Adelaide Film Festival - Mike Walsh makes a plea for an immediate commitment to an annual festival.

Editor's Note: This essay by Mike Walsh first appeared on Bill Mousoulis's terrific website Pure Shit Australian Cinema a continuous source of information about and support for Australian film culture. It is reproduced here with permission of Bill Mousoulis and the author Mike Walsh. 

Mike Walsh was formerly Associate Professor in Screen and Media at Flinders University. He has also worked for AFF since 2002 as programme consultant and writer of program notes.

Mike Walsh

A Dry Spring in Adelaide
In the past week we saw the announcement that Amanda Duthie, the CEO and Director of the Adelaide Film Festival (AFF), would leave following the upcoming festival to take up a position with the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC). The media release sneakily dropped another bomb, however, in its statement that the biennial festival would be searching for a new director in time for its next iteration in 2020(my italics). That is to say, the festival which has been held annually for the past two years (or four years if we count the short ‘Rogue’ event in 2016), would now revert to its former status of rearing its head only once every 24 months.

A little history is in order here. AFF was re-instituted in 2002 following a campaign promise by ALP leader, Mike Rann. Rann was a keen cinephile, who saw film as a way of promoting the state and putting his distinctive signature on his new administration. Like many of his reforms, it was a cautious one. The festival was to alternate with the biennial Arts Festival in February. Katrina Sedgwick, who was appointed director, jobshared with associate director, Adele Hann. Sedgwick was starting a family and the part-time status suited her.

Rann had stated the ambition of making AFF the biggest film festival in the southern hemisphere, but this was never going to happen. The festival quickly established a national reputation for innovation, instituting an investment fund (whose films won AFI Best Film Awards in three consecutive years), a Feature Film competition, and the Hive workshop to generate productions for the ABC by artists from other art forms.

But then things changed in Adelaide’s “Mad March.” The Fringe Festival became annual in 2007, and later expanded from three weeks to four. The main Festival of Arts was made annual in 2012, with the result that in 2013 AFF moved its dates from February to October. AFF had become an anomaly as the only festival in the Festival State that ran only every second year.

Katrina Sedgwick left the festival following its 2011 edition to take up a position with the ABC. She was replaced by Amanda Duthie, who had come from the ABC. Duthie, like most of those involved with the festival, chafed under the problems that stemmed from running a festival only once every two years. A start-up festival that runs so infrequently finds immense difficulties in building an audience. There are also problems in retaining high quality staff who are laid off between festivals, and in getting the attention of sales agents and distributors.

In 2016 Duthie instituted a short ‘Rogue’ event featuring the premiere of Ali’s Wedding, in order to get some traction with local audiences around the October date. In 2017 it was announced that the festival would run consecutively in that year and in 2018—which, ominously, was an election year. The ALP went into the election making a campaign promise to make the festival annual on a permanent basis. It lost. The new Liberal government has since transferred oversight of film institutions such as AFF and SAFC away from ArtsSA to the Ministry of Industry and Skills. 

Back to the present. The decision to return the festival to biennial status is the perfect political disaster, as each side of politics can blame the other. The recent state budget notes:The former government elected to bring forward the 2019 Adelaide Film Festival to occur in 2018. In the absence of this additional funding, the next Adelaide Film Festival would be in 2021.

In other words, the Liberals can point out that the ALP declined to allot extra money to make the festival annual, merely bringing forward the expenditure for a single festival on its Arts budget. The ALP can point out, with equal truth, that the Liberals have walked away from any interest in maintaining the festival as an annual event. What is clear is the victims of this will be the audiences and the staff of the festival.

There is, of course, a moral to this story—don’t rely on government funding. This is more easily said than done in a city such as Adelaide that lacks the critical population mass of Melbourne and Sydney, and suffers under the additional disadvantages of only having a single Murdoch tabloid newspaper, and a CBD that struggles to retain people after 6pm.

So, this year’s AFF will be our last before a long drought until October 2020. The festival desperately needs to establish a higher profile in the city, but it will be difficult to do this given that existing staff contracts will expire, and it is unclear exactly when a new director will be appointed. Whoever does get the job will be faced with reinventing the festival from the ground up.

The battles to restore the festival’s annual status will begin again, and the new director will have to find ways to build the box office while cutting costs. Some public debate on all this would be welcome. The festival’s strongest selling point thus far has been that it has been supportive of local film production. While this is true, it needs to be augmented by strategies that build audiences and revenues. Support of filmmakers is a source of expenditure, not of income.

