learn how to do it well and it’s like Thai food. I suppose people who live in Thailand consider it gratuitous and are more interested in getting steaks from Canada or something. But for us, this is what we do and we try to do it so well that people will respond to it in the same way that they respond to anything else that’s done well.

 

Do you find that people have changed over the years in the way that they respond to the camera’s presence?

 

CH: For me, I feel like it’s been a process. Probably in the very beginning when Penny and his fellow cinema vérité filmmakers started out, I think that people didn’t understand what the process was enough to really know about it. I think by the time I started making these films in the ’70s people were aware of it. Certainly politicians were much more aware of the camera than they had been, especially the sound. They knew what sound could do that would be harmful to them. 

Now everyone has a camera, it seems, and I think in some ways it’s gotten a little easier because so many people are filming and so many people want to be a part of it because they’ve seen other people on it and it’s threatening but not as threatening because everyone’s being sprayed with it at this point. That was especially the feeling I got during startup, that it seemed to be more accepted.

James Carville, The War Room

DAP: But you know I don’t think that James Carville [in The War Room] behaved any differently than Kennedy did 20 years before. To me, if you come in with a lot of equipment and five people carrying cameras and it’s a big deal and you set ’em all up and you command the forces of without, then of course that’s something that takes people away from their normal lives. But if that camera isn’t such a big deal, then it’s not a big deal for people. 

We had the same problems sitting in the war room as I had sitting in the Oval Office with Kennedy. He knew what it did, everybody did. They’re not dumb. They know what cameras do. But if you just seem to be interested in what they do, and not in how you operate your camera or trying to make an art form out of your movie or any of those things, then I think that’s what interests them because they really haven’t got time to help you make your little art film. Their only interest in the film is that get to see some little feedback of what they’re like. And that’s hard for them to get. 

They’re surrounded by ‘yes’ men, and the 6 o’clock news is showing something that’s scabrous or slanderous or whatever. So for them to actually see how they look when they work, that’s hard, and if they think that’s what you’re getting, then they’re interested in it. 

Like psychiatry. It’s something that really gets at them. And if you’re interested in that, in what they do, they understand that right away. Then the camera disappears. They don’t even see the camera. Sometimes when they say, ‘Gee, I never noticed you had a camera,’ that’s not quite true. But I understand what they mean.

 

But do you have to remain sceptical about your subjects, ever alert to ‘the trap of the camera’, to the way they might be putting on a performance simply because the camera’s there?

 

DAP: Well, with some people you might. But think with people that we’re interested in and that are doing what we think they’re gonna do, there are no surprises. That’s not such a problem.

CH: There are certain people that act for the camera, but if you film people while they’re doing things that are meaningful to them and that they’re very occupied with, they really can’t be bothered with you. And I think that people who act for the camera, like James Carville, act for everyone, which is why The War Room was such a terrific invention for him because there was a whole audience for him all the time.

 

In Down from the Mountain, John Hartford looks really ill when you interview him near the start, but once he’s on stage it’s as if something possesses him… [I subsequently learned that Hartford, who’s probably best known for composing “Gentle on My Mind”, suffered from non-Hodgkin lymphoma from the 1980s until his death in 2001.] 

 

CH: I know. It is incredible. I was really worried about him when I met him. He looked very sick and he was very sick. You go to shake hands with him when you meet him and he wouldn’t even shake your hand because he didn’t want to spread any kind of germs. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, how is he going to put on this concert and be the MC for it?’ 

But you know it’s like the way actors transform themselves on stage and musicians, a lot of ’em, are also actors. And he just got up there and he was splendid. He looked better than almost anyone else in the film with his hat and his outfit. He just came alive and it was amazing to watch.”

 

I understand you two met as a result of Town, Bloody Hall?

 

CH: No, we didn’t meet as a result of Town, Bloody Hall, but that was one of the first projects that we did together.

