Defending Cinephilia 2016 (3) - Editor's Choice and Explanatory Note

'Defending Cinephilia' was the phrase invented I believe by my friend Robert Koehler, an astute critic and programmer and one commentator who has looked a little down the road to see where we're heading. So this series of end of year posts is intended to provide cinephiles with opportunities to both write and read about the things that gave people heart in pursuing the cause of keeping the art of the cinema front and centre. The first post by Adrian Martin rounded up, with his usual exuberance, a host of activity that gives a good lead about the things that matter - quality TV, specialist festivals, institutional enthusiasm and just sitting down to soak up a movie. The second contribution by Rod Bishop segued us into resetting our manner of viewing in the Trump era.

Contributions are welcome. My thought is for three to five items per person but no real restrictions apply, yet at least and brevity is always best. Send stuff for posting to me at filmalert101@gmail.com.

Off we go....

Bologna Catalogue Cover, 2016,
30th Anniversary

1. Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato remains the gold standard of public events devoted to bringing back the cinema's past. The general air of goodwill, the easy Italian style arrangements (actually some find this a reason not to go), the ever-lurking potential for surprise, the generous meal breaks - all bespeak an approach that welcomes cinephiles to the world of restorations, revivals, film history, scholarship and the sheer joy of unexpected discovery. And the great thing is the crowds are made up of many more beyond white haired oldies, (though Bologna's annual DVD awards remain resolutely male, old and white all over top to bottom).

Govett Brewster Gallery, home of the Len Lye Foundation
New Plymouth, New Zealnd

2. A trip to the Shaky Isles. Taking off for the North Island two days after Kaikora and Wellington copped some wild 7.8 shudders ("I really thought this was it. I was going to die." said a friend in Wellington a week or so later.) involved a bit of trepidation but on arrival hey... For cinephiles, two institutions, the remarkable Govett Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth incorporating the Len Lye Foundation, and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision in Wellington bespeak what natural enthusiasm can do to bring film's past back.  




Age of Shadows, Kim Jee-woon, South Korea

3. The Current Cinema. I used to get invited to contribute to the Senses of Cinema Annual Poll and always had odd feelings drawing up lists of films seen in all sorts of odd places, especially old films seen at Bologna or on disc from sources that might sometimes even be called the dark side. This year I estimate I saw round a hundred movies just rocking up to the beloved local Randwick Ritz, the Event Cinemas at Bondi Junction and George St and occasionally the Chauvel, the Verona and the Dendy Newtown. (The Dendy has great seats in its extended section though nothing rivals the comfort in the so-called  V-MAX theatres at Bondi Junction.) So, the highlights of this selection, solid commercial movies, all seen at commercial venues:

45 Years  (Andrew Haigh, UK)

Age of Shadows (Kim Jee-woon, South Korea)

Beasts of No Nation (Cary Jo Fukunaga, USA)

Down Under (Abe Forsythe, Australia)

Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, USA)

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, New Zealand)

Julieta (Pedro Almodovar, Spain)

Rams (Grimo Hakonarson, Iceland)

Shanghai (Dibarkar Bannerjee, India)

Snowden (Oliver Stone, USA)

Spear (Steven Page, Australia)

Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, USA)

Trumbo (Jay Roach, USA)

4. TV Drama - Watching multi-episode dramas has become the go to activity and discovering the new is as thrilling as those long ago moments when you started tracking down a new favourite director (Robert Aldrich!, Budd Boetticher! Seth Holt! Blake Edwards!....ahhh such memories). But relentlessly HBO, AMC, the BBC and more, including in Europe, are making cinephile lives more home bound and sedentary. 2016 highlights included, in the order seen and not mentioning the designated series, Show Me a Hero, The Bridge, Luther, Mr Robot, Cartel Land, Black Mirror, Homeland, Spiral, And Then There Were None, The Night Manager, Happy Valley, House of Cards, Better Call Saul, The Americans, Gomorrah, Bloodline, The Night Of, Baron Noir  and Narcos. (Goodness a lot of sitting down there.)

5. ...and the great absence When you discover enthusiasm in unlikely places like Wellington or New Plymouth you get a serious reminder of how Sydney has been let down by the failure to establish at least one, preferably more, film institution of the kind established in Melbourne and Brisbane especially. The state institutions in NSW are restricted to Robert Herbert's often fine selections of films to screen on 16mm or 35mm at the AGNSW and there have been in recent times some erratically presented screenings at the MCA. Not good enough by a long streak. My taxes are not working.

