Documentaries So Far

Tags

documentary, film, gaelic

I started writing this at the halfway point of the year, but then life got in the way in good and exciting ways so this post got put in hold. However, then as now, I was doing well on the documentary-watching front. I said at the start of the year that I wanted to watch at least one feature-length documentary a month this year and so far, I have indeed watched one a month.

As always there’s been a certain amount of hold over from previous years as I track down films that came out a while back but that I either missed the one screening round my way or where it has just taken that long for it to make it to my neck of the woods. In my 2013 review I talked about The Act of Killing being much touted but never actually seeing screenings advertised – though I couldn’t remember its title at the time. (It turns out to be about an anti-Communist purge in Indonesia but the events are no less horrific if less widespread than the Khmer Rouge) Turns out that one reason I’d never seen screenings advertised was that it didn’t make it to my local arts cinema until April this year. It was a strangely compelling, somewhat disturbing little documentary and made the oddest contrast with A Story of Children and Film (lovely, lovely film, made me want to watch all the films featured – though a sad lack of mention for Beasts of the Southern Wild and Quvenzhané Wallis’ frankly mesmerising performance in it) that I watched two days later.

My first documentary of the year was watched almost immediately after I wrote my review of the previous year’s documentary offerings. I was all fired up and motivated and, while flicking through the iPlayer looking for something else entirely I stumbled across Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. I’d missed it in the cinema when it came out, but I’d really wanted to see it then so I watched it there and then before I could forget it was on again and it was definitely worth seeking out. How gripping can a documentary about hair be you wonder? Very. Especially when you discover the complex issues around culture, politics and economics that interweave around the issue of African-American hair. Also it’ll be a long while before I can hear the phrase ‘hair relaxer’ without flinching a little.

The most recent documentary that I saw this year was The Bridge Rising/An Drochaid I think, largely because I went to the premiere of it during Celtic Connections. It’s a film about the campaign to remove the tolls from the Skye Bridge – a summary that either tells you everything you need to know about the film or leaves you utterly in the dark. So, essentially, the bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the mainland was one of the earliest Public/Private Funded ventures in Scotland and as such was massively controversial (such projects, especially in regard to hospitals and prisons remain highly controversial) in its own right. On top of this, the tolls were high and in a place where petrol/diesel is notoriously expensive anyway so a protest movement began – marches, petitions, refusal to pay tolls, legal campaigns, questions in parliament, and the lot. Anyway, the tolls were eventually removed at some considerable cost both financial and personal, and it was really fascinating to see it all gathered together because I was quite young when all this started and we only really got snippets a significant turning points. It’s also an interesting demonstration of how important Gaelic media is in the Highlands and Island, because the vast majority of news footage they have is from Telefios (Gaelic news programme in the 80s and 90s) and lots of the interviews with campaigners are in Gaelic. So I’d recommend it even if you know nothing about the Skye Bridge, purely if you’re interested in grass roots protest movements or minority-language/indigenous media.

I intended to see more documentaries at the Glasgow Film Festival, but most of them were either really popular and sold out, or their alternative screenings started when I was either at work or finished at a time that would see me missing the last train home. I did manage to schedule a documentary double-bill to see The Last Impressario and On The Edge of the World. The first of this double-bill I saw without trouble (well, there was some unnecessary running about to get my tickets in time but never mind) a strange and intriguing little documentary about an equally strange and intriguing man. Michael White was a producer and social butterfly extraordinaire for the best part of 60 years (he’s still alive, just reluctantly retired), putting on a kinds of interesting and controversial plays (including the original run of The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and introducing all sorts of the artists – including Yoko Ono and Pina Bausch – to British audiences. Despite his social butterfly/party animal status, he’s very shy and seems to have spent a great deal of time hiding behind his camera, which has made for some fantastic photos with which to illustrate the stories in the film and fill in the gaps where his memories are now failing him. The second of my double-bill was denied me, as the screening was cancelled – not because the film hadn’t arrived in time but in a new issue with digital projection, the films arrive at cinemas time-locked, so they can’t test the films until the day they’re being shown and thus if they find they either can’t unlock them or there’s otherwise an issue in formatting or ratio or even just that the file is corrupted, its too late to get a replacement or reach most of the people who’ve pre-booked their tickets. So I saw the Japanese remake of Unforgiven instead, which was good but not a documentary in any way shape or form.

