Pordenone - Le Giornate del Cinema Muto - Barrie Pattison previews the 40th edition of the pre-eminent Silent Film Festival - 2-9 October

It’s that time of the year again and what Google translate calls “the fesival of dumb films” is on again. It’s kind of agonising to not be there but they are offering the consolation prize - a selection of the offering streamed on line. It works out at about five dollars a movie so it’s something to fill the long hours of shut down and an easy introduction to the whole process of saving those first movies from permanently sliding into the void. 

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First past the post comes the Danish-German-British co-production Jokeren/Der Faschingskönig/Joker from the tail end of the silents, an impeccably made A feature potboiler filmed in Copenhagen and Berlin at a time when Nordisk Film was on the point of selling up.

It’s carnival in Nice - huge parade floats, streets full of revelers in costumes and draped with streamers, a setting we know from the work of the Russian emigré film makers. 

After a night of partying in his office (with velvet covered doors), lawyer Australia’s own Miles Mander is woken up with his current flame. Pierrots from the street are pounding on the door to have him come and take down the last deposition of the victim of an (off screen) car crash. The dying man presents Miles with a locket with a picture of titled Renée Héribel and a billfold of her letters. Don’t ask why.

As Miles has just had a visit from a trustee demanding return of his funds which had him gesture putting a pistol to his head, the blackguard sees a golden opportunity for blackmail. Meanwhile Henry Edwards (Elvey’s The Flag Lieutenant) is got up in a Joker outfit to match his reputation as unbeatable at cards. This is convenient because he gets to pluck the heart stitched on his sleeve and present it to the then current Mrs. Jacoby, Elga Brinck when he becomes interested.

She’s the sister of Renée, now Lady Powder, through her marriage to barely recognisable aristocrat the great Gabriel Gabrio (Tourneur’s Au nom de la loi, Pagnol’s Regain) who conveniently is obsessed with avoiding having his family name dragged through the filth. 

His interest in Miss Brink has Edwards intervene in the Savoy Hotel card game, where Mander is cleaned out, and arrange to have Renée’s pearls (which the bounder demanded as the price of the locket) lifted from him, in a mix up with costumed players, and dropped in the casino reading room where she can find them when Gabrio notices they are missing.

Miles now sees the stakes raised and demands Elga’s hand to provide him entry to the nobility. Henry’s intervention is halted when henchmen tie him up in the garage but he uses his conveniently pocketed cigarette lighter to burn through the ropes, backs the car through the garage door and frustrates Mander’s schemes, winning Elgar in the process. The torn letters end trampled with fallen streamers.

Director Jacoby’s career stretches from the teens to 1960 including the Emil Jannings Quo Vadis and a string of musicals with his second wife Marika Rökk. The handling is impeccable - constant movement, good choice of angles smoothly edited together. Silent movie miming is at its peak. It takes a while to adjust to Edwards in lip rouge as a smooth man of affairs but the women are charmers and mustache curling Mander get the most out of the heavy role. His career was peaking at this point with him just having directed his own The First Born  script. All this said, The Joker  is unfortunately still a cliché heavy melodrama that even the Drury Lane Audience in whose terms it was conceived would have found creaky. 

The restoration was a marvel, sharp and blemish-free with the bulk printed in an agreeable simulation of the amber tint with blue for night exteriors and the familiar cut between them on switching on a light looking as plausible as it ever will. The Pordenone live score was admirable.

Still to come is Wilfred Lukas’ 1920 Australian The Man from Kangaroo, written by Bess Meredyth, later to act in a series of her own and marry Michel Curtiz. This one is quite presentable, an advance on the team’s two year earlier Enemy Within though it does show the backward state of the local industry. 

Imported  D W Griffith actor  Lukas (Man’s Genesis, Enoch Arden) manages competent film craft and performances, with appealing heroine Brownie Vernon first found playing with kittens, like Linda Darnell in Mark of Zorro which Meredyth will write, and doing Phiramus and Thisby with reverend-to-be Snowy Baker over the wall dividing their gardens.

