Vale George Whaley - Rod Bishop remembers a titan and a man of many parts

“We’re out here on the Edge of the Known World” bellowed George Whaley in a staff meeting, referring to the North Ryde campus of the Australian Film Television and Radio School. 

His utterance became the title of the School’s glossy 300-page coffee-table tome celebrating the first 25 years of AFTRS.

George’s career included spells as an actor, director and writer in film, television and theatre, much of it championing Australian work. Among his many positions, he was Resident Director of the Old Tote Theatre Company (1973-75), the precursor to the Sydney Theatre Company; Head of Acting at NIDA (1976-81); artistic director of Theatre ACT, Canberra (1981-83); and Head of Directing at AFTRS (1993-2002).

I first met George when I became Director of AFTRS in 1996 and George taught direction for six of the seven years I was at the School.

During his stewardship - and with his staff Robin de Crespigny, Ross McGregor and Anna Lang - they produced notable feature film directors: Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds, Dreamland, Toomelah, Mystery Road, Goldstone); Cate Shortland (Somersault, Lore, Berlin Syndrome), Kim Farrant (Strangerland, Angel of Mine), Steve McGregor (Big Name No Blanket, Croker Island Exodus), Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones, The Devil’s Candy), Clare McCarthy (Cross Life, The Waiting City, Ophelia), Serhat Caradee (Cedar Boys, A Lion Returns), Tony Krawitz (Dead Europe, The Tall Man), Catriona McKenzie (Satellite Boy), Rupert Glasson (Coffin Rock, What Lola Wants), Erica Glynn (She Who Must Be Loved), Peter Duncan (Children of the Revolution, A Little Bit of Soul, Passion, Unfinished Sky) and Alister Grierson (Kokoda, Sanctum). Features aside, these graduates have more than 130 television credits between them.

It was a remarkable achievement and significantly added to AFTRS’s history of producing “industry-ready” directors. Sadly, this output of feature film directors has catastrophically declined in the 17 years since George held the position.

One memory of George stands out. At AFTRS, I tried to attend the recruitment sessions for new students, but with 11 departments all interviewing simultaneously, it was difficult. 

Watching George and his staff assess potential students was a remarkable experience. After finalizing a short list of applicants, the prospective students would be brought into the School for a full day assessment. I’m not sure if I remember the entire process, but each applicant was given a time-limit to mark up a script for direction; then each would be asked to direct a three-camera television set-up; after which a copy of a Charles Condor painting was produced and, on the spot, the applicants were asked to construct a storyline from the painting; the applicants were asked to bring VHS tapes of films cued up to sequences they found impressive, screen them and explain why; their previous short films would be screened and discussed; and the final hour of the day taken up with wide ranging discussion on life history, their views on the industry and where their aspirations might take them.

World-class best practice. And like the other Heads of Department at AFTRS at the time, delivered without any discernable threat or jealousy over the talent shown by the applicants before them.

Sara Hourez, a veteran AFTRS staffer, emailed me when George passed: “He was a true gentleman, a generous person.  I was in Newtown when he introduced me to his wife and I still remember it like yesterday as it was an adoring, caring husband presenting his wife to me.  He was always respectful and inclusive.  Always had a soft spot for him. Always will have.”

Rod Bishop is a film-maker, film producer, critic, teacher, commentator, former CEO of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and currently a member of the Organising Committee of Cinema Reborn 

Melbourne International Film Festival - Tom Ryan reviews MONROVIA, INDIANA (Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2018)

Frederick Wiseman

“My job is, as I define it, to make a movie about an aspect of contemporary experience and to organise it in a dramatic form. So I’m not simply observing, or not onlyobserving. I’m there to try to think about what the experience that I’m watching means to me, and then ultimately, in the editing stage, organise it in a dramatic form and in a way that fairly presents the experience I had in making the film. So it’s not in any way a passive role, because you’re constantly having to make choices. Choices about the subject matter, choices about what to shoot, how to shoot it, how to edit the material in relation to other sequences, how to impose a form on the film: all of those things represent choices that have to be quite consciously made.”