Personally, I would like to see the festival build some stronger links with organisations including the Media Resource Centre (MRC) which runs year-round exhibition programs such as the Adelaide Cinematheque and the Seniors on Screens programs. It is also notable that the OzAsia festival runs its film program (curated by the MRC) at virtually the same time as AFF, though there have been no links forged between the two organisations.

AFF’s 2018 edition runs from October 10 to 21. And then the dry spell begins. It seems a matter of some urgency that the festival should incorporate a debate on its own future.

The Road to Pordenone - Barrie Pattison prowls around the current offering in Paris and discovers the great animator Raoul Servais

Well I don't drink wine or eat cheese and I just bathe in gloom at the thought of Napoleon's tomb so what do I do here?

A good example came up a few nights back. Buried in the small type in L'Officiel des Spectacles (I really miss Pariscope) was a reference to a Forum des Images night with Raoul Servais, the great Belgian animator of the sixties and seventies.

Raoul Servais

It wasn't in the spread sheet program but I rolled up anyway and sure enough there was ninety-year old Servais fronting a program of his shorts - Chromophobia (1965) and his extraordinary Goldframe (1969) and Harpy (1979) included - along with the 1994 feature Taxandria.

A product of his time, along with Manuel Otero, Les Cineastes and Why Do You Smile Mona Lisa? he was one of the wave of animators which introduced art school and magazine illustration sophistication to movies in an era when the toons were always the best of festival shorts.

Servais told us the way had not been smooth. A stint with the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux hadn't worked out when Servais decided the master was petit-bourgeois. There was no training in animation in Belgium and only one course in all Europe. He disowns his first cartoon for its crude track.

Taxandria, which I'd never heard of, proved as described, a Euro-Pudding with a script in re-voiced English by Alain Robbe-Grillet no less. It's only classy element was the central performance by Armin Mueller-Stahl but the animated sequences, where the seagull flies from live action into the drawn frame, using the technique developed for Harpy, have arresting images. The panel of mascara'd clerks in tall black hats, ripping the juvenile's diploma into an increasing sea of fragments, belongs in a more substantial project.

The man from the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles wound things up before I got a chance to ask if Servais watched Pixar and Brad Bird. Then the audience, which struck me as curious rather than reverent, made their way off into the Paris night.

I had the feeling I'd been through this before - the British Council flew out the admirable Phil Mulloy to introduce his Cowboys toons at the Bondi Pavilion after which he went off with the organisers to have dinner, which was just as well as twenty of the twenty five people who turned up didn't make it back from their drinks at the interval.

The passion for films which I knew in the sixties here has sunk or submerged. I had to spell S-E-R-V-A-I-S for one of my film freak friends who'd never heard of him. I got the impression that the great man was used to that.

But there is still an audience for class movies here. Black Klansman is gaining momentum and Michel Audiard's Romanian Spanish Western with Hollywood stars The Sisters Brothers has just opened big. Move over Stagecoach, Whispering Smith, The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch. Remembering the miserable release Blackthorn (Mateo Gil, Spain/Bolivia/UK/France, 2011) achieved in Australia, let's not hold our breath for that one though.

Talkie Talk #30 - Adam Bowen's rundown of the new movies and the TV highlights

IN CINEMAS THIS WEEK

Jirga (Benjamin Gilmour, Australia)

Jirga – Aussie soldier returns to Afghanistan to seek redemption from the Afghani family of a civilian he killed.

Watch the trailer here

McKellen: Playing the Part – doco about Sir Ian McKellen.

Custody – French drama about a painful, post-marriage custody battle.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot – wheelchair-bound Joaquin Phoenix sobers up and discovers the healing power of art.

Night School – comedy in which high school troublemakers are forced to attend night school.

Alpha – Prehistoric boy meets wolf.

Zama (Lucretia Martel, Argentina)

Zama –drama set in the 17^thcentury about a colonial administrator, “stuck” in Argentina, and yearning for his native Spain.

Watch the trailer here

Pataakha– feuding sisters miss each other when they’re separated by marriage.

ON THE TELLY

David Farrar, Kathleen Byron The Small Back Room

Tuesday 12.10pm 9Gem: Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room (1949) – during WW2 an alcoholic bomb disposal expert (David Farrar) faces the external challenge of ingeniously booby-trapped bombs. Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Also starring Kathleen Byron.

Watch a key scene from the film here

Thursday 10am Fox Classics: Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1944) – in WW2 Martinique, Humphrey Bogart helps a French resistance fighter. Also starring Lauren Bacall and Walter Brennan.