Agnes Vernon, Snowy Baker, The Man from Kangaroo

Snowy stops the tinies fighting over lollies and teaches them the manly art of fisticuffs (flashback to his triumphs in the ring where he looks quite plausible and giving a diving exhibition in a meter of water). He warns off the business man who happens to be Brownie’s guardian over his running the evil Black Swan pub (which we never see) and so the dastard contrives to have the parents take a dim view of pugilism for kids and get Snowy transferred to the tough district.

There the pug uglies wait behind the street corner to club a passer-by but reject Snowy because clerics never have any dosh, only to find they have to deal with him when they cosh the businessman who follows. 

The businessman gratefully has Snowy assigned to the town near his cattle station. This, coincidentally, is next to the property owned by Brownie, who shows up when Snowy sets up services in the main street hall. The anti-wowser nasties are headed by threatening bad hat Wilf. Parson Snowy shuts down, worried for the women and children. What children - the small congregation is mainly ladies in their picture hats with a few weedy blokes at the front?

Another of Sid (Fatty Finn) Nichols’ art titles tells us that disillusioned Snowy has taken up the life of a station hand where he’s told by the black stockman that stolen cattle tracks lead to the adjacent property and that’s the last we hear about rustling. However fearing for Brownie’s safety, our hero vaults into the saddle and rides off to arrive when the low life guardian has decided to force the girl into marriage so that, as his wife, she can’t testify against him.

More action with Snowy follows - lollies all round. Happy end.

Baker’s stunting is showcased effectively, as well staged as the cowboy films of the day and later  - a chase through urban blight includes the jump off the Paddington overpass onto a passing van and then a car, taking command of the running canvas coach which the bad guys have commandeered at gunpoint and leaping off the bridge (dummies falling filmed from a distance). He actually does the drop into the saddle from the verandah roof that they send up in Hearts Of The West. They avoid him having to do any acting.

The fact that this is a transplanted cowboy movie, complete with W.S. Hart style punch up sky pilot, cattle rustlers, stage hold-up and frontier main street (nice establishing shot with the dog barking at the coach wheels) along with the lack of shaded characters removes Man From Kangaroo from serious consideration but it is passable entertainment and easily superior to the work being done around it in Australia.

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Defending Cinephilia 2020 (10) - Serious cinephile Michael Campi overcomes lockdown in pursuit of his calling

 Editor's Note: This is the final post in this series for 2020. If you would like to read the others CLICK HERE TO TAKE YOU THROUGH TO A PAGE WITH LINKS TO THEM ALL 

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A calendar year of sudden, unexpected upheaval and tragedy is nearly at an end as the pandemic continues to sweep the world regardless of the timelines we set ourselves. For some, the passing of these many months has been slow but for many of us engaged in following our various paths of cinephilia, the weeks and months proceeded curiously at quite a pace, especially in the many weeks of being confined to home for 23 hours a day with specific short-term exemptions. Much of our passion for cinema has been directed to the ever-increasing range of material on line, posted generously for free, by one payment per view or through longer term subscriptions. 

Marlene Dietrich, Angel

Melbourne Cinémathèque's weekly screenings through more normal years are always a high point for cinephiles in that city. In March 2020, the Cinémathèque followed its six film cross-section of the work of Vittorio de Sica with the announcement of three programmes devoted to the career of Marlene Dietrich. During the second screening which included Lubitsch's ANGEL, the potency of Dietrich's line "Travelling's becoming quite complicated, isn't it?" was only just becoming apparent.  Indeed, within days, cinemas had closed. Planned trips were cancelled or deferred. The final Dietrich programme couldn't be presented. Two festivals running in Melbourne cinemas were stopped in their tracks and the masterpiece with some of the greatest of Lubitsch touches was the last film I saw in a cinema until December.  