6. ...and the best Australian film of the year. I lament that the best Australian film I saw during the year, Molly Reynolds (and David Gulpilil's) Another Country (Australia, 2015), has not even, a year or more after its premiere, had a public screening in Sydney let alone caused discussion and celebration to break out all round. I feel further sadness that no one anywhere, not just in Sydney, wants to put on a screening of my friend Peter Tammer's The Nude in the Window a wonderful final tribute to the life and career of the late Paul Cox. I fear there will be ever more such films out there and our rickety systems of exhibition of locally produced independent work are letting toiling film-makers down big time. 

Fred MacMurray - Serious Cinephiles Noel Bjorndahl and David Hare discuss the work of a star

(Pillaged and edited from Facebook)

MacMurray and Stanwyck in Double Indemnity

Noel Bjorndahl: The shifty elements in Fred MacMurray's screen persona were best exploited in the two films he made for Billy Wilder, the outstanding film noir Double Indemnity, and the acerbic comedy The Apartment. On the other hand, MacMurray did much of his best work for the shamefully neglected director Mitchell Leisen, whose elegant films he graced nine times: from Hands Across the Table (1934) to Suddenly It's Spring (1947). Swing High, Swing Low (USA, 1937), one of the best of them, has never, to my knowledge, been released on DVD. He was a great partner for such fine actresses as Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, and especially Barbara Stanwyck (Remember the Night is one of their most infectious pairings with its sharp Preston Sturges script and with Leisen as always at the top of his form directing romantic comedy).

MacMurray in The Apartment

MacMurray's naturalness and self-effacing understatement suited both his light and dark screen personas-Douglas Sirk exploited the uncertainty behind the cheerful facade tellingly in an unsettling domestic melodrama There's Always Tomorrow with old flame Barbara Stanwyck re-entering his seemingly staid family domicile and upsetting the apple cart: and in Richard Quine's Pushover, a neat noirish crime melo, a kind of a cross between Double Indemnity and Rear Window, he was visibly older and tireder playing the cop going bent to have young and beautiful Kim Novak. David Thomson aptly characterized him as "a romantic lead built on quicksand, a hero compelled to betray, a lover likely to desert". He's surely one of the Hollywood greats.

Carole Lombard & Fred MacMurray in
Swing High, Swing Low

David Hare: Noel as you presumably know there is apparently no extant useable 35mm source for Swing High and, in rights terms, it currently lives in a Public Domain black hole. There have always been acceptable 16mm TV prints around, including one in Australia with the MCA/Universal (Lew Wasserman era) Opening credit. That print was "on permanent loan" from a collector in Melbourne who had obtained it after one of those occasional and convenient "fires" Channels 10 and 7 used to have whenever their 16mm libraries came up for renewal.  The "collector" had lodged it with what is now the ACMI/Film Library for safekeeping. And indeed I first saw it in that form at the Sabines then residing in Nicholson St Fitzroy where James projected it onto a wall. It looked great. Anyway who the fuck would know what's happened to it now and more importantly who the fuck cares enough to even try and locate a source, other than the abomination from TCM. Even Bertrand Tavernier and the curatorial staff at the CInematheque Francaise could only access that abysmal source for the amazing Leisen retro in Paris over 2008. I went to that screening (a packed house, to the rafters, very gratifying indeed) and spoke to Tavernier for quite a while after the screening. It's a great movie. Despite her entreaties he still calls the rooster "Butch". 

MacMurray was only ever as good with Billy Wilder (and once for Richard Quine) as he always was for Leisen. Mitch gave his actors space, room, and affection. He is one of the greatest directors of actors. Although Fred's not it in it, Midnight is my greatest film of 1939 wiping out both Zangiku Monogatari/TheStory of the Last Chrysanthemum (Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan) and La Regle du Jeu (Jean Renoir, France). It's a squeeze for 1939 but Ophuls Sans Lendemain scrapes in second. Stagecoach (John Ford, USA) third etc. 

Publicity Still for There's Always Tomorrow
Joan Bennett, Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck

Noel Bjorndahl David, There's Always Tomorrow is one of the least known of Sirk's stunning creative burst of domestic and romantic melodramas during the middle 50s and early 60s. I was totally engaged with the commentaries and conversations between John Flaus and Adrian Martin in the release of this much neglected film. Sirk's examination of the opposing forces of a staid bourgeois marriage and a passion revived by the intrusion of an old flame is as nuanced and relentless as this rich genre gets. Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck (the old flame) and Joan Bennett (his wife) are all at the top of their form. 

MacMurray was a class act. Whatever he did, he did well l- Comedy, Film Noir, Melodrama, Adventure. His best work includes Alice Adams, Remember the Night, Take a Letter Darling, Double Indemnity, Murder He Says, Father Was a Fullback, Pushover, There's Always Tomorrow and The Apartment. He was active from the 30s to the 70s and he was deeply respected by by some of the best directors in the business including Billy Wilder, Mitchell Leisen, George Stevens, John M Stahl, Douglas Sirk, Richard Quine and Henry Hathaway.