Saturday 4.15pm 9Gem: We of the Never Never (1982) – fascinating, beautiful, underrated Australian classic about Mrs Aeneas Gunn (the excellent Angela Punch-McGregor), a 19^thcentury white woman making her mark in the outback.

Watch a preview here

Sunday 1.50pm 9Gem: The Cruel Sea (1953) - WW2 naval drama about the crew of a convoy escort ship. The emphasis on realism and lack of melodrama makes it all the more gripping and moving. Starring Jack Hawkins.

On Blu-ray - David Hare grapples with the Criterion edition of Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (USA, 2011)

All these screens come from the second half of the new 188 minute extended cut of Malick's The Tree of Life which has just come out through Criterion on a double Blu-ray disc edition with the Theatrical cut. That version was released in what was then (and still is) a reference quality Blu disc by Fox a few years back.

Having only ever seen this cut, like everyone else, I decided my disappointment with the film which bordered on intense dislike, needed to be fed with a re-viewing of the new work. 

So far so good. The new color grading done by Malick and his DP, Emanuel Lubezki is slightly warmer and gives the image, which was already completely mind blowing, greater depth while maintaining the lightness and gorgeous felicity of the original color palette. If ever Criterion could have committed to doing a title in the new UHD 4K format this should have been it.

So I achieved one viewing of it earlier today, broken up by three interruptions, and I will give it one more without any interruptions later. I feel far more at ease these days with what Stratton used to call his loathed "wobble cam". I have never had major problems anyway with hand held photography, definitely not in the hands of skilled artists like these. 

I think in fact Lubezki and Malick have literally unchained the camera from the formal tyranny of the tripod, and in the process the film ceases to indulge or even permit more or less straight lines. Conceptually and visually every shot tilts, travels, shifts its angle and never leads anywhere except to allow itself to exist. The formal purposefulness of this cubism is most profound I think in the first half of the movie in which autobiographical narrative is less prominent than the second half, and unlike my original viewing back in 2013 or so, I was engaged far more by the movie. 

The second half turns into a different key, which is why I've taken screens from it. And it's in this last 90 minutes that the extra material - all of it I believe extensions of existing characters and locations - takes the picture deeper into personal conflicts. But it also gets much more churchy. I could smell this coming a mile off, but ignored it until, in the end that became impossible. Just a minute before the final credits, in the last multi-time, multi-generational sequence in which everyone is brought together in some supernatural framework in a transcendental beach scene, Jessica Chastain's "wife/mother" character picks up one of her children and whispers to the sky "I offer up my child to you". 

And so it all comes crashing down. I will defer to David Denby, of all people, a critic I don't usually read or seek out. In reviewing the original movie back in 2011 he says, in effect: "I have never met any woman in my life who has or would ever say they offer their child to any god." I think his meaning is clear and I concur absolutely. 

Thus the entire edifice, so powerfully wrought and felt, for me is ultimately abandoned to something as meretricious and as offensive as this hideous biblical level of subjugation to some fucking theocratic drivel. 

The movie has its admirers, and sadly or not I remain not one of them. I will watch it one more time, for the record, and put it away, probably forever

The AFI/AACTA Awards - a few notes, a few questions

The Pretend One (Poster)

“Are you OK?” Without question that is the line uttered most frequently across the totality of the entries in the 2018 AFI/AACTA Awards. Just saying. …

There are 38 films nominated for Best Film in the Competition for Best Australian Feature Film. 18 of these films are also nominated for “Best Indie Film” a category which requires that the film be made for a budget of under $2 million. The under $2 mill movies were often made for a lot under $2 mill.  A lot of heart and soul or as one writer/lead actor advised. “This film was made with a lot of love because we had no money.” 

All 38 films will, by the time the screening schedule is complete, have been screened once in Sydney Melbourne and Brisbane at AFI/AACTA screenings either through the year or at the AACTA Festival. Attendances vary. For some, including where some of the film-makers were present, less than a couple of dozen spectators were on hand. The screenings of course get no favours. The Sydney Underground Film Festival, increasing in popularity is the word, and the behemoth Italian Film Festival with dozens of screenings at all the Palace Cinemas were on at some or all of the same time.

Included in the 38 titles are the films Gringo (Nash Edgerton) and Boy Erased (Joel Edgerton), both made in the USA, the former produced or acquired by industry megalith Amazon and the latter produced by Focus and by Anonymous Content and acquired by Universal for local distribution. 