 

So…

 

DAP (whispering conspiratorially): She came in to see us looking for a job. I was really about to go bankrupt at the time, but I didn’t want to let her escape. So I said, ‘Yes, of course you can have a job.’ I hired her immediately. I don’t think we paid her very quickly, but we hired her.

CH: I was under the false impression that there was money to be made.

DAP: We had a good front.

Who do you think are the good documentary filmmakers these days?

 

DAP: There’s quite a few.

CH: “I think Nick Doob, our partner on this film, is an amazing filmmaker who’s just done a wonderful film called Schooling Jewel, about a high school student in mid-west America.

Germaine Greer, Norman Mailer, Town Bloody Hall

DAP: I think Ross McElwee. I think there’s a number of good filmmakers around whose work I don’t know very well. I’ve seen a lot of films in the past couple of years that tell me that people have figured out how to do it. It’s how Charlie Parker must have felt: that five years later everyone was playing like him. It makes you feel good.

 

Frederick Wiseman?

DAP: Sure. He’s a very hard worker and very obsessed and his films are very interesting. They’re hard, and you’ve really gotta pay attention to them, but they’re unique. There’s nobody else doing that.”

 

Albert Maysles?

 

DAP: Sure, terrific filmmaker. He’s a good cameraman and he has people around him who are good editors and they’ve worked out a way of working together that is very effective. People figure out how to do things their way. We don’t all do them the same way. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in front of an editing table, but he’s a fantastic cameraman. He shot with us on Monterey. He gets people who understand what he wants to do and they figure out how to do the editing…

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison ponders ELLA McCAY (James L Brooks, USA, 2025)

Emma Mackey as Ella McCay

Broadcast News is one of my favourite movies so I homed in on Ella McCay the new film ending a fifteen year retirement by  its creator James L. Brooks.  He’s eighty five years old now. His work is most notable in TV - Mary Tyler Moore, The Simpsons, Rhoda but his movies are substantial - Spanglish, As Good as it Gets and (less so) Terms of Endearment.

 Ella McCay has arrived  as the big Xmas attraction, trailing terrible reviews.  It’s a big (two hour, all-star) theatrical feature. Impeccably scored by Hans Zimmer and shot by Robert Elswit, from the Paul Thomas Anderson films. I often found myself laughing out loud  at it but I can see where the film’s bad press is coming from.

Emma Mackey  (get it) is, unprecedented for a thirty four year old female, the Lt. Governor of a state which might be Rhode Island, where they filmed.  Her boss Albert Brooks accepts a post in the Obama administration and resigns leaving her in charge for the remaining fourteen months of his term, despite the fact that her reformist zeal sends people to sleep in meetings. (“Would you like to hear about my favourite community health program?” “God, no!”)

Jamie Lee Curtis, Emma Mackey, Ella McCay

The film, draws from a formidable talent bank. First up we get a narrator (”You are truly blessed if you gave never experienced other people’s normal, happy families as a small stab in the heart”) who it took me half the picture to recognise as an older Julie Kavner, collaborator of Woody Allen and the voice of Marge Simpson. Add on Jamie Lee Curtis, Brooks from Broadcast News, also director of the great Defending Your Life, and Woody Harrelson, whose appearances lift the movie each time he shows up. I don’t think the people writing about film now were alive when all these great talents peaked.

The film also fields some surprise discoveries. Kumail Nanjiani looks like he’s part of the scenery the first time we see him but, given the chance to move up from his voice acting and walk-ons, he becomes one of the film’s dominant, endearing characters. His scene with the director’s son Joey Brooks, about overtime for their security trooper detail is great and the follow-up when the star bawls them out, while being deeply grateful for their loyalty is a show piece of writing and performance.

There are quite a few of those. The appearance of Becky Ann Baker as Jack Lowden’s nasty mum and Kathleen Choe’s hard bargaining Majority Leader impress as iceberg tips of their back stories.

