When Fortune Smiles: John Snadden writes on The Life and Times of Raymond Chow and Golden Harvest

Raymond Chow

Raymond Chow, a major figure in world cinema, died on 2 November 2018. He was the co-founder and public face  of the Hong Kong based Golden Harvest Film Company. From 1970-2003, Golden Harvest produced approximately 600 feature films, and through its theatrical arm distributed nearly as many titles again. From the mid-1980s, Golden Harvest became the most prosperous and prolific movie business in South East Asia, supplanting the once all-powerful Shaw Brothers Studio.

Run Run Shaw, Run Me Shaw

Raymond Chow and Run Run Shaw spent much of their professional life at first as trusted colleagues and later as commercial rivals. Both possessed brilliant business minds and that key ability to recognise and develop raw talent.

Chow had the demeanour and guile of a welcoming restaurateur. His heavy set glasses and easy smile were as much disarming to business acquaintances as they were reassuring to family and friends.

As a businessman, Raymond Chow had few peers in the Cantonese film industry. His planning and forward thinking had him at least five years ahead of his competitors - and they all knew it !

Raymond Chow Wai-Man was born in Hong Kong in 1927, and following his father's death the family moved to Shanghai where Chow spent his formative years. He attended the prestigious St John University where he studied English and Journalism. It was during these tertiary years he developed a life-long passion for Eastern and Western contemporary cultures, particularly cinema.

By the early 1950s, the daily grind and appeal of journalism was beginning to wear thin for Raymond Chow. He moved back to Hong Kong and began work in the more lucrative advertising industry.

In 1959, he was employed by the Shaw Brothers Studio in the marketing department. He rose quickly in the organisation and by the mid-1960s was Head of Film Production. Chow proved to be a very capable and loyal lieutenant to Run Run Shaw and his brother Run Me. 

 

Raymond Chow, Bruce Lee

In 1969, Raymond Chow first met Bruce Lee, whom he saw as having great potential as a future star and a figure to lead the studio into the 1970s. 

Unfortunately, both Shaw brothers didn't envisage such a rosy career path for this “cocky TV-actor”. Chow described Lee as a game changer – something the studio was going to need in coming years. But the powers-that-be were set in their opposition to employing Bruce Lee – and their decision was final. 

Raymond Chow was facing a major dilemma: to remain at the Shaw Studio as a well-paid functionary or to pursue Bruce Lee as an independent producer. As a middle-aged executive with a young family, the stakes were high.

Chow acted swiftly, and with Shaw Brothers colleague, Leonard Ho, set up the Golden Harvest Film Company. Veteran Shaw Brothers director, Lo Wei, also jumped ship and joined the new entity. It was a company without a studio, stars or produced films. But Chow did have a tentative arrangement with the now LA-based Bruce Lee to negotiate a possible contract with the newly formed Golden Harvest.

Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho knew it was vital to get Lee to sign with their company. Both executives decided to not be directly involved with the contract negotiations. Instead, Chow asked Lo Wei's wife, Lau Leung-Wah, would she speak with Lee. It turned out she was a close friend of Lee's parents.

In a short time, the “cocky TV actor” was on his way to Thailand to star in a Golden Harvest martial-arts / adventure pic, The Big Boss.

For the time being the banks were on side with Hong Kong's newest film company – a situation which could change very quickly. 

 

Bruce Lee, The Big Boss

Nearly everything rested upon The Big Boss being a commercial success. The production was fraught with problems, and early on saw Lo Wei replace the original director. The cast and crew disliked the primitive Thai locations, and Lee spent much of his non-film-making time fending off agents working for the Shaw Brothers who were now offering the actor big money deals to leave Golden Harvest and to work for Hong Kong's largest film studio. Lee told each of these carpetbaggers: “Raymond Chow is going to make me an international movie star.”

 The Big Boss opened in Hong Kong in late October 1971, and quickly became the highest grossing film in the colony's history. Bruce Lee's screen charisma and his character's conflicted persona were a revelation to Hong Kong audiences. The movie's stylised violence and overt sexuality only added to the picture's mass appeal. Within months, and with screenings throughout South East Asia, The Big Boss had returned fifty times its initial budget – a financial figure unheard of in those years. 

Fist of Fury

Lee and Lo Wei went to work on their next pic Fist of Fury, whilst Raymond Chow was busy talking with Hollywood executives who were beginning to see what Bruce Lee could be capable of. It was with Warner Brothers and director Robert Clouse that a film project was being seriously discussed.