More recently, I indulged my DVD buying habit, by getting a double-bill of documentaries from 2010 Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Senna which were both excellent for very different reasons. Oddly enough, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the only Werner Herzog film that I’ve ever seen and based on it I feel I should watch everything he’s ever made, because its essentially a record of the archaeological excavation of a cave in France which holds the oldest cave paintings – the earliest known human art by quite a considerable stretch of time – in the world. It’s somewhere between a museum’s audio-visual display and a mediation on the history of art and what it means to be human. It is fascinating and compelling and if you’re remotely interested in history or art then I highly recommend it. Senna is good for completely different reasons. Whereas CoFD peaked into a world of people whose names we’ll never know and whose lives beyond the art they left behind are a mystery to us, Senna is about someone whose life was lived largely in the public eye, whose words and actions we have detailed documentary proof of and can analyse in great detail, yet still remains an enigma. You know how the story ends from the very start, yet still, somehow, when it does your heart still breaks a little.

Under The Skin

Tags

film, johnathon glazer, johnnie burn, strange sound design

It’s been awhile, a really long while actually, since I’ve seen a film as genuinely beautifully weird as Under the Skin. I mean that as a compliment too. I was utterly engrossed, enthralled is perhaps the better word given the subject matter, by this film. I’ve seen a lot of self-consciously strange indie films, painfully self-aware screaming ‘look how weird I am’. I like weird films, but my goodness you have to wade through a lot of dross to find the good ones. This one though, this one feels like a reward for a thousand terrible arty ‘weird’ shorts that I’ve sat through over the years. This one isn’t trying to be strange or kooky or off-the-wall, it just is full-heartedly weird. It’s decided to portray the viewpoint of our world through the eyes of an uncomprehending alien and its committed to the task utterly. Alien is what the film is, nothing is ever explained, and everything we know about Scarlett Johansson’s character we’re shown not told. We see our world through an alien lens and eventually, like her we come to see the beauty in the mundane alongside her.

I suspect that the film works better if you’re Scottish, there’s something about Scarlett Johansson puttering about Glasgow (walking through the Buchanan Galleries, driving a white van through scabby bits of the suburbs) that gives it an extra surrealness that I suspect you lose if those places (those terribly ordinary faces) aren’t familiar to you. Perhaps not though, perhaps the places they picked are sufficiently ordinary and anonymous that they could be anywhere but I suspect knowing Glasgow gives it a certain extra frisson. It was the closing film of the Glasgow Film Festival – I wanted to see it then but it was sold out, and I can completely see why, such a fitting film to premiere at GFF.

The sound design is excellent. Scratch that. The sound design is amazing. Strange and alienating, it commits to creating a detached and disconnected soundscape. When she’s out hunting the sound feels like it’s coming from outside a bubble, as though she’s listening from a distance, safe and untouchable, utterly in control. By the time the tables are turned on our alien protagonist, the sound is utterly in the place, she is reachable, touchable and very much a vulnerable part of this world and the soundscape reflects that. Most of the time you don’t even notice the sound design (always a good sign) its so subtle, but in the quiet, introspective moments it shows its true colours, reflecting her mood and adding to her character development. It adds to her thrall. The score may signpost threats in the narrative – to both other people from her, and of other people to her – but it’s the sound design that draws us into her world – there’s very little dialogue for large swathes of the film – makes us forget that she’s actually a serial killer, and makes us root for her survival. I need to see this film again purely to examine what the sound designer Johnnie Burn was doing at various points, because I was too wrapped up in the film to pay attention to it most of the time. Burn is not a sound designer whose work I’ve noticed before (IMDB tells me he was ‘additional sound designer’ on Glazer’s previous film Birth, but this appears to be his breakthrough film), but I’m in awe of his skill here, it’s the kind of sound that makes me go: that’s what I want to achieve when I grow up, something that strange and beautiful. Magnificent.

Docs of 2013

Tags

documentaries, films

I didn’t watch very many documentaries this year. Just five feature length documentaries, all of them very interesting and worth seeing, but only two of them – Side by Side, on the great film vs. digital debate and Fire in the Night on Piper Alpha – was actually released this year. I’ve written previously about the short documentaries I saw at the Glasgow Film festival at the start of the year, so things certainly started well, but trailed off quite quickly. To be honest, I just didn’t know about documentaries that were coming to the cinema, last year there was all sorts of excitement about films like Searching for Sugarman and, well actually all the other examples I was going to give turn out to be from 2011 rather than 2012 which just goes to show how few documentaries have penetrated the white noise of the multiplex. This year, Fire in the Night caught my eye in the press, but was promoted more as a Scottish film – it’s about the Piper Alpha disaster, and while it was a Scottish disaster, I don’t think the appeal is purely to the home audience, I think the subject has wider appeal, especially in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster a couple of years ago. Other than that, well I’m vaguely aware of Blackfish in as much as its caused a fair bit of controversy around Killer Wales and SeaWorld in the states, and of We Steal Secrets though only in the sense of The Fifth Estate being compared unfavourably to it. I seem to remember hearing about an interesting, if strange, sounding film about former members of the Khmer Rouge but needless to say that I’ve seen none of these films, I’ve not even seen them advertised nor listed as being screened anywhere near me.