 

One of the most disappointing consequences was the postponement of an eight film season of some masterworks of Shimizu Hiroshi, one of the great Japanese filmmakers especially from the 1920s to 1940s. A collection of his major films had been in development stage for quite a while but was stifled by the increasingly destructive path of the virus. While three of the programmed films have been more broadly available on disc and otherwise through Criterion and Shochiku, several of the titles have been extremely difficult to see more recently such as the silent films ECLIPSE and A HERO OF TOKYO along with sound masterpieces like FORGET LOVE FOR NOW and the almost indescribably affecting A WOMAN CRYING IN SPRING, Shimizu's first talkie before he returned to silent films for a few more years. The failed opportunity to see these works in three programmes over a couple of weeks in a cinema setting is truly disappointing. Let's trust this can be rectified before too long.

Shimizu Hiroshi

 

Online viewing

 

Leaping ahead a few months to the end of August, when Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato became a part real and part virtual event, a later Japanese master's work was also out of view for most of the people who couldn't attend the films in real cinemas in that welcoming city. The Bologna festival's notes tell us Kawashima Yuzo "is the 'missing link' between the classical Japanese cinema and the New Wave." They screened six of his features theatrically but none in their online event. Only BAKUMATSU TAIYODEN (1957) is available on English subtitled commercial disc to my knowledge. Others have appeared on the MUBI streaming platform but only in certain territories and I don't believe they have become part of their continuing library. Let's hope the Bologna celebration will help to highlight the versatility and importance of this large body of work: nearly fifty features made in less than twenty years from the final months of World War 2 until the director's early death in 1963 at the age of 45. More on Il Cinema Ritrovato below. 

 

From May the deluge of online film festivals and other curated film events was burgeoning from its previous steady stream of mostly subscription viewing to become a visual tsunami of choices that's been ongoing ever since. This huge change to the cinephile's regular ways of watching old and new cinema seems irreversible. For some, watching a variety of great movies on one living room screen tended to have a dulling sameness of environment. Changing surroundings could be beneficial. Choices might be made to watch more visually spectacular films on a larger screen, Q&A and lecture sessions on the laptop, other material, less demanding visually, might be seen on a Tablet or iPad.  

 

The first of the curated festivals to take over a week of my viewing was "We are One: A Global Film Festival" in May with contributions suggested by over twenty film festivals, from the major A class events to exciting other suggestions from Annecy, Guadalajara, San Sebastian, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Sarajevo and more. A mixture of short films and features reminded us that over recent years some imaginative work makes its mark in a couple of festivals but doesn't become part of the more publicised global trail.  Specially rewarding films from a few years ago were two contrasting dance films, DANTZA (2018) by Telmo Esnal and LOS PASOS DOBLES (2011) by Isaki Lacuesta, both designed to work magical rhythms into the viewers' legs along with MARY IS HAPPY, MARY IS HAPPY (2013), the second film  by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit whose wonderful latest film HAPPY OLD YEAR is streaming in many places on Netflix now. Fukada Koji's THE YALTA CONFERENCE ONLINE (2020) is a wry look at that historical event by the theatre troupe Seinendan:  history seen through videoconferencing with women as Stalin and Roosevelt. Athina Rachel Tsangari's 24 FRAMES PER CENTURY (2013), Mati Diop's short film ATLANTIQUES (2009), her first short film and a precursor to the feature ATLANTICS, which is streaming at the moment, and the multi-director BRIDGES OF SARAJEVO (2014) were also highlights of a very stimulating week.

 

Mati Diop

Other festivals, some partly in cinemas and online, some completely virtual, provided some fine ways to see new films contrasted with curated older ones. The Far East Film Festival in Udine presented early chances to see Derek Tsang's BETTER DAYS (2019) with its school bullying theme, Layla Zhuqing Ji's VICTIM(S) (2020), a Malaysian Chinese noir thriller and Thop Nazareno's EDWARD (2019), which engages as we watch a quickly maturing adolescent caring for his father in a public hospital.  Sadly, some promising titles were geo-blocked and haven't reappeared. 