Fist of Fury repeated the box-office success of The Big Boss. Fist of Fury is Lee's masterpiece.  It begins as a straight forward revenge movie but soon develops into a much darker narrative where Lee eschews the heroic for the psychotic. The final shot is a rabble rousing, visceral image which soon became an iconic freeze frame of 1970's world cinema. It is for many Asian people the highpoint of Bruce Lee's short cinema career. 

John Saxon, Raymond Chow, Bruce Lee
on location for Enter the Dragon

The production of Enter the Dragon  in Hong Kong by a major Hollywood studio was big news in the region. At the centre of this frenetic cinema activity were Bruce Lee and Raymond Chow. This was a gilded time for both where financial and artistic futures were often being considered. It was no secret that the Warner Brothers suits saw this rising star and Hong Kong producer as opening doors to audiences that had been previously closed to American film companies. 

Fortune may favour the brave but it is the weavers of fate who decide our destiny. In mid-1973,  Enter the Dragon was released world-wide and became a box-office phenomenon. Only six days before its US premiere, Bruce Lee was found dead in a Hong Kong apartment owned by a Canto starlet named Betty Pei-Tai. The news spread like wildfire and the circumstances surrounding his death were shrouded in official secrecy, creating a world of lurid rumours ranging from triad assassination to sex play gone wrong. Raymond Chow was also linked to the death as it was strongly suggested he and Lee had spent the day with the young actress. Chow denied this emphatically but did admit he was the first person Betty Pei-Tai contacted when she found Lee to be seriously ill that night. 

The post mortem eventually showed the star died of a cerebral edema, triggered by a severe reaction to excessive use of pain killers and tranquilisers. The coroner   ruled: death by misadventure. 

The death of Bruce Lee demonstrated once again how a major star is often at the hub of the commercial film-making process. All the plans for Lee'

s future involving Hollywood, Raymond Chow and Golden Harvest were nothing more than ideas in the ether, without the star to bring it together and to make it happen.

On a personal and professional level, the loss of Bruce Lee was a body blow to Raymond Chow. To an outsider, such a tragic event for a fledgling film company could well be something the business might never recover from.

 

Angela Mao

But from day one of Golden Harvest, Chow and Leonard Ho had invested wisely in talent and bricks and mortar. They had under contract a shrewd blend of young and veteran stars. For Hong Kong audiences Golden Harvest was producing a string of entertaining and profitable genre films. Ex-Shaw Brothers leading light, Jimmy Wang-Yu, starred in excellent martial-arts pics such as One-Armed Boxer and Beach of the War Gods. Taiwanese born Angela Mao Ying was a screen sensation in Lady Whirlwind and When Taekwando Strikes.  Her brief but memorable stint in Enter the Dragon created a well-deserved star profile. 

Poster for When Taekwando Strikes

Editor's Note: This is the first of a four part series. John Snadden is a Melbourne cinephile, film distributor and writer with a longstanding interest in Chinese cinema. His notes on new Chinese films can be found throughout the Film Alert 101 blog.

Bruce Hodsdon - On Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style and FIRST REFORMED

Transcendental style “fleeing” narrative in First Reformed

    

Paul Schrader

 A cross reference from the note on First Reformed in Paul Schrader Part 2 in my series on Authorship and Hollywood  this is a summary, not a critique, of the realisation by Schrader in his latest film, of transcendental style based on analysis of the style proposed by him in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu Bresson Dreyer (first published in 1972, Bracketed references in black type are to relevant page numbers in Transcendental Style in Film, 2018 edition). 

This essay appears here also to complement the appearance, in Issue 92 of Senses of Cinema, of an essay,“Paul Schrader's 'Rethinking Transcendental Style'.”  You can find that essay if you click on this link

“Movies are antagonistic to articulating spiritual feelings, but through a process, a stylistic ritual in motion pictures you can create a feeling of transcendence or a sensation of the Wholly Other.” (1)

   

When he wrote Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader admits that he had little idea of how the phenomenology (2) worked in the process of breaking free from “the iron nucleus of narrative.” (25)  

In defining filmic transcendental style (TS)  (2), Schrader makes his intentions explicit: not to pretend any “new” aesthetics but rather to situate his concept within some previous theories which draw conclusions from “the checkered history of sacred art.”(171) Schrader emphasises that there are no specific religious techniques. What is important and necessary are aesthetic generalisations. “A technique or form can only be described as “religious” (or transcendental) when defined in a highly restricted context.”(172) This context comes into clearer focus, Schrader suggests, by the adoption and adaptation to cinema of the theory of abundant and sparse means in art.(177) (3)