In the case of Gringo the booklet states that it has been ‘deemed eligible to compete in the listed categories as it received the Department of Communications and the Arts’ PDV Offset and features Australians in key creative roles.’ The same is said in regard to The Lego Ninjago Movie (?, No director credit is included in the AFI/AACTA booklet).

Nor is there anything in the  booklet which explains how Boy Erased  came to be entered or accepted for entry. Maybe it’s because Edgerton also acts in the film along with Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman in supporting parts. Whatever. The audience gave it a good clap but nowhere near as good a clap as that received by Survive or Die (Daniel Okoduwa & Mike Kang) or even Indigo Lake (Martin Simpson). The applause for the two latter could possibly be explained by the fact that both audiences were significantly enlarged by many of the cast and crew being in attendance and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

You do however have to wonder how it is that Boy Erased, a film made in America, about Americans and American issues, from a memoir by an American, financed by an American company, distributed by an American company and whose credits list no significant Australian contribution beyond the presence of Joel Edgerton in front of and behind the camera, Nash Edgerton on stunts and the roles for Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, gets deemed to be eligible for the AFI/AACTA Awards.  Of course I don’t know whether all of the more than a dozen people listed in the booklet are in fact Australians. Maybe all of them are.

But if not, you also have to wonder how it is that all the various guilds and professional associations haven’t hit the roof at having to compete with an American movie in the local awards.  ....Whatever. Maybe I missed it.

Actually, the credits in the booklet are quite interesting and indeed varied. For some titles, most notably the abovementioned Survive or Die, only a couple of names are listed. For others a quite extensive list is provided and on 26 of the titles the Casting Director is listed. Is there a casting award? What have I missed here? Whatever.

One thing the booklet doesn’t specify is the form of any government assistance provided to the production. If you sit through the end credits its sometimes possible to work out which films had taxpayer funded largesse and which didn’t. You shouldn’t assume that the eighteen films eligible for “Best Indie Film” have all been made without taxpayer assistance but you should assume that some of them have.

The Pretend One

So, among the “Indies” I have already passed some comments on West of Sunshine and The Second, Strange Colors and on Brothers' Nest.  Barrie Pattison has reviewed Jirga.  I haven't seen all eighteen of the entries but did write earlier about Angie Black's  The FIVE Provocations.  

Geraldine Hakewill, The Pretend One

The story of The Pretend  One  is a delight, smart, funny, something imaginative to set it apart from many of the others which are derivative and reliant on the tropes of far better models and predecessors. A young woman, living with her bitter, solitary father on a cotton farm, keeps her imaginary friend until well into womanhood. He's very much alive and present, at least for her. It drives dad nuts but the imaginary friend, increasingly mean and bitter himself as the arc of the story takes her away from him, provides much of the humour. People are going to work out their lives and priorities in a quite detailed environment whose peace is disturbed by the arrival by the arrival of a handsome young journalist who wants to get the town story down. This meeting in the pub isn’t like TV and Heather Ewart’s Backroads  by the way. The almost entirely male denizens of the pub are a mostly ignorant bunch full of beer, bile and grumpiness, not at all saintly, generous, tolerant outback folks of legend. It all works out mostly for the best and there’s more than a smidgin of sentimentality but the treatment of the imaginary friend, of peoples’ lives changing for the better and the bit of suffering that has to be borne is really well done, filled with imaginative turns.

I fear for the film of course. It's got a 2017 date on it so its been around awhile already. It's unlikely that it will win anything. It seems unlikely it will ever get any reviews. It may not even get shown anywhere else. Them’s the breaks, but if writer James Raue, director Prescott and producer Dinusha Ratnaweera come knocking then somebody doling out taxpayer-funded largesse should hear them out and give them enough money to make another modest movie. 

With this film, and with Strange Colors (Alena Lodkina) and The Five Provocations (Angie Black) mentioned above, we have some films this year that actually make you think there is some talent out there to nurture.

Canberra International Film Festival 2018 - Homage to the great Australian Cinematographer Robert Krasker

The forthcoming Canberra International Film Festival will have a special focus on the work of Robert Krasker the first Australian cinematographer to win an Oscar. Three films have been selected to represent the diversity of his work and the quite extraordinary skill he displayed in creating images on both large and small scales.