The documentaries I did see though, they were good. Side by Side is, I won’t lie, a little bit pretentious. It’s a film student/geek film, it’s about digital vs. film and while it is fascinating, it’s a pretty niche interest, even with Keanu Reeves narrating. Though it did spark an awful lot of conversations between my friends about why though we’ve never actually made a film on actual film we still think it would be a tragedy if they stop making film stock. Probably the same reason that as a sound person I’ve only ever worked in digital format – well unless you count dubbing music across double tape decks as a teenager making mix tapes and fake radio shows – but retain an inexplicable protective love of vinyl. Man on Wire is essentially the story of the French high wire walker, Philippe Petit, who is best known for having done a high-wire walk between the towers of the Twin Towers in New York when they still under construction. It looks at why he did it and how he (and his small and dedicated team) pulled it off. Though personally I found the footage of him walking between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris more impressive, the Twin Towers adventure got a bit too James Bond for my taste. Bus 174 is a fascinating and despair-inducing look at endemic poverty and horrific prison conditions in Brazil. Officially its about a young street kid, Sandro do Nascimento, who held up the bus in question, held the passengers hostage and was essentially beaten to death in the back of the police van taking him away afterwards. He’s essentially a metaphor for many of Rio de Janiero’s social ills, but while the film does use him as a way to examine wider issues, it also makes him a human, three-dimensional character, whose life and choices were indelibly shaped by personal tragedy and police brutality, beyond the TV footage of an angry young man with a gun. The film caught my attention on the library shelf this summer because I wanted insight into the summer’s riots in Brazil and my goodness it fulfilled that role. Extranjeras (Foreign Women) is an interesting little Catalonian documentary about the diverse immigrant communities that live in Barcelona. From the older Chinese ladies who have lived in the city for 30 or 40 years and worry about their grandchildren having no interest in learning Chinese to the young girls from Eastern Europe and North Africa cleaning offices, struggling with the language and just trying to make it through the winter. The documentary felt like one of those educational TV dramas that you get in language class at school, informative but distant letting the interviewees speak for themselves, giving insight into the communities they’ve left behind and those they’ve brought with them. It was an interesting alternate/more realistic view of a city that I have a decidedly romantic holidaymaker’s affection for. Fire in the Night is a dramatic, heart-wrenching and even-handed look at the Piper Alpha disaster on its 25th anniversary. It’s one of those news stories that I remember from childhood, the image of the flaming rig seared onto my memory, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square protests and the Braer Tanker disaster. It was weird to re-experience it as an adult but of all the documentaries I’ve seen this year – it’s the film I’d recommend most wholeheartedly.

I need to seek out documentaries again. I really enjoyed the challenge I did a couple of years ago where I saw one feature-length documentary a month, the way it made me realise how many excellent documentaries out there if you just looked out for them. It was also quite frustrating to realise how many excellent films would have passed me by if I hadn’t been so focused on looking for them – though that’s more of a film marketing issue. I’m your target audience (I’m regularly one of half a dozen people in a documentary screening at my local art-house cinema) if you’re not reaching me…what are you doing wrong? Time to find out…

Sound Inspirations

Tags

inspiration, sound art, sound design

I wanted to write something about sound that was making me feel inspired at the moment, because, well I’ve not been feeling particularly inspired recently and I need to remind myself of what inspires me and reconnect with it.

People Doing Excellent Work Within the System

I’ve not been to the cinema very often this year, and mostly only to see big blockbuster efforts which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal circumstances to hear good film sound. Everything’s painted in broad brushstrokes, soundscape just as much a characterisation and plot, and in most cinemas the soundtrack will be played Far. Too. Loud. (Turning it up to 11 doesn’t always make it better) Which is why of course I ended up seeing Gravity in 2D at an arts cinema where you can actually find an human being to adjust the sound if its gone wonky.

As any sound geek will tell you (and as the film tells the viewer in its opening moments) due to space being a vacuum its not possible for sound to be heard in space, so following that school of thought almost all the sound we hear in the film is strictly subjective; lots of breathing and radio transmissions. The sound traps us into the suits with the astronauts too, giving us the full claustrophobic experience. The sheer weight of the silence outside their little bubbles is like a physical weight pressing down on them, as relentless as gravity, and the astronauts’ communications, narrating their actions (especially after they lose contact with Earth) and telling each other – and the ether – stories to fight off the silence is a vital part of the film’s atmosphere as well as its soundscape. The way the radio broadcasts act as lifelines just as much as the tethers do, from Matt’s country music and stories told to keep Ryan from passing out as she runs low on Oxygen, to the banter and warnings from mission control (especially the astronauts reporting back to ‘Houston in the blind’ just in case they can be heard back on Earth, to Ryan’s two-way incomprehensible conversation with a Chinese farmer/radio operator, it says a fair bit about the human urge to communicate and reach out to each other even when they don’t/can’t understand and manages to be rather emotive as well. The sound is subtle and rarely foregrounded, the score is barely noticeable – and when it is briefly noticeable it feels grating and wrong – and all the more powerful for that. Less is more after all, but when it needs to be my goodness it packs a punch.