I like the surprise introduction of the lead’s “not-agoraphobic” brother Spike Fearn’s girlfriend, a year after he stopped taking her calls. She turns out to be black comic Ayo Edebiri. Their uneasy but so suitable relationship is James Brooks in top form.  However the scandal that topples the lead’s career is a convenience no more plausible than the hoked-up impeachment of President Martin Sheen half way through The West Wing.

So what’s really wrong with Ella McCay? Brooks set out to make an up-date of the Frank Capra comedies but he didn’t have Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to front the project. Emma Mackey and Jack Lowden give it their best but they come over more like Megan Fox and Mike Myers getting their big break into serious acting, which is a short fall. I was never convinced that I was watching the first thirty two year old female deputy governor and her "ticking time bomb" husband. 

My excuse for not approving what is a polished and ambitious attempt to mix class entertainment and Trump era comment (that only becomes evident in the last and irresistible scene) is that I’d seen better. I don’t know what all those knocking reviewers can offer.

On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes Radiance editions of WHITE NIGHTS (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 195) & UN FEMME DOUCE (Robert Bresson, France

Two new Blu-rays from the estimable Radiance label, out this month. First screen above in B&W is from Visconti's 1957 Le Notti Bianche/White Nights, itself an adaptation of Dostoievsky's novel, which Robert Bresson ironically would adapt a few years later as Four Nights of a Dreamer. The remaining screens, in color, are from Bresson's 1969 Une Femme Douce, his first film not in B&W.

Radiance's master of the Visconti is taken from a 4K restoration made a few years ago which was previously released un-subtitled on the Italian label Cristaldi. Radiance's own mastering is vastly superior in resolution, grain management and grayscale and the disc sports a couple of hours of beautifully curated extras. I am not a great fan of the picture, and after watching this again still not. But as soon as the focus is taken off the two leads the movie's completely artificial realism (down to a reconstructed city of Livorno fabricated in Cinecitta Stage 5) everything lifts to giddy heights.  

Visconti was following up after the apparent commercial failure of Senso (which is a complete masterpiece) and was trying to appease the neo-realist critics who disapproved of so much decadence . But his own far better sense of theatre and layering of style almost saves White Nights from succumbing to the maudlin charms of a totally Bambi-in-the-headlights performance from Maria Schell. Marcello Mastroianni is also directed to play a possibly impossible part as a goofy momma's boy. 

The rest of the picture's stylistic influences are fascinating, and outrageously beautiful. It further benefits from the first fully credited DOP title from Rotunno, who bends realism beyond the scale with a Cinecitta Stage 5 recreation of Livorno in high chiaroscuro, as though harking back to the late 30s and Carne's Trauner studio rebuilt Hotel du Nord/Canal St. Martin of 1938. And there is a short but devastatingly beautiful theme track from Nino Rota.

Radiance's Une Femme Douce is first time for this title in English friendly release and Radiance have given it their now expectedly classy mastering. Bresson's treatment of the Dostoyevsky story seems to fit like a glove with his direction of actors as "models" and thus he gives us, with Dominique Sanda's constantly averted gaze and relative but deceptive impassivity, the next suicidal heroine in his canon, after the earlier Mouchette. Again Radiance's disc is graced with a plethora of extras. 

These discs are literally catnip for collectors.

At the Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane Film Festivals and the Current Cinema from 9 January 2026 - Rod Bishop analyses NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard Linklater, France/USA, 2025)

Christmas/New Year is a bumper season for cinemas, but you have to wonder how Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s loving tribute to the French New Wave, will fair in Event Cinemas at this time of year. 

Godard, Breathless and the French New Wave are probably not top-of-mind interests for most holiday punters, when they can opt for Avatar: Fire and Ash or a day at the beach, or the tennis, or the cricket...maybe not the cricket…

So far, Nouvelle Vague’s box office in cinemas has been minimal.