In this context transcendental style “must walk the line”: it must use the given abundant means of profane cinema to sustain audience interest, and it must sufficiently reject the empathetic rationale of profane cinema in order for that rationale to attain a new priority. The book thus uses a minimum of abundant means in order to sustain a film in which the means are becoming increasingly sparse (179).  At the same time, despite increasing austerity, spirituality in a film needs to remain in a state of flux, to have “room to move” in a subtle interplay between abundance and sparsity. In this, irony and ambiguity have a part to play.

The following is a form of transcendental analysis (1) of the style Schrader subsequently applied to First Reformed  for the first time in his own filmmaking. Many filmmakers have used elements of TS in their films in the context of other styles but according to Schrader “few have had the devotion, the rigour and the outright fanaticism to employ it exclusively.” (41)

Ethan Hawke, First Reformed

In First Reformed Schrader opens with the everyday,a meticulous representation of the commonplaces in everyday living which for him is a form of stylisation - the camera is static and human figures positioned in flat (planimetric) compositions – a preponderance of images with the camera placed in medium or long shot to the action, filmed and edited in longer than average shots (ASL) . There is an ASL in Film Reformed of around 12-13 secs with shots in some scenes of 30-60 seconds or more, minimal reverse angle cutting between characters. Schrader emphasises that “if the everyday was an end in itself it would be a style rather than a step within a style.”  (69-70)

In his film, minimal non-diegetic music throughout heightens the impact of the onscreen choral performances in this austere environment. Acting in First Reformed is more expressive than Bresson would have allowed. Schrader repeats Bresson's use of “doubling,” i.e., repeating information in the form of spoken onscreen diary entries. He suggests that this questions what is perceived to be happening in the everyday, increasing the sense of disparity.

Disparity is“an actual or potential disunity between man and his environment...a growing crack in the dull surface of everyday reality” (70). “Disparity is often reflected (as in Ozu's family dramas) “by a thoroughgoing sense of irony”  (72). [Disparity] is “a gradual process, each progressive step eating away at the solid veneer of everyday reality.” (74 ). Disparity is caused by the insertion of what Amédée Ayfre calls, “human density” which, if examined more closely, is actually a spiritual density  (70).”

Amanda Seyfried, First Reformed

Mary, a parishioner who is pregnant, asks Pastor Toller, himself struggling with his faith, to counsel her husband Michael who is despairing for the future of their child in what he perceives to be a physically and morally polluted world. Following the counselling, Toller is shown a suicide vest by Mary, of which he takes charge, that she has found hidden in the garage. There is a moment of subjectivity in the everyday- the elation of the bike ride with Mary.  Disparity in the everyday becomes an open rupture with Michael's suicide. Toller's comforting of Mary transmutes into the 'miraculous emotional screen' of the levitation.

A sparsity of means is balanced by narrative interest – Toller's relationship with the two women and the critical environmental issue. Toller discovers on Michael's computer, that a company, the main sponsor of the 250^thconsecration of Toller's church, is a leading polluter. This is rationalised by Toller's superior in his concern about the pastor's growing despair.

In transcendental expression there is a difference between East (enlightenment) and West (conversion) – the disparityin Ozu's films is primarily internal  (“man cannot find nature in himself”), in Bresson's films it is external (“man cannot live harmoniously in a hostile environment”). In the former the decisive action is communal, in the latter it is restricted to a lonely figure pitted against the environment. (82-3) In transcendental stylewidening disparity produces a decisive action, a commitment by both a central character and the viewer. Without the latter there can be no stasis.(105) (3)

Ill and in personal crisis, in the light of dawn Toller embraces belief in “a new form of prayer” fuelling the pastor's resolve to take decisive action. The cold environment is briefly 'thawed' by the singing of 'Everlasting Arms' in the church service. Irony cannot mask Toller's resolve.

Ethan Hawke, First Reformed

Note: the following paragraph in italics contains spoilers.

Despite his earlier warning for her to stay away, Toller sees Mary enter the church for the consecration service during which he is planning to activate the suicide vest.  Following the Pastor's maximum emotional conflict expressed in a muffled scream of agony, is Mary's sudden presence in the room which must be accepted or rejected - they embrace as the camera circles, then stasis - image and sound just stop at the ambiguous final moment, an abrupt cut from image and sound to a black screen and silence.  