 

As another example of extended and generous cinephilia, part of the annual Locarno Film Festival could be streamed in August. Again we could see significant older and some newer films. Top of my list was another opportunity to see Garin Nugroho's magnificent MEMORIES OF MY BODY, first on view in 2018-19, a rich look at a very personal journey and a cinema counterpoint to Nugroho's second live performance event in Melbourne: THE PLANET - A LAMENT,  part of Asia TOPA just days ahead of the first Covid-19 restrictions being introduced in March. 

Garin Nugroho

 I was also pleased to see again Yeo Joon Han's vivacious 2008 musical SELL OUT! while Mouly Surya's WHAT THEY DON'T TALK ABOUT WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT LOVE reappeared after some festival screenings back in 2013.  It was timely to be reacquainted with Riri Riza's ATAMBUA 39 DEGREES CELSIUS from 2012. Several of Riza's other films are on Netflix at the moment. However, APPARITION (2012) was new to me, a potent tale of an order of Catholic nuns believing they would be undisturbed by the rigours of the new Marcos regime. The film's credits show the director as Vincent Sandoval, a fascinating filmmaker whose recent impressive new LINGUA FRANCA, part of the online Melbourne Queer Film Festival Interrupted is signed by Isabel Sandoval.  I was also impressed by new shorter works streamed from Locarno such as Hirai Atsushi's RETURN TO TOYAMA (the final image at bottom of this post), Viet Vu's AN ACT OF AFFECTION, Pham Ngoc Lan's THE UNSEEN RIVER and Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's AININSRI DAENG which takes a wry look at Thai cinema traditions and gender roles.  Locarno also provided online, though geo-blocked locally, films by Pasolini, Tanner, Rossellini, Duras, Yang, Akerman and many more. 

 

Closer to home, the Melbourne International Film Festival decided many months before opening night that this year's event would be completely virtual and available across Australia. In retrospect, this was a sensible decision rather than to find, as some other international festivals experienced, some films had to be dropped as producers or sales agents wouldn't give permission to show their work once festivals moved from cinemas to home screens. MIFF presented about a quarter of its usual number of features. However, of the three dozen films I watched, almost all were of a most pleasing high standard, sometimes conveniently grouped in booking bundles, making online purchase easier. Standouts were Catarina Vasconcelos' METAMORPHOSIS OF BIRDS with its beautifully textured 16mm colour images revealing a woman's relationship to the father who was almost nearly absent from his children, Jayro Bustamante's eerie third feature LA LLORONA, mixing ghost film horror with the exposure of rightwing political atrocities, and Valentyn Vasyanovych's ATLANTIS (one film that really needs a larger screen for our eyes to wander a very wide landscape). Three other highlights shared the filmmakers very personal experience: Myriam Verreault's KUESSIPAN, Faraz Shariat's NO HARD FEELINGS and Ulrike Ottinger's PARIS CALLIGRAMMES.  

 

Catarina Vasconcelos

This year Venice Film Festival also shared an online selection with some fine premieres such as Pedro Collantes' ART OF RETURN, Uberto Pasolini's NOWHERE SPECIAL, Ahma

Bahrami's THE WASTELAND, Adilkhan Yerzhanov's YELLOW CAT, while Shahram Mokri's CARELESS CRIME is his third feature after making an impact a few years ago with the one-take noir FISH AND CAT.  The new film experimentally looks at the awful event of nearly fifty years ago when a group of men decided to lock patrons in a cinema and set fire to the building during a screening of Masud  Kimiai's THE DEER.  Not long after Venice, a kind university streaming programme gave us the chance to see THE DEER in context with Ehsan Khoshbakht's FILMFARSI, an authoritative look at aspects of Iranian pre-revolutionary cinema. It's been interesting to see some of these films' journeys through later festivals.