(Frederick Wiseman) (1)

                                                           

 If you live in Melbourne, as I do, just about the only way you can get to see a Frederick Wiseman film these days is at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It’s been that way for almost 20 years. You could buy DVD versions via his website –Zipporah Films– but, given that they all sell (to individuals) for around $US30, that would be a very expensive exercise. Worth it, perhaps, in order to keep up with the work of, arguably, the greatest of all documentary filmmakers, but a costly proposition nonetheless.

His 44th film, Monrovia, Indiana (2019, 140 minutes), screened to a packed house at the Kino Cinemas last weekend at MIFF 2019. It’s screening again  (Sunday, August 18, 10.45am at the Forum). 

A portrait of a small town in the American mid-West shot over a period of ten weeks, it quietly goes about its business along the same lines as the rest of his work. Seemingly simply content to observe, his camera watches unassumingly, his subjects never seeming to notice its presence. Wiseman says that he doesn’t interfere with what happens in front of it, although, if ever anyone happens to look at it, he keeps shooting but cuts away from them in the editing room. 

And there are no interviews. People talk to each other in his films, but never to the camera, to him or to his surrogates. If they pontificate at length – as several do in Monrovia, Indiana– he lets them, leaving it to the editing process to call matters to a halt when he deems it appropriate. 

Wiseman doesn’t suffer gladly anyone who might want to describe his methods – and the documentary form in general – as somehow objective. He regards his work as closer to fiction than anything else, pointing to the fact that he makes choices about how to shoot and shape what he films as a clear indication of his intervention in the process. 

In one way or another, all his films focus on what makes places tick, like businesses and other institutions (as in The Store or Boxing Gym) or the communities that flower in big cities (Central Park, In Jackson Heights) or towns (Belfast, Maine, Aspen). He says he chose Monrovia as the setting for and the subject of his latest film because he hadn’t turned his camera on the American heartland before. Of course, the fact that he happened to choose this place at this particular moment in time had nothing to do with the fact that its inhabitants represent exactly those voters who placed their trust in Donald Trump. More than three quarters of its population supported Trump at the 2016 presidential election.

As it happens, nobody mentions POTUS in the film, which was, Wiseman says, their own choice. In fact, there’s barely a single reference in the film to the world beyond Monrovia. The only suggestions of a link to somewhere else are a recurring image of a yard filled with satellite dishes and a Republican Party stall spied in the background of a single shot during the sequence set at the Monrovia festival. Interviewed by Matt Prigge for Filmmaker magazine, Wiseman explains that it wasn’t just when the camera was rolling that the citizenry of Monravia avoided the issue. “There was no political talk when we were shooting or when we were hanging around,” he recalled. “There was local talk at the town council, some of which was in the film, but there was no national political talk at all. I found that fascinating. And I don’t think it was because I was around. There was a considerable lack of curiosity about the external world.” (2) Nevertheless, politics is a defining presence in the film and Monrovia’s essential and unbending conservatism is everywhere felt.

In his excellent Mise En Scene and Film Style, Adrian Martin draws creatively on previous theorists, including Umberto Eco and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli, to introduce the idea of a “social mise en scene”. Central to this are the ways in which a film, deliberately or inadvertently, allows us to see how its social world is “relatively strictly organised, codified, subject to a multitude of rule-sets that govern (or at least regulate) behaviour, posture, gesture, level of emotion (contained or released), where and how one will sit, stand, walk, run, be active or passive, hushed or loud…” (3)

Monrovia, Indiana and Wiseman’s work as a whole provide a perfect illustration of the concept. In fact, to make sense of the details of his films, it’s essential that we engage with them, a point that’s true of all films but is rarely as crucial as it is with Wiseman. He doesn’t tell; he shows. To make sense of his work, we have to reflect on the places and the patterns of behaviour that it presents to us. 