Made on a budget of $US10m with Netflix acquiring the streaming rights for $4m; at the time of writing this note, it has only had a cinema release in four territories: France, where it grossed $862,000; Romania, $11,600; Russia, $159,000; and The Netherlands, $53,500. Some ‘select’ cinemas in USA have screened the film to qualify it for the Oscars.

This Australian release will come before cinema releases in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.

In Nouvelle Vague, Roberto Rossellini refers to the Cahiers du Cinema crowd as “a circle of cinemaniacs”. It’s an apt description of Film Alert 101 readers also, but is there an audience for this film beyond such cinemania?

Jade Phan-Gia as Phuong Maittret; Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg; Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard;
Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo

Instead of developing characters, Linklater has reduced everyone to a caricature, played by lookalike actors. There’s a solitary, notable exception in Zoey Deutch playing Jean Seberg, and she manages to come close to a three-dimensional performance in a film populated by two-dimensional cut-outs.

The lookalikes stream by: there’s Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Belmondo, Demy, Varda, Resnais, Rouch, Rissient, Melville, Seberg, Coutard, Bresson, Schiffman and de Beauregard.

But the high-point of this film is Linklater’s 60-minute recreation of the Breathless shoot. 

Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo; Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg

In pre-production, Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) tells his cameraman Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) that he wants “guerilla” filmmaking. Handheld, no lights and no sync sound as he’ll be using the very lightweight and very noisy Cameflex Éclair, a camera Coutard at least had some experience with during World War II. 

Godard also wants Ilford film stock, designed for stills photography, not movies, and he believes it can be used by splicing the small rolls together for the movie camera. Coutard agrees: if the splices go through a projector, they should go through the camera. 

True to his word, the debut director’s frenzied guerilla shooting style, with no lip sync, drives most on set into bewilderment and despair.

The first day’s shoot ends after two hours, with Godard claiming “I’m out of ideas”. 

Day two and the cast and crew are in the Dupont Montparnasse café having finished shooting well before lunch. 

Godard deliberately disregards continuity; Seberg’s make-up artist is told to leave because “there is no make-up in this movie”; Seberg wants to quit on day three; by day five the script girl is asking Godard “Let me get this straight. Tolmachoff wants to play a gangster named Balducci. He didn’t show up so our publicist named Balducci, is going to play the gangster, but you’ve changed his name to Tolmachoff?” “Exactly” is the reply.

Coutard deadpans to Godard: “If they never let you make another film, you’ll be a world-class dolly grip”. On day six an expensive stuntman is stood down and Rivette gets to play his dead corpse instead.

Richard Linklater

By day eight, the cast and crew have an early morning call and wait in the café until Godard abruptly cancels the day’s shoot. “Maybe he’s quitting” says Seberg hopefully.

Next day, they meet up again in the café with Godard directing only one exterior shot before declaring “Let’s go eat. We’re done for the day. I’m hungry”. 

By day 10 he’s called in sick and producer de Beauregard finds him in the café playing pinball. “You can’t call in sick. In two weeks, we’ve had eight half days of work, some only two hours long”. He threatens to close the production down. 

They are not even halfway through the shoot, or halfway through Linklater’s recreation of the shoot. Somebody asks about the schedule. Someone else replies: “What schedule?”

For a film destined to be so influential on filmmakers and audiences alike, it’s a remarkably irreverent approach from a director marked out for greatness and blessed with an ego that would put the current English Test team to shame.

Godard’s jump-cut in Breathless revolutionized filmmaking, and he’s often mentioned as one of a handful of directors considered to have changed film language, forever. There’s only a passing reference to jump cuts in Nouvelle Vague, and it comes during a conversation between Godard and his bemused editors:

“We are not cutting any scene. We’re cutting within a scene…we’re going to cut what we can to create a new rhythm.”

“It’ll be choppy. Abrupt.”

“It’ll be amazing.”

“It’ll be disconnected like jumping everywhere.”