 

Khoshbakht is also a curator of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. After nine successive editions, I had decided to take a break from another trip at Bologna's usual festival time. Of course the travel didn't happen.  Though postponed for two months, Bologna's legendary festival went ahead with indoor social distancing and more cinema screens to accommodate audiences.  The regular massive catalogue was produced and arrived with incredible speed to be consulted by those who opted for a certain payment level of the much reduced virtual event encompassing restored features and a couple of live presentations each day.  

 

Maureen O'Sullivan, Henry Fonda, Let us Live

Excellent copies of familiar Henry Fonda films were one focus of the programme: John Ford's THE GRAPES OF WRATH and YOUNG MR. LINCOLN looking specially fine. Bologna also gave us a rare chance to see John Brahm's LET US LIVE, something of a forerunner of Hitchcock's THE WRONG MAN. One of the most impressive inclusions was the restoration of another Iranian film, THE CHESS GAME OF THE WIND (1976) by Mohammad Reza Aslani, seen in a visually sumptuous restoration from recently rediscovered picture and sound elements which many thought lost for decades.  Since Bologna, the film has blazed a trail through international festivals and smaller Iranian events.  

 

Chess in the Wind

Meanwhile there was a continuous and often overlapping parade of other online festivals plus screenings from national events like the local Korean (sadly abandoned before the end) and Japanese film festivals.  The Taiwan Film Festival in Australia streamed some fine titles midyear while Taiwanese dialect films of half a century ago could be found from some specialist university and festival sites with a series of Taiwanese noir films streaming with discussions elsewhere on line as well. It's commendable that a selection of the unique Taiwanese dialect features of half a century ago has been restored and issued on disc with English subtitles.  However, its purchase from outside Taiwan seems complicated if payment is not by Taiwanese credit card.

 

One boutique festival designed for cinephiles was The Calvert Journal: 7 Days of New East Cinema online. I was specially impressed by George Itzhak's short film from Uzbekistan, WAITING FOR THE SEA, which asks the question if an electronic music festival can be powerful enough to draw attention to the disaster that caused the Aral Sea to dry up. Damjan Kozole's HALF-SISTER is a serious and sometimes humorous look at a divided family in the Balkans while Bulgarian filmmaker Hristiana Raykova's THE PIT is a 2019 documentary set around a communal mineral pool on the Black Sea, a popular meeting place for locals but its free access is threatened by developers. 

Mark Rappaport

 As a bright contrast to much of the year's viewing, the Munich Filmmuseum can't be thanked enough for streaming, a few at a time, a large number of the features and shorter essay works by Mark Rappaport, probably best known for his feature ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES (1992). It was a refreshing delight to explore the imagination in Rappaport's I, DALIO, THE VANITY TABLE OF DOUGLAS SIRK, JOHN GARFIELD and L'ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À DACHAU among many more. These demonstrated a particularly devoted passion for the history of cinema together with an extraordinary memory for detail and nuance. For several weeks, this was a glorious tribute to our love of and inspiration from the movies. 

 

Several contributors to this year's Cinephilia series have commented on Pordenone's Le Giornate del CInema Muto, the long-running silent film festival held in the beautiful Friuli district in North-East Italy around early October.  Because of clashing festivals and mostly because of other travel arrangements, I've managed to attend this event only once, back in 2017, when the timing was perfect between ending a trip through the Balkans and starting some real relaxation around Lake Maggiore. This year's festival was mostly a virtual event but one developed in the most inviting way by cinephiles as an online substitute for actually being in the city. Each day festival director Jay Weissberg introduced the programme from a different attractive part of town: reminders of the visual beauty of the place for those unable to be there this year and acting as a potent lure for newcomers. Eleven film sessions were presented over eight days, seemingly a light load compared to other weeklong events but when factoring in many hours of zoom-like discussion sessions each day,  it was quite an immersive time. The explanatory Giornate video sessions included regular daily discussions on the presentation of music for and new books about silent film plus a panel of critics and archivists talking about each film programmed. 