For more details and tickets on this and the whole program go to www.ciff.com.au

Friday 26 OCTOBER at 7.30pm 

THE THIRD MAN 

Director: Carol Reed
1949, UK 104 mins B&W Classification: PG 

With Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard 

Reed’s masterpiece, and a deservedly celebrated British thriller,
THE THIRD MAN won Australian Robert Krasker an Oscar for
Best Cinematography. Krasker’s experience in Germany
studying the lighting and photography of the expressionist
period, allowed him to apply an unforgettably dark and
brooding atmosphere to the shadows, cobble-stone alley-ways
and damaged grandeur of war-torn Vienna. The story follows
a naïve American pulp-fiction novelist (Joseph Cotton) in his attempts to find an old friend who is now deeply embroiled in the post-war black-market and drug-dealing. Orson Welles revels in his scenes as the menacing Harry Lime, and the entire cast is perfect. With an original screenplay by Graham Greene, and electrifying music on the zither by Anton Karas, the whole film is “a tender/tough classic” (Time Out), which can be re-visited endlessly, especially in this new 4k restoration.

Saturday 27 OCTOBER at 1.30pm


THE CRIMINAL (aka THE CONCRETE JUNGLE) 

Director: Joseph Losey
1960, UK 86 mins B&W
Classification: unclassified (CIFF recommends M) 

With Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker, Margit Saad, Patrick Magee 

Re-building his career after being blacklisted in Hollywood
during the McCarthy witch-hunts, Joseph Losey found a wealth
of support in England. Loser took a commission to make a crime movie
 about an old-fashioned lone-wolf criminal trying to outwit a
large crime syndicate. Losey transformed the project into an
 exercise in existential angst, with the best of collaborators:
actor Stanley Baker, hiding his anguish beneath a severe,
 tight-lipped exterior; emerging playwright Alun Owen (his first feature, soon to be followed by A HARD DAY’S NIGHT) who crafted terse, percussive dialogues; and above all, Robert Krasker, whose willingness to play with light and camera angles gave Losey perfect expression for his intense, baroque vision. John Dankworth’s moody jazz score adds to the mix, especially with Cleo Laine singing the haunting, recurring, theme song. 

Sunday 28 OCTOBER at 4.00pm

EL CID 

Director: Anthony Mann
1963, USA/Spain 182 mins Colour Classification G 

With Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, Raf Vallone, Genevieve Page and Australia’s own Frank Thring 

Described by Martin Scorsese as "one of the greatest epic films
 ever made" this cast-of-thousands big-screen movie depicted
 episodes in the life of the 11th century Spanish hero who fought to defend his country from invading Moors. Krasker shifts effortlessly from his dark b&w thrillers to a rich palette of bold colours, magnificent wide-screen compositions, and a camera that swoops and glides and encircles the characters. The climactic siege of Valencia is one of Krasker’s finest hours, and he thoroughly deserved an award from the British Society of Cinematographers. Director Anthony Mann was best known for his tough gutsy Westerns and is in top form, as is Miklos Rozsa with a full-blooded music score. Of all the epics that Samuel Bronston produced in the 1960s, this one, according to Geoff Andrew in Time Out, was “one of the very finest ... genuinely stirring ... and equally impressive in terms of script (by Philip Yordan) and spectacle.” 

On Region-free US Blu-ray - A new restored edition of Phillip Brophy's BODY MELT (Australia, 1998)

Phillip Brophy

Watching this year’s crop of AFI/AACTA nominated films this year gives the distinct impression that as a nation of film-makers our main trope is derivation. Watching them at a moment when smallminds and idiots everywhere are sticking needles in the fruit crop, you realise that one of our national default modes is mindlessly copying others. Yet one film in our past leapt out of those circumstances to make something quite unique, something which at the time in fact drew some praise from the cognoscenti but which has now developed a two-decade long and quite formidable international reputation for its unique combination of genre subversion, dirty black humour, gross-out special effects and satirical dismembering of many Oz icons.

Phillip Brophy’s Body Melt became our own outlier movie. It exists almost as Australia’s, singular, film maudit, its aesthetic being such that, despite the praise referred to it caused noses to be turned up from the moment of its first appearance. It both began and ended Brophy’s career as a commercial film-maker. Brophy himself has written somewhat philosophically about his fate and that of the film. 

Among its public champions. Adrian Martin has continually, even doggedly, championed the film, most recently here on Film Alert when another local Blu-ray edition was released. You can also read more of Adrian’s views on his Film Critic website. Quentin Tarantino has also been most supportive.

Now, the film’s producer, and regular Film Alert contributor Rod Bishop, has drawn attention to the reception of the film on the invaluable DVD Beaver website. There is much technical analysis devoted here to a new US edition of the film which producer Bishop and others claim show the film off to its best extent ever. Go to the link for some very detailed commentary. 

You can buy the Region-free disc if you go to this link. Here below is the cover of the edition, one of many on offer, you should be looking for.