“Absolutely. Let’s make everything jump.”

Perhaps Godard’s approach to filmmaking is best condensed in his own words: 

“Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires four minutes of actual directing. I prefer to have five minutes work for the crew – and keep the three hours to myself for thought.”

Others mentioned: Marc Pierret (on-set reporter); Richard Balducci (publicist); Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (critic, actor); Amarilù Parolini (screenwriter, secretary Cahiers du Cinema); Michel Mourlet (critic); Pierre Kast (screenwriter, director); Claude Mauriac (essayist); Jacques Rozier (screenwriter, director); André Labarthe (actor, producer); Françoise Arnoul (actress); Juliet Greco (singer, actress); Jean Cocteau; Liliane David (actress); Georges Sadoul (critic); Pierre Braunberger (producer); José Bénazéraf (erotic filmmaker); Phuong Maittret (make-up); Daniel Boulanger (novelist); Michel Fabre (writer)

 

Happy 11th Birthday to and from FILM ALERT 101

Vale David Stratton 1939-2025

Happy Birthday to Film Alert 101. This blog started up in November 2014. Since that time there have been 3177 posts and, allegedly according to the stats kept by the blog itself 2,321,193 page views. Over the last twelve months the page views have exceeded 708,000. The highest viewed post over the last 12 months may perhaps be a surprise to many, myself included, but it was signposted as an Open Letter to Bill Mousoulis about Angie Black’s THE FIVE PROVOCATIONS. It was posted way back on 13 September 2018 and I cant really explain why it would continue to be so favoured. If you want to read it  click here  

The highest page views of all time have been recorded for a fiery piece from the late David Stratton who, back in August 2020 took serious exception to MIFF caving in and withdrawing the film THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN from its line-up. David’s piece click here  followed an earlier one by Tom Ryan, also in the top ten of all time click here and both of them led to a strong response from critic Karl Quinn which is also in the Top Ten. click here Nothing like a bit of film festival controversy, as I discovered when, way back in 2016, I published what was for a long time the most read post, a piece by Tony Rayns about the state of the Busan Film Festival and the sacking of its then director click here 

Here’s Tony’s final paragraph of that one.

“I had very little first-hand knowledge of the “dark days” under military governments in Korea (my first visit to the country was in 1988, when the worst was over), but I know from Russia, China and Singapore amongst other countries how authoritarian governments work. They don’t believe in debate and don’t tolerate opposing points of view. Their first instinct is not to meet opposition with counter-arguments but to silence it. When Busan Metropolitan City Council tells BIFF not to screen a documentary that’s critical of the government, it’s a textbook example of an attack on free speech and an impulse to silence opposing voices. Apparently Korea’s right-wing politicians haven’t noticed or understood the changes since 1993. Apparently they are nostalgic for the “dark days” of censorship, of silencing dissenting voices and of strict social control. I’ve always thought that Korea has a very bright future, and I’ve said so in public many times, but the pig-headed political tactics of Busan’s city council mark a step back into the past. It makes no sense to me.”

 

Sentiments that are still relevant all over…

 

Over the last twelve months the following people were contributors and I thank them all: Janice Tong, Rod Bishop, Bruce Hodsdon, Barrie Pattison, Tom Ryan, David Hare, John Baxter, Joel Archer, Frank Shields, Pat Fiske, Adrian Danks, Michael Organ, Ray Edmondson, James Vaughan, Bruce Beresford, Alena Lodkina, Peter Tammer, John Timlin, Barrett Hodsdon and Zac Tomé.

If you click on any of the names above it will take you through to one of their contributions.