 

Festivals such as those in Pordenone, Bologna, Locarno etc. offering streaming options this year have broadened their audiences, some of whom could never be there in person (distance, timing) and others who may not have been as encouraged as this year when the excitement of the programmes was brought into their homes. 

 

Abwege

In this year of unusually restricted movement, it was an inspired idea to begin Pordenone's week with a programme called "The Urge to Travel", a collection of short actuality reels showing New York, Kraców, Bruges, Trieste and Ostend among other locations that nearly a century ago were viewed keenly by armchair travellers in cinemas around the world. Other contributors have discussed their favourite Pordenone features this year. My own highlights were GUO FENG (NATIONAL CUSTOMS), a late Chinese film from 1935 co-directed by Luo Mingyou and Zhu Shilin co-starring the legendary and tragic Ruan Lingyu (in her final screen appearance) with the sprightly Li Lili best known for her films directed by Sun Yu.  Pabst's ABWEGE from 1928 with Brigitte Helm glowed in a luminous restored copy.  A lively roster of musicians for silent films can be heard in both Bologna and Pordenone each year.  There's a rich range of performance styles and informed choices of interpretation.  Of all of these, the accompaniment which impressed me the most this year was the one for ABWEGE by Mauro Colombis who should be familiar to those in Sydney who have been fortunate to hear his work there. Colombis' piano accompaniment of great subtlety and introspection was ideal for a film of many contrasting moods and striking visuals, deftly creating an atmosphere that never called attention to itself.  Let's hope silent film enthusiasts in Melbourne and other cities can hear his work soon.

 

Guo Feng

Blu-ray releases of special interest. 

 

WIth so much streaming to many sizes of home screens, let's not overlook some outstanding releases on Blu-ray and DVD.  One of the casualties of Covid-19 in the second-half of the international film festival year, KRABI 2562 premiered at Locarno in 2019 but its normal festival trail was interrupted by the pandemic.  It's the first joint feature by two directors with significant followings: Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong.  Just released is a Blu-ray disc from Anti-Worlds in the U.K. which adds a commentary by the directors to a very fine copy of the feature film. The disc is packed with extras from an experimental perpetual loop of a sequence taken from the film, GHOST SONATA which is Ben Rivers' diary film about KRABI 2562, THE AMBASSADORS - the directors' first collaboration, some short films by Anocha Suwichakornpong along with several contributions by the sound designer. 

Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong

Another other essential purchase reflects cinephilia at a peak with Criterion's Blu-ray and DVD third box set in their Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project series. The six titles will be familiar to those who have followed one of the recurring strands at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. For most of the films, it's their first first release on disc at least with English subtitles. Solás' LUCIA, Ismail's AFTER THE CURFEW, Babenco's PIXOTE, Oro's DOS MONJES, Hondo's SOLEIL Ô and Beyzaie's DOWNPOUR.  A wide international selection from filmmakers whose other works we should be able to see more easily. The usual Criterion extras are bountiful including a booklet and many disc supplements.

 

Much has been written about Bong Joon-ho's reworking of two of his colour films into monochrome versions: MOTHER and PARASITE.  Ash Mayfair's THE THIRD WIFE (2018) enjoyed success at international festivals and some commercial release including in Australia following its screening at the Sydney Film Festival. In its original colour version, the film is a sumptuous portrait of strict traditions in 19th century rural Vietnam. The director decided to rework her film into the monochrome BETWEEN SHADOW AND SOUL, in the process eliminating the original soundtrack including the dialogue, replacing them with a completely new atmospheric score by the same composer An Ton That and occasional English subtitles. As only a little of the dialogue is translated, various interpretations may develop in some scenes adding another layer to the experience of the original film. The film is also available for streaming in some territories. 