Like his other films,Monrovia, Indiana begins with a series of what are conventionally known as establishing shots: empty farmland stretching out to the horizon, corn rustling in the breeze, a late-Victorian style house sitting magisterially alone at the top of a hill (above), a silo alongside a group of sheds, a country road (allowed speed 45mph), a railway crossing with a flashing orange light and a couple of houses in the background, a town sign, a mostly deserted street with a few shop fronts, a church with a steeple, a cemetery alongside… 

This is the kind of place city folks might generally regard as paradise, or else as one of the most boring places in the world. Its character remains seemingly untouched by the modern world, going its own way in its own time. It’s not by chance that a key sequence soon afterwards finds a group of councillors gathered around a table (below) pondering the wisdom of allowing the establishment of a new allotment of homes that would increase the population by at least a thousand and require expansion of the local infrastructure. Several of those in attendance at the meeting are female, which mightn’t have been the case for previous generations, but a general murmur of approval accompanies the observation that “change” should not be mistaken for “progress”.

The past is important in Monrovia. The mostly Victorian architecture of the stand-alone homes with their large, sweeping lawns and trimly groomed gardens speak of an earlier time, as do the conversations of the grey-haired folks who meet at the local diner or sit in deck chairs at a vintage-car meet to chew the fat, remember contemporaries who’ve died, and recall how it used to be back in the day. The minister at the funeral that takes place at the end of the film delivers an extended eulogy that is as much a celebration of the old-fashioned values of home and hearth as it is of the deceased whom his congregation have come to farewell.

Monrovia’s history is written into its buildings and their arrangement as well as into the routines followed by the population, what is sometimes known as everyday or ordinary life. The school with its classrooms and gymnasium, the hairdressing salon, the church where, during the course of the film, people come together for a wedding and a funeral, the diner where everybody seems to know everybody, the roads that bind together the people of the town and the places they visit… 

Intriguingly, while there are many shots of the exteriors of the citizens’ homes, Wiseman never takes us inside any of them. The weight of history is embodied in their exteriors and his focus is on the community and the communal rather than individual families and domestic spaces. He takes us behind the scenes at the pizza place, but not into domestic kitchens.

He is showing us a way of life and the community that has gathered in its embrace, or its shadow. It depends how we interpret what we’re seeing. In an early sequence, in the stockyards outside town, the cattle huddle together as cattle do, numbered tags attached to their ears as they await their fates. Is the sequence to be taken as providing an abrasive metaphor for the citizens of Monrovia herded together in their workplaces, residences and routines? Or is it simply there to indicate that farming in Monrovia and its surrounds isn’t just about corn? 

Everyone in the film – the town councillors, the students and teachers at the school, the gathered congregations, the visitors to the town festival and the vintage car rally, everyone – is Caucasian. With one exception, an African-American woman manning a water-bottle stall at the festival. This is, effectively, a gated community, cut off from the parts of America that have been enveloped by change (or “progress”).

It’s not by chance that the film’s final sequence is a funeral (above), complete with the mourners singing “Amazing Grace”, or that there are recurrent shots throughout of the cemetery. But how we interpret these details relates to how we see the film is a whole. Certainly the sequence and the shots function as a reminder that everything that Monrovia, Indiana stands for is transient. However, are they also implying more than that? Perhaps to do with a dying way of life? Perhaps, given the film’s suggestion that what occurs in the film’s present tense is an ongoing mimicry of the past, the proposal is that to die is human but the body of the social world is intact?

It is possible – just – to see Monrovia, Indiana as an affectionate embrace of ordinary people and the everyday. The people who gather in front of Wiseman’s camera are decent and likeable – perhaps aside from the man holding forth at great length about his life success at the vintage car rally – and they certainly don’t seem to be at all dangerous (unlike the man they helped to vote into the Oval Office). On the other hand, it’s also possible to see the place as trapped in the past, its population inward-looking, blinkered, backward and insufferably smug.

1.                interviewed by the author, July 2002

2.                Matt Prigge, “‘It’s Impossible to Predict [an Audience’s] Reactions, and I Make No Effort To Do It’: Frederick Wiseman on Monrovia, Indiana and His 51-Year Career”, Filmmaker, October 26, 2018

3.                Adrian Martin, Mise En Scene and Film Style, Palgrave, Macmillan, London, 2013, p. 131

On Blu-ray - David Hare praises a new edition of THE LEOPARD MAN (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1943)

Margo (above, click to enlarge) as "Clo Clo" the New Mexico niteclub dancer in Tourneur's wonderful The Leopard Man (1943). From the new Shout Factory/Warner Blu-ray. 