“If the viewer accepts the decisive action (and disparity), [she] accepts through [her] mental construct a view of life that can encompass both. On screen this is represented by stasis...This static view represents the “new” world in which the physical and spiritual can co-exist, still in tension and unresolved, but as part of a larger scheme...more or less expressive of a larger reality.” (108)

The outburst of inexplicable emotion Bresson called “ 'the moment of transformation'...This transformation does not resolve the disparity, it accepts [overrides] it” in what Schrader identifiesas “the end product of transcendental style,” (75)...the trademark of religious art in every culture.” (75-6) It establishes the image of another reality which can stand beside the ordinary reality; it represents the Wholly Other.”  (76) “All is one,” disparity, now frozen, is “unresolved but transcended in stasiswhich is the final example of sparse means.” (108,179)  This “forces the viewer into the confrontation with the Wholly Other [she] would normally avoid.” (106)

Unlike conventional religious films which deploy identification with abundant means as the means of audience engagement, transcendental style uses a form of confrontation through increasing sparsity culminating in stasis. “If successful,” Schrader concludes, “stasis transforms empathy into aesthetic appreciation, experience into expression, emotions into form. This distinction between form and expression is not pedantic, but fundamental; a form can express the Transcendent, an experience cannot.” (77) In transcendence  “the viewer keeps going, deeper and deeper into the image,” Schrader suggests, that “this is 'the miracle' of sacred art...if it occurs, the viewer moves...beyond the province of art...past the point where 'temporal means' [abundant or sparse] are of any avail.”(179 ) (4)  Schrader acknowledges that this does require some special knowledge and commitment on the viewer's part to explore the spiritual in art.(184)

Claire Thomson summarises filmic stasis as “reducing narrative to a repeatable ritual devoid of 'human culture and personality'.” (5)  Schrader illustrates this by reference to Carl Dreyer in the final scene of Ordet in which expectation of the transcendent, already explicit in the film and set-up by the miracle of Inger's resurrection, is denied by Dreyer's assertion of  'the social and material reality of the body and the cultural context'. (134-6).

In contrast to Dreyer's dualistic re-admission of the immanent, Schrader is committed to evoking the mystery of transcendence.

Stasis, on the threshold of transcendence, is acceptance of a parallel reality.

End Notes

1.  Paul Schrader, “Ozu” Film Comment 2016

2.  Phenomenology is the philosophy of experience. Film both records and is the object of experience. Although they are not mutually exclusive, criticism based on transcendental analysisis more about communicating the experience of the film - a criticism based in persuasion -  distinct from experience based on analysis in hermeneutic mode(story, plot, characterisation). Transcendental style aims to transform experience into transcendent expression, “that spot on the spectrum, whether in art, religion or philosophy, which can take [the viewer] to the point of greater mystery.” (185)

3.  See also David Sorfa, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory 2015 p.353). Unlike so-called stasis or monomorphic films (the best known being films by Warhol and Michael Snow) which, in terms of the ability to sustain an audience, could be termed overly sparse, films in transcendental style are concerned with holding audience interest by building what Schrader calls “spiritual momentum” in moving from abundance to sparsity of means. (184)

4.  Superficially the three phase template, as outlined by Schrader, within which transcendental style operates resembles the dominant template of the  conventional three act structure in the screenwriting text books. The everyday(Act 1- introducing the problem); disparityin the everyday (Act 2 -extended struggle severely testing the protagonist and his or her problem); the decisive event preceding stasis( Act 3 – the protagonist solving the problem). In addition to the application of the theory of sparse and abundant means, the key departure in transcendental style is with the concept of stasis in place of narrative closure. These departures do locate TS in the ambit of Deleuze's time-image film. The desired result in the transcendental film is the viewer breaking free of the 'iron grip' of narrative.

5.  Essay in Slow Cinema ed.Tiago de Luca, Nuno Barradas Jorge 2016, p.50.

Terminology

A necessary preface to engaging with Schrader's theory of transcendental style in film is in the introduction to his book (pp.35-44). Without attempting to summarise here Schrader's arrival at definitions of 'transcendental', 'transcendental art' and 'transcendental style', below are some essential elements in his 'moving towards a working definition'.

The Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience, and that which it transcends is, by definition, the immanent. Beyond this truism there is little agreement about the nature of the transcendent in life and art.