 

Ash Mayfair on DVD

Moving image celebrations in gallery spaces

 

For a month from early August, the Tate Modern gallery in London presented the first major Steve McQueen exhibition for twenty years since he won the Turner Prize in 1999. Over a dozen works contrasted his sculpture, photography and film. Let's hope this will travel widely as a reminder that McQueen is such an important visual creator. His most recent SMALL AXE cycle has been hailed for its five narratives which powerfully investigate aspects of the sociopolitical situation in the U.K. in the latter part of the 20th Century. The urgency of their heartfelt stories extends beyond the shores of Britain.  McQueen's narrative films have such strong scripts that what is not discussed so much is the cinephile aspect of the impressive visual appearance of his work extending beyond his installations. SMALL AXE develops five unique and separate films in a far more imaginative way than many a usual longform episodic series.  Each work is presented in a different aspect ratio (although reports suggest the small screen reality might reduce this to three) and the running times are very different for each film.  Three of the films have music by one of the most striking of today's composers, Mica Levi whose scores for MONOS, JACKIE and UNDER THE SKIN have added much to the success of these works. 

 

Steve McQueen

Cinephilia much closer to home for me, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, west of Melbourne, is presenting MONTAGES: The Full Cut 1999-2015: Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, running until March 14, 2021. This exhibition presents together for the first time the eight montage films by artist Moffatt and her collaborator Hillberg, spanning sixteen years of their working together. The gallery announces "The exhibition is an ode to cinema and its form, offering unprecedented insight into the stereotypes that populate our collective cultural imagination". The films include LIP (1999), ARTIST (2000), REVOLUTION (2008) and the most recent THE ART (2015).

 

Tracey Moffatt

A long awaited in-depth volume in English on a great European filmmaker. 

 

The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions.  Tom Ryan's enquiries into the work of Douglas Sirk have extended through the course of the many years of his exploration of writings about cinema history, styles and authorship. I still have the passionate and enthusiastic correspondence from the time of his first arrival in the UK in the early 1970s to study with Robin Wood. His excitement at  discovering the wonders of the films of Douglas Sirk, which his research could access through archives in London, are still very palpable.  Through his many longer articles and shorter weekly film reviews, the author has engaged using his elegant prose to exquisitely reveal elements which excite him in the cinema.  This is highlighted in this unique volume in English to examine every film directed by Sirk in Europe and the U.S.A.  Every film is discussed in detail with chapters devoted to contextualised groupings of the American films. When the writer first began his study of Sirk's work, only a few films were available generally in cinemas, 16mm prints or shown on television before the age of video recordings. Today's readers should celebrate the fact that the majority of Sirk's most pivotal films are now easy to access in various video formats and with deeper investigation all of his films can be seen one way or another. 

Defending Cinephilia (8) - Simon Killen, another Melburnian, survives a lockdown year

Kelly Reichardt

Vidor and Reichardt in Berlin

The cinematic year started for me in Berlin as usual. Passing through Singapore airport, an elevated level of masking, and the first temperature testing sites being set up at various gates were ominous motifs for the year ahead. A very disappointing line-up at Berlinale but two fine highlights: The exhaustive King Vidor retrospective (I was able to see only STELLA DALLAS and THE REAL ADVENTURE, but reports from others were all pretty joy-filled). And what would turn out to be my final real life festival screening, both in Berlin and 2020 (gulp!) was Kelly Reichardt’s FIRST COW. And took place in the glorious jewel that is the Friedrichstadt Palast. Rarely has a screening venue been as incongruous – but what a beautifully made piece of cinema this film is. Later in the year I would shed a quiet tear at the notion of watching it on a small screen stream. 

Hear My Eyes

Shortly after Berlin, an even bigger screening: SUSPIRIA at Hamer Hall. A collective named Hear My Eyes had commissioned a new score which was performed live – and very large indeed. King Gizzard Wizard mini orchestra created a buzzing and tense score that gave the viewer an entirely new angle on the Dario Argento film. I had misgivings about the process before the experience – but am now a total convert. I would never miss a Hear My Eyes production in the future.