As is so often the case in Tourneur, a major musical number signals the first intimation of meaning and mystery in the narrative. Like the Zombie healing ritual ceremony in I Walked with a Zombie, or the dusk campfire sequence from Way of a Gaucho in which Rory Calhoun and Gene Tierney fall in love before our eyes in ten wordless minutes backed only with shadows cast around the bonfire and passionately sung music.

This newly minted and sourced image for Leopard Man was harvested from a much battered O-Neg and several other elements in 4K workflow and finally delivers a superb visual and audio quality to what was previously the very worst presented title in the now fifteen-year old Warner's Lewton boxset from 2005. The film is now completely revelatory in this presentation and feels like a new experience. 

This leaves five more Lewton titles still to go, with Robson's The Seventh Victim and Tourneur's sublime I Walked with a Zombie as the outright high points.

As the beautifully rendered image quality on this disc attests, Tourneur was a master of extracting maximum impact from modest, even humble production resources, upon which he focusses his gaze with the intensity of a deeply powerful auteur. One whose gaze rests on the unknowable mysteries of human behavior and the nature of evil. 

Leopard Man has one of the most felicitous female casts in all Tourneur, including Jean Brooks (the fallen sister from The Seventh Victim) as Kiki, Isabell Jewell as the Fortune Teller, and Margaret Landry as the "innocent" Teresa who's ruthlessly killed at her own doorstep. The males in the picture including the unlikeable lead, Dennis O'Keefe wander through the picture like lost souls, with James Bell who played the Doctor in Zombie, here playing another powerless authority figure who has clearly given up on the human condition and its evils in this Cornell Woolrich based screnplay from Ardel Wray.

Apparently Shout Factory recorded fairly dismal sales for the previous Lewton release in this series, Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, which may spell imperilment for the release of the remaining titles in the Lewton series which, I understand have all been rescued and restored at Warner's MPI facility.

The Lewton films are the very sort of thing fucking Criterion should have been at least considering for its number 1000 title. Instead we get a ten-thousand disc deluxe gilt edged bank-breaking boxset of Godzillas from 54 to 77 as the grand celebration of cinema from this once estimable label. Criterion for all its formerly good work, these days resembles more a wallpaper factory for millenial film college students with its continuous repertoire of often needless reissues of new 4Ks which are already out there anyway for collectors in other regions or territories. Meanwhile strapped outfits like Kino-Lorber, or Arrow, or Indicator/Powerhouse keep producing the goods in spades from deep and crucial catalogue with joyous abandon.

On Public Domain DVD - Barrie Pattison unearths APOLOGY FOR MURDER (Sam Newfield, USA, 1946)

Let’s talk about Ann Savage whom a few of us know as the malevolent female lead in

the 1946 Detour, the nearest Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC)   or director Edgar Ulmer came to making a classic movie. 

When I was based in London, the Présence du Cinéma guys came in from Paris to hire

fifty movies from the Sixteen Millimeter Distributors. I set them up in the

Grasshopper Group Cinema. On a break, a few diehards picked a couple of titles out

of the six foot stacks of prints against the wall to have a second look at - Detour,

which no one had previously heard of, was elected, a highlight of the event. This

pattern I found to be repeated wherever that then unknown film turned up.

Ann Savage would make production line movies for fifty years. She was in a

Boston Blackie and a Cisco Kid and Andre de Toth's first movie. In 2007, idiosyncratic Canadian film maker Guy Maddin brought her out of a sixteen-year retirement to appear his My Winnipeg.

Suddenly after all her forgotten B movies, Ann Savage had recognition.

One result was that an enterprising public domain DVD maker brought out an Ann

Savage box set - three features and some half hour religious TV eps., not exactly a

towering monument to her talent but still welcome.

Apology for Murder is included, said to be the film she made after Detour, and using

several of the same personnel. Include musician Leo Erdody and designer Edward C.

Jewell. It has all the features of a PRC cheapo and no one would call it a masterpiece.