At the Greek and Italian Film Festivals - Janice Tong embraces a Trilogy: Life's Labyrinths, Part 1 - ATHENS MIDNIGHT RADIO (Renos Haralambidis, Greece, 2024)

The voyage back from the far side of a metaphoric world had taken almost a year through a fogged maze of days and hours undone. Throughout, I have been an impersonator of the small-spirited and bumbling adventurer Phileas Fogg (courtesy of a recent viewing of the comic and alarming meteoric talent of one David Tennant), and suffice to say, it was not only in name that we were equals. This year of quiet unassuming mourning where films were watched unnoticed, passed me by with a meandering haze of interceding narratives that neither yielded joy nor nostalgia. In fact, I had not noticed much but for a lack of appetite. 

 The Italian Film Festival changed all that. Maybe it was time, too. I had selected more than seven films to be watched (managing only three in the end), I did, however, include the great Visconti’s Death in Venice in the same season – this other film, newly restored, was screening at the Ritz in Randwick and nicely complemented the three films. And ending this period of weekend film-going with a poetic, lyrical and infinitely beautiful film from the Greek Film Festival (first time attendee to this one), Athens Midnight Radio. And it is with this film – and the end of my chapter of disquiet – where I shall begin. 

Renos Haralambidis, Athens Midnight Radio

Nyhterinos ekfonitis | Athens Midnight Radio 

Written and directed by Renos Haralambidis, who also plays the main protagonist in the film, a lovelorn late night radio announcer who is about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday on air. This film is pretty much a one-hander and Haralambidis carries it off magnificently. Part recollection, part reflection, on the unrelenting onset of time; this is the announcer’s call into the darkness – for a return to love, to youth, and perhaps to the better days already missed, those long gone years. With this, he has cast a message in a bottle, and set it adrift in a vast ocean of the unknown. His one wish – to be reunited, on air, off air, into the distance of the night – with a love he’d let go a long time ago. He has given her the duration of his session to get back in contact, to call in if she happens to be listening. 

So this night is a story crafted in memories of his youth, where the city’s glorious ancient monuments, tokens of his lover’s meeting spots, and the music, a nostalgic signalling of lost days – many beautiful pieces, especially the repeated aria from The Pearl Fishers, Je Crois Entendre Encore (I Think I Hear Again), differently rendered each time. And at each hour, passed-time was marked through its announcement by an analogue tape recording (a hark back to ancient Hellenistic days where the hours of the night were announced via water clocks). 

Contributing to this film’s hypnotic quality is Haralambidis’ sonorous midnight voice, like a confessional, this internal monologue is sometimes punctuated by music, sometimes by callers into the radio station, and sometimes, most memorably, by the recordings of messages left by his lover on his answer phone. In this way, Haralambidis invites us into not only his personal history and desires but also identifies to us his current mood: as a man of nostalgia; we immediately understand that he is a collector of songs, for the messages have a musicality of their own. 

The characters, although unnamed (and probably because they are unnamed) made their love story infinitely relatable. The anonymity a city like Athens offers is depicted none more clearly than in the scenes of the midnight marathon runners preparing for their race, the warm up exercises were shown in close-ups: the back of heads (one with headphones in place), fragments of limbs, arms, hands, feet – as though preparing the viewer for those other fragments, sculptures of Greek gods, and monumental ruins like the ever-watchful Acropolis, that featured prominently throughout the film. Kostas Gikas’ cinematography paints the city in slow motion, the quiet city released from tourists and workers commands our eyes, paired with a soundtrack (provided by the radio announcer) demands our ears’ attention too. Even a remembered ‘performance’ from an isolated phone booth brought out a sense of yearning, nostalgic for a youth long gone, for a simpler way of life. 