 

Gable, Colbert, It Happened One Night

It Happened One Night

These two mammoth screenings gave way to the smallest of the year – and in many ways the most enjoyable. At North Fitzroy library, a screening of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT with around 18 people of various ages was a complete joy. To my shame, I’d never seen the film. I’d heard how risqué it was over the years, but was still unprepared for just how sassy it is, how much it spits and fizzes – and shows a glimpse of a possible future for Hollywood that the code quashed. And to be sharing the laughs with a group of strangers was pretty joyous.

 

Jay Weissberg, Pordenone (top)
Guy Borlée, Bologna

Bologna and Pordenone

Festivals, so long the cinephilia anchor for many, were turned upside down. And for me, there was huge upside. The loss of Cannes is pretty incalculable, but at least there was a market on-line where a lot of content was screened. And there was even a bidding war or two that took place on Whatsapp and messenger. But the loss of Cannes opened up space to attend Bologna and Pordenone virtually. And thus my biggest surprise of 2020: which country provided the highest quality service and resolution in digital film delivery? Italy! Forza italia!! Bologna was excellent, but Pordenone took the on-line festival experience to the highest level. Jay Weissberg’s introduction to each night’s feature from a different part of Pordenone was passionate, knowledgeable and welcoming. Seeing him do this made me realise that we so rarely get to see a person synthesize all the elements of a festival so well. The Q & As that followed were equally as well run. 

 

Sandra Wollner

Remembering MIFF

Back at home, MIFF acquitted itself really well with a fine programme given the restrictions they operated under. But sadly it won’t be the excellent programming that MIFF 2020 will be remembered for in the world of cineastes – it will be the sad spectacle of Sandra Wollner’s THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN strange journey. Invited after its Berlin screening, and subsequently uninvited in a secretive process shortly before the festival opened. That the time-line of withdrawal took place in public without clear communications from the festival was unsavoury. Yes, it’s a small thing in the wider world. But for those with an intense interest in defending cinephilia, it’s a bad marker.

 

Eliza Scanlen,Babyteeth

Oz

Back at cinemas, I entered lockdown one with an excellent Australian film, and re-entered new normal after lockdown two with four well above par Australian films. IN MY BLOOD IT RUNS, BRAZEN HUSSIES, THE DRY, and BABY TEETH all present unique and thoughtful portraits of contemporary Australia and all do it with a strong eye to entertainment as well. And while on Australian cinema, no film was better for screening during the COVID period than Warwick Thornton’s THE BEACH. The timing for a gorgeously shot film about a man having a wise-crack speckled existential crisis in the most breathtakingly lonely and beautiful landscape in Australia could not have been better. And his son Dylan River continues to be a cinematographer whose work I’d crawl over broken glass to see. 

 

David Thomas

Vale David, Amree and Bill

Apart from being inherently depressing in and of itself, we all lost so many loved friends and families through the lock-down, so many people have thus not been celebrated in the way we might ordinarily have done so. I toast in the most virtual sense: Dave Thomas, projectionist at MIFF forever, solver of all problems known to humankind. When we can finally send him off as he fully deserved, the stories are going to be sensational. Amree Hewitt, as referenced by Adrian Danks in his summary - a woman of intelligence and effervescence who as Adrian said, could make a day better by being there. An energiser, a producer, a networker par excellence. She'll be hugely missed. And over in New Zealand, the man who was never entirely sure he was the longest serving film festival director in the world died - and I think we'll print the legend on this. Bill Gosden was a lightning rod for quality in all forms, cinema being the central one. Cheeky as a schoolboy until the very end, but as erudite and passionate about cinema - all arts - as anyone I've known. His notes for the NZFF programme were a year in, year out delight. And I'll pull them out every now and then to marvel at his fluent expression - I envied him that so very much. Vale Bill, Amree and Dave.