In fact, casual viewers would likely dismiss it as garbage. It is however a more

interesting study than most films of its day - or any day.

Reporter Hugh Beaumont crashes the mansion of magnate Russel Hicks and is

abruptly dismissed. “What I plan is of no interest to the Daily Tribune.” However

Beaumont encounters Hicks’ younger wife Savage - introduced as a nylon covered leg

straddling an arm chair. It’s not long before the pair are having secret liaisons. For a sex-based film there is minimal sex. She recruits him to her plan to murder Hicks and inherit.  “He expects me to walk out with nothing!”

Now it doesn’t take an intense familiarity with film history to recognise that Fred

Myton’s “original story” is retreading Double Indemnity. In fact, they were going to call

the film “Single Indemnity” until they heard from Paramount’s lawyers.

Director Sam Newfield (a.k.a. Peter Stewart or Sherman Scott) rolled out five of these

a year, mainly for his producer brother Sigmund Neufeld who ran PRC. Most were

drab production line efforts though, like several of these hack-working forties directors, he

was capable of better things. See Adventure Island done the next year, Newfield's Technicolor re-make of Paramount’s pioneer Ebb Tide. 

The leads are more than adequate. Savage, whose unconventional looks they don’t

always take the trouble to photograph attractively, smolders with B movie greed.

(“Anyone who’d go for a dame like that can’t be very bright”).  Can’t see Trudy

Marshall, Sheila Ryan, Jan Wiley and the rest of her peer group managing that, though

Jean Parker her career in decline did provide an impressively murderous gangster’s

moll in the stark Hugo Fregonese-Leonard Goldstein Black Tuesday a few years later.

Featured players - Hicks, Norman Willis, Charles D. Brown & Pierre Watkin are

familiar face pros. They’d show up in serials and never let on that they could do these

in their sleep, delivering their lines clearly and with adequate conviction probably on

the first take. Unfortunately, next level down the day players are dreadful, damaging the

competence the production is attempting to display. Silent movie star Eva Novak (in

For the Term of His Natural Life and some of Tom Mix’ best films) makes no

impression in her walk-on as Hicks’ maid.

Apology for Murder is largely ambition free. The murder and the car crash are played

on Savage’s reaction in close up which may be an effective cost cutting measure but is

also a cheat. They do shots as simple as a car parked in the street in front of Ray

Smallwood’s process screen and after that economy you’ve got to wonder about them

hiring in a dozen extras to mill about in the newspaper office. The cut-in opticals announce their arrival with a quality drop before we get fades or dissolves. On the other hand cross cutting yokel Budd Buster’s breakdown with Hicks’ car approaching generates some genuine suspense. 

Newfield is not above indicating that he has absorbed the lessons of film noir & Edward Hopper (neither of whom he’d quite possibly heard of) by the single shot of Beaumont in hat and raincoat at night outside the bungalow window watching through the Venetian blinds as Savage makes out with lawyer Willis inside in their brightly lit room.

The fact remains that the Cain plot and Newfield’s shepherding it through its one week

schedule make this a surprisingly watchable example of low level filmmaking. Sixty

years later it arrives seeped in forties noir associations. I enjoyed it a whole lot more

than I did I Ring Doorbells, the PRC film François Truffaut admired. 

I once challenged Jean-Luc Godard to name the Monogram titles he was sufficiently

impressed by to dedicate À bout de soufle to them. He couldn’t do it. It was easy to be

a pundit in those days. Has anything changed?

On DVD and (in 2017) on BBC First - GUERRILLA (John Ridley, UK, 2017)

Here’s how it happened. 

In Lawson’s Record Store in Pitt St, now gone, a DVD of a TV series called Guerrilla. On sale for $7, marked down from $10. The one selling point was in one of three actors listed above the title. This was Idris Elba, one time Stringer Bell from The Wire  and more recently the eponymous star of Luther now into Series Five, one marked by the return of Alice Morgan, played by the silky voiced Ruth Wilson, the murderess who offed her parents in Series One and got away with it, thanks to Luther’s infatuation/love for her. But I digress….