This film is also Haralambidis’ love story to Athens. As the night paints its stars across the sky, the narrative illuminates and awakens the secrets long buried there. In what seems to be another life, the announcer was once an Evzone, part of a light infantry that stands guard at monuments. In recalling its elaborate handover parade, which for me at least, has always been a curious mix of choreography, solemnity and discipline. This sentiment and tone matches perfectly the magnificent, but silent monuments standing sentinels across the city in sleep, where the vanished lover of his youth, a dancer, leaps and twirls across these landscapes. The most touching scenes were those where she had danced in front of him. First at Syntagma Square in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where he was stationed. At the time, even her beautiful grand jetés were unable to stir his heart, marking the place where their love story began to unravel. And now, in a dreamscape, and Haralambidis with eyes closed, reclined against the sublime fragments from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, were of Demeter (whose skirts he leant against) and Persephone, and Dionysus nearby, all in a kind of limbo and frozen in action. 

These replica sculptures located at the Acropolis metro station in Athens are mute, as though their stories, currently voiceless, are asking to be discovered – slow mirage-like sequences where everyday workers pass by these works, and the sleeping Haralambidis, unseen. Whilst his lover, a ballet dancer, portrayed wonderfully by Eleftheria Stamou, a dancer herself with Greek National Opera Ballet, is as alluring and mysterious as these ancient gods, and as graceful as Athens, her city, especially when dawn breaks. 

Does he get to reunite with her? This dream lover? You’ll have to watch the film to find out. Perhaps the mood and meaning of this film is best described by Haralambidis in his own words: “I always appreciate Athens as a city where you can be in the arms of eternity as trains go by and also amongst the crowds, which come and go, as if indifferent to these surroundings. And it is in the underground of the city's metro, at the Acropolis metro station where the exhibit of the replicas of the statues of the eastern gable end of the Parthenon, that I discovered the stars for my new film Athens Midnight Radio.” 

This quote is from a beautiful short article on the website of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles where Haralambidis speaks eloquently about his film and Athens. 

 The Greek Film Festival ran in October in Australia this year. 

The Italian Film Festival ran in September and October in Australia this year. 

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 Look out for the next instalments coming soon, on La Grazia by director Paolo Sorrentino and Il tempo che ci vuole | The Time it Takes by Francesca Comencini 

CINEMA REBORN NEWS - Multi-ticket passes for 2026, Dates, Volunteers Wanted, Tax Deductible Charitable Donations

 Multi-ticket discount passes for 2026

For the first time we will be able to offer multi-ticket concession passes that will admit to any five or any ten titles in our program. The five film pass will cost $80 and the ten film pass will cost $140. These are substantial savings on general admission prices at the Randwick Ritz and Hawthorn Lido. When added to the concessions available to Movie Club Members at the theatres and the cheapest student discount tickets on offer anywhere we would like to think we are making it possible for our audience to sample a seriously large part of the total program. Details of the multi-ticket purchases will be available early in the new year when we announce the first four titles for 2026.

2026 Program

We are quite long way down the road to confirming our Cinema Reborn 2026 titles. A number of previously unrepresented countries and directors will be featuring in our program. Some of the great film-makers will also be represented for the first time including the esteemed film-makers pictured below and at the bottom of the text.

Dates for 2026

Cinema Reborn is changing its programming arrangements for 2026 to enable our program to be presented over two weekends. In Sydney at the Randwick Ritz we will be opening on Friday 1 May and closing on Sunday 10 May. In Melbourne the season at the Hawthorn Lido will commence on Friday 8 May and close on Sunday 17 May.

Volunteers

Cinema Reborn always has a need for volunteers to help on our information desk and to monitor the door at the screenings. If you would like to know more send your name to cinemareborn2025@gmail.com and mention which city you are in and your availability (Nights, Weekends, Daytime)

Charitable Donations

The major cost of presenting Cinema Reborn comes from the screening fees paid to archives and producers. Since our inception supporters have understood the need for continuing support to ensure that the annual season is able to present the very latest and very best international and Australian film restorations.

Tax deductible charitable donations have enabled us pay these fees and keep our admission charges to regular Ritz and Lido prices (with the lowest student concessions of any similar film-related event). We have once again set up a page via the Australian Cultural Fund to receive donations of any size, large or small. You can find it IF YOU CLICK ON THIS LINK