The style is not intrinsically transcendental or religious, but it represents a way to approach the Transcendent. The matter being transcended is different in each case, but the goal and the method are, at their purest, the same. Ozu, Bresson and to a lesser extent Dreyer, have forged a common form not determined by the filmmaker's personality, culture, politics, or morality but are the result of two universal contingencies: the desire to express the Transcendent in art and the nature of the film medium. In the final result no other factors can give this style its universality. Because it is a style it can be isolated, analysed, and defined.

Schrader has chosen to use a meaning of style which Heinrich Wölfflin, in Principles of Art History (1950), calls “a general representative form,” like the primitive or classic styles, the expression of similar ideas in similar forms by divergent cultures. This use of style is concerned with what is universal rather than style in terms of individual expression, described by Raymond Durgnat as the “creation of a personal, subjective, non-objective world” ( p.30 Films and Feelings 1967) .

On Blu-ray - David Hare enthuses over the 'pure Sternbergiana' of Criterion's edition of Josef von Sternberg's DOCKS OF NEW YORK (USA, 1928)

Betty Compson

Ferocious emotion in Sternberg. 

In the history of movies there has long been a select group of masterpieces nominated over the years from the silent picture era which always rise to the surface, time after time and with good reason. Sjostrom's The Wind, Murnau's Sunrise, Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Chaplin's The Circus, King Vidor's The Big Parade and Sternberg's 1928 The Docks of New York. 

Docks, made at Paramount, brings together cameraman Hal Rosson and screenwriter Jules Furthman with original material by the great John Monk Saunders, who would shortly pioneer the aviation picture genre, starting with Hawks’ Dawn Patrol, Ford's Air Mail, Leisen's Eagle and the Hawk and many others.

George Bancroft

The tone and texture of Docks is pure, distilled Sternbergiana with signature compositions of characters against bare chipped walls, and ornamentation entirely composed of a flimsy nightie and cigarette smoke, through to densely layered choreographed riots of crowds whom only a rapidly travelling dolly can break up with its own fervent search for the essential subject of the sequence. 

Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova

In this case for the last two screens, the "heroine", Mae a broke prostitute whom Bill (George Bancroft) has just rescued from the New York harbor and a failed suicide attempt. The "other" woman is Lou (Olga Baclanova) who befriends Mae, with the preternatural knowledge from her own life to see the abysmal future in store for Mae. The embrace between the two women in the last two screens is one of the most moving moments in Sternberg, perhaps equalled only by Keiko's ghost appearing at the airport to honor the men returning to Japan, living and dead who shared her life on Anatahan, in that final masterpiece, 

Both George Bancroft and Betty Compson were hugely popular stars in the day in what the French used to call “alimentaire” or popular genre films, and here they’re giving startlingly nuanced performances, often with nothing more than their eyes in shots that last up to twenty seconds, creating a depth of acting so shaded no post-war 20th century acting school could have ever come near it for subtlety and expression. 

Olga Baclanova, Betty Compson

Sternberg takes Bancroft's natural physicality and directs him to play scenes often rigid or still, with just one arm or a leg moving in distraction. Elsewhere with only title cards to provide dialogue which happily Furthman has written so everyone can "get it" before it's even read, Jo gives us the central organic truth that only cinema can reveal. It's the human face, and for his entire career, everything Jo created, assembled, wrote, devised, cut, moved around and photographed was the human face. With everything else in the frame - from a bare wall, to smoke, water and birds, to massive levels of chiaroscuro and disguise, mask, feather, lattice, foliage, costume - all totally subservient to the central meaning of every shot. As he insisted, nothing in the frame is superfluous. Everything points to one meaning. 

The screens are from Criterion's reissue, finally in Blu-ray of the three great last Paramount silents first released on DVD in 2010 including Docks, Underworld (1927) and The Last Command (1928.)

Chris Luscri and Bill Mousoulis present a new season of UNKNOWN PLEASURES in Melbourne

Editor's note: You have to admire the sheer indefatigable spirit of Bill Mousoulis and Chris Luscri and their dedication to getting low-budget indie cinema onto a local screen. Below are details of the next screenings. These follow a sold-out season last month.

Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema

curated and presented by Chris Luscri & Bill Mousoulis, at the boutique venue Long Play in Melbourne 

WEBSITE:  http://www.pureshitauscinema.com/unknown_pleasures.html

"Unknown Pleasures: Australian independent cinema" is a series of semi-regular screenings curated and presented by Chris Luscri & Bill Mousoulis, featuring the best of Australian indie cinema, both new and old, narrative and non-narrative, with discussions with most of the film-makers, presented in the boutique venue Long Play Cinema in Melbourne. It is an attempt to throw some light on under-represented films and film-makers, and also an attempt to foster a sense of community, to create a movement toward a more intimate, local model with film-makers closely and passionately engaged with their audiences.  

PROGRAM FOR Oct/Nov/Dec is now released, we are pleased to present some quite special events to conclude the year:

Mon Oct 21 - Marie Craven will be in town from Qld to present a "Poetry + Video" program, with one poet performing.

Sun Nov 10 - Under-appreciated Melb indie Mark La Rosa will present two of his works, including The Captives (2005, 57 mins).

Thu Nov 14 - Gillian Leahy will be in town from NSW to present and discuss (with John Hughes) her classic essay film My Life Without Steve (1986, 53 mins).

Sun Dec 8 - We have an End-of-Year special, with a rare screening of Bert Deling's Pure Shit (1975, 86 mins).

A Cry from the Heart from DVD Beaver

Folks

There is no need for me to say anymore. One of the great sites devoted to the reception and consideration of Blu-rays and DVDs is asking for help.

Click here for details

On SBS World Movies channel - John Snadden recommends three major titles from Asia DETECTIVE DEE: THE FOUR HEAVENLY KINGS, DEPARTURES and I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY

World Movies, an SBS digital channel now free to air, has a small but worthwhile selection of Asian cinema this week. DETECTIVE DEE: THE FOUR HEAVENLY KINGS (2018) is the third in this ongoing series which have all been directed by Tsui Hark. The film is the usual flurry of convoluted story-lines and impressive CGI. Although the pic revolves around the Sherlock Holmes-like skills of the title star, I actually prefer the ongoing role of the Dowager Empress which Carina Lau has made her own.

DEPARTURES (2008) is a Japanese drama which follows a young couple moving from the city to the country mainly for financial reasons. Obviously, it's much more than this and the departures become a major part of their lives. A human drama of the finest order which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the following year.

Towards the end of the week sees the mainland film I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY (2016) programmed, and is one of my all-time favourite Chinese movies. It's a sly and beautifully observed tale about a Chinese nobody taking on the bureaucracy. A major film from superstar Fan Bingbing and director Feng Xiaogang. Unfortunately, of late both have fallen out of favour with the CCP and life has been made very difficult for them.

Maybe a case of lost in translation....This arvo I picked up some HK blu rays from a Chinese DVD seller in Box Hill, who I know pretty well. She's a businesswoman with many fingers in many pies. In our conversation today she asked : "You want to go Hong Kong? I can get veeeeery cheap ticket now". I replied "Not particularly with all the riots, fire bombings and police shootings" With a dead serious look she said "No, no you won't miss any of that - that all go on for long time!"

Images of Fan Bingbing, I am not Madame Bovary

A new venue for screening experimental work in Sydney - The Film Group presents the Australian Premiere of LINEFORK ( Vic Rawlings and Jeff Daniel Silva, USA, 2016)

The Film Group Screening 1

When: Thursday 17 October at 7.30 pm

Where: "Archies"
Archway 4, Jubilee Park Oval
Chapman Road 
Annandale/Glebe NSW 2038

Admission: FREE


Landscape I: LINEFORK (2016) by Vic Rawlings and Jeff Daniel Silva.

An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains. Now well into his eighties, Lee Sexton is the last living link to the distant past of a regional American music. A retired coal miner with black lung, Lee and his wife, Opal, continue to farm the land where he was born. Together they face encroaching health concerns and stark economic realities. Recorded over three years, Linefork is an observational film documenting their marriage, their community, their resilience, and the raw yet delicate music of an unheralded banjo legend, linked to the past yet immediately present. For more information click here to go to the film's website

“...a gentle and conscientious ethnography that borders on both home movie and art film...It presents a graceful portrait of a couple whose lives are, above all, oriented toward each other...This depiction of being-with-each-other is not romanticized, yet it permeates the film." — Sander Hölsgens, Cultural Anthropology

“The film’s power derives from the same thing that made the first moving pictures so mesmerizing: the spectacle of life passing before your eyes, in all its tedium and strangeness, including the strangeness of life drawing to its end.” — Peter Trachtenberg, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Exquisite...each shot so absorbing, I watched the whole thing with a kind of suspense." — John Jeremiah Sullivan, Oxford American