Idris Elba plays a small role in Guerrilla  as Kent, a community figure who perceives revolutionary violence as the action of hooligans and who ultimately informs on his friends. For the part Elba has a wig and an earring. Elba also gets a credit as an “Executive Producer”, one presumes for lending his name to the project and maybe having bought a share in the series via a deferred salary. The small role is a key because it defines a very particular attitude to the righting of the wrongs done to the black community in Britain in the late-60s, early 70s.

The mover and shaker of Guerrilla  is John Ridley. He gets the first credit as “Created by”, the writer’s credit on five of the six eps and the director’s credit on four. He is the ‘showrunner’ and must be a rarity, a black man working at the highest levels of Brit TV in a production presented by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky and by the US cable network Showtime. One of the producers is Endemol Shine, a company jointly owned by Disney and a big private equity firm. Endemol started out making Big Brother but in recent years has made among many, The Fall, Peaky Blinders and  Black Mirror. Ridley’s previous work is similarly devoted to key moments in black oppression most notably in his script for Twelve Years a Slave

Guerrilla  starts off following a group of friends who are radicalised to the point of undertaking revolutionary violence against the state. The allegation is, and this is a second narrative thread, that within the Special Branch and surveillance activities there exists a group informally known as the Black Power Desk whose job it is to clamp down on radical political behaviour. The key copper (the blacks always refer to the police as ‘The Filth’) is an expat Rhodesian Pence (Rory Kinnear) trained in the very same heavy-handedness and happy to resort to violence in dealing with his task. The plain-clothes police all carry, and use, metal coshes, the uniformed police who act at the direction of the Black Power desk frequently use their batons to deal with demonstrators.  The Special Branch practices torture on those from whom it seeks information, including in one case where a member of a German revolutionary cell member has the handle of a cricket bat rammed up his anus.

After a series of run-ins with the police, a cell of four Brit blacks goes underground and prepares two pieces of revolutionary violence. The first is the simultaneous assault on four airline offices. One of these goes disastrously wrong, the police are waiting and one of the cell is killed. The second involves an elaborate plan to put a bomb inside the office of the Black Power desk, the planning and execution of which takes up the second half of the six episodes. A shame to give away the plot because it builds to a genuinely thrilling, and unexpected ending. The misleads throughout the last episode in particular are superbly created and managed.

Guerrilla  went out on BBC First, the Foxtel cable channel back in 2017. The DVD was released by Acorn Entertainment.

Streaming - Rod Bishop urges note be taken of THE GREAT HACK (Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim, USA, 2019)

Sobering viewing here: Trump, Brexit, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and a touch of the Caribbean. 

It’s the story of fallout from the data-mining of social media accounts. Of Cambridge Analytica and their seemingly innocuous survey of the ‘digital life’ of Facebook posters. Click-bait from the sinister. 

The survey gave Cambridge Analytica access not only to the respondees but also their Facebook Friends – a breathtaking 87 million voters in the USA. All were ‘data-harvested’ and, significantly, all the data stolen without permission.

Joining the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica then chopped up the swing states into ‘precincts’. Behavioural and personality data were analyzed and a campaign devised to target only “the persuadables” - will Hillary Clinton ever live down “the deplorables”?

The persuadables are the unregistered, or the apathetic or the on-the-fence voters in swing states who were then bombarded by Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign with “untraceable” and “unattributable” social media ads and anonymous posts attacking Hillary and trumpeting Trump. All swirling around social media platforms, again principally Facebook, and all designed to influence their ballot box decisions.

“Crooked Hillary” and the pair of handcuffs was just one of Cambridge Analytica’s attack ads.

The millions of unregistered, apathetic and on-the-fence voters flew under the radar of traditional polling methodology and hey, presto! What just happened? Trump is POTUS and the Poms are out of the EU.

Although not mentioned in The Great Hack, Trump stoking the ‘Russian interference’ in the election proved a convenient smokescreen to deflect focus from Cambridge Analytica, it’s Vice-President Steve Bannon (“I came up with that great name”) and its urbane, slippery CEO Alexander Nix.

But when the spotlight eventually struck, they ran for the lifeboats.

Sitting in front of one of the many subsequent investigative committees, Alexander Nix just lied. No, we didn’t harvest Facebook data; no, we’re just a simple election consultancy company and no, we weren’t involved in the Brexit campaign, despite footage of the Leave.EU launch with Cambridge Analytica staffer Brittany Kaiser publicly disclosing their data-mining strategy for Brexit.

Only a few days ago, Brittany Kaiser revealed emails had been supplied to Damian Collins, Chair of a House of Commons Committee. The emails support her claim “Chargeable work was completed for Ukip and Leave.EU…data sets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica…later used by Leave.EU without Cambridge Analytica’s further assistance”.

Alexander Nix, nevertheless, has the gall to still paint himself as victim: “The global media took umbrage and decided to put us in their crosshairs and launch a coordinated attack on us as a company in order to destroy our reputations and our business”. 

Faced with worldwide disclosure, Cambridge Analytica liquidated to avoid probes into their illegal data collection. Destruction of evidence was probably high on their agenda, as well. 

Perhaps the most chilling two-and-a-half minutes in The Great Hack are devoted to elections in Trinidad and Tobago.

In that country, Cambridge Analytica was less interested in data-mining and more intent on demonstrating their Holy Grail objective - to significantly “change behavior” and thereby voter intentions.

Employed by the Indian residents of the Caribbean islands, who represent one of the two major political parties, the strategy was simple. Firstly, a campaign of graffiti street art and You Tube video clips called “DO SO (DON’T VOTE)” was aimed at the Afro-Caribbean youth to convince them voting in the elections was just too “uncool” to even contemplate. The second strategy looked after itself. The Indian parents would simply tell their children how to vote.

The result? Alexander Nix claims during an audio-visual presentation on Trinidad and Tobago: “The difference in the 18-35-year-old turnout was 40%. That swung the election by 6% and that was all that was needed [in a close election]”. He then lists the other countries where Cambridge Analytica are working: “Malaysia, Lithuania, Romania, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria … and the Brexit campaign. But we don’t talk about that”.

A company able to target apathetic persuadables to vote in one country and target apathetic persuadables not to vote in another is somewhat challenging.

One thread running through The Great Hack is the legal efforts of Professor David Carroll to have Cambridge Analytica return the data it stole from him. Alexander Nix, however, chooses to face prosecution than rather than disclose Carroll’s data and their methodology for weaponizing it.

The data-science company had morphed from SCL (Strategic Communications Laboratories), which had morphed from a military contractor known as SCL Defense that had worked in Afghanistan. As former Cambridge Analytica employees, now turned whistleblowers, put it: “Cambridge Analytica is not data science, it’s a propaganda machine” (Chris Wylie) and “Cambridge Analytica’s psychographics should be classified as weapon-grade” (Brittany Kaiser). 

The Times of London suggests there are people who believe Cambridge Analytica are just snake-oil salesmen and their claims with Trump and Brexit are nothing but fantasy. Really? All made up, was it? As Adrian Martin might say “Oh, dear…” 

Most readers of Film Alert do so after noticing posts on Facebook. It’s the platform, described by The Guardian  investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, “where we chat to friends and post baby photos”.

Is this the future? Will there ever be another ‘fair’ election? You might ask Zuckerberg. Persuadables or not, how can we protect our data without desisting from the keyboards entirely. How likely is that?

Screenings of Spanish Cinema at the Cervantes Institute

The indefatigable Barrie Pattison has drawn attention to these upcoming screenings at Sydney's Cervantes Institute. 

Level 3, 299-305 Sussex Street Tel.: 02 9274 92 00. Reasonable digital projection.

6:00 pm Fridays in August. 

16 August

Nacidas para sufrir/Born to Suffer. Directed by Miguel Albaladejo, 2010 with Adriana Ozores.

An all women group conspire.

23 August

Sé quién eres/I Know Who You Are. Directed by Patricia Ferreira, 2000 with  Miguel Ángel Solá, Ana Fernández.

Lady shrink probes her amnesiac patient's past.

   
30 August

Maria (y los demas)/Maria and the Demons Directed by Nely Reguera with Barbara Lennie.

Dad re-marries.