(I knew Glen Freemantle’s name was familiar from somewhere, he’s been sound designer on almost all of Danny Boyle’s films, include Sunshine which has frankly excellent sound – I can’t believe I haven’t written about it before, must remedy that and soon.)

People Being Experimental and Adventurous

Soundry. In their own words, ‘an online creative listening laboratory and magazine…[that]…publish existing work and help artists create new work with the aim of sharing sounds that enrich and transform ways of listening to the noise and silence of everyday life’. Essentially they’re collating all the weird and wonderful sound projects and experiments going on out there that you might otherwise miss. They’re mostly on tumblr, which is a nice change, as it means their posts just show up in the flow of my dashboard when I’ve had a long hard day at work and can’t cope with anything more complex than a flow of pretty pictures but could really use something strange and imaginative to kick me back into gear. (There’s just so much on twitter these days that it’s easy to miss the good stuff)

I first stumbled across them via a posting on, I think, Central Station, calling for submissions to their postcards project. Essentially, you submit a photograph with a minute of sound that captures the atmosphere of the place you took the photo. It’s a really simple idea, but there’s something really evocative about the way the sound postcards capture little moments in time and place. Proper slice of life stuff.

Edinburgh Water of Life. Stumbled across on the Scotland Introducing podcast of all places, its Tommy Perman of FOUND (and weird and wonderful composing efforts for the Riverside museum fame) and singer songwriter Rob St John, recording and sampling the sounds of Edinburgh waterways with underwater microphones combining natural and unnatural sounds and making music with them. If you pop over to their website you can hear some of the source recordings (which are rather fascinating in their own right), some samples of the finished tracks and read all about the research and adventures they had on this arts/science project of theirs. I’ve a deep abiding love of contact microphones but having listened to this I really want to experiment with hydrophone microphones now. I had a pretty good summer this year, but I kind of wish it’d been more like theirs…

Mark’s Sri Lankan adventures. Actually this one needs a bit more explanation. So, I run the Production Team at the radio station based at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Radio Royal. Last year we were lucky enough to have an artist in residence Mark Vernon – well, actually he belonged to the hospital itself but we got to work closely with him. Which led to the Channel 604 project, which in turn really fired up my production team about the potential to do interesting things with sound. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work of the production team, making jingles, promos and adverts, teaching new starts the basics of audio editing, and forget that actually the point of the team is to do ‘different’ stuff. Having Mark around and hearing the positive responses from people to the project (whether as participants or audience members) were a timely reminder that there is in fact an audience for something that wee bit different out there. It made us get out there with our giant headphones and tiny recording devices, interview people and record the world. We made things and tried things and generally got very excited and geeky about sound. But of course things tailed off, the residency finished, deadlines reared their ugly heads and generally we got distracted. But lo, a few weeks ago an email appeared, turns out that Mark’s out in Sri Lanka on residency working on a project for the Colombo Art Biennale next year. He’s sent back a sound diary of his adventures and once again weird, mundane and wonderful sounds are filling the room, snapshots of adventures half the world away. I can feel my inspiration waking up, looking around blearily and fixating on that one patch of blue sky amongst all the heavy grey.

It’s time to stop talking, grab the giant headphones, put fresh batteries in the Roland or the Marantz, get out there and listen.

12. Rouge Parole

Tags

12 films, documentaries, Elyes Baccar, tunisia

Given that it was the films that I saw when the Africa in Motion festival tour reached my local art-house cinema four years ago that spurred me to sign up for this project the first time round, it seems fitting that the final film of this round should be a film that arrived at my local cinema courtesy of the Africa in Motion festival once again. Like most of the films on offer that first time, this one was a documentary too. Rouge Parole tells the story of the revolution that rocked Tunisia and kick started the ‘Arab Spring’. Or rather it tells stories of the revolution. There is no central over-arching narrative or voice-over to guide us. Instead the film-makers present their audience with different people’s, often contradictory, accounts of flash-points and significant moments of the revolution. The differing accounts are often laid next to each other in the film, interspersed with television news footage, shaky camera phone footage and surreptitiously filmed contemporary recordings by local guerilla film-makers. There doesn’t seem to be any judgement in the inclusion of contradictory accounts, or differing opinions on what action sparked what event, or where the birth place of the revolution truly was. Instead it feels like a statement on the subjectivity of truth, the unreliability of memory and the way in which different things may be true for different people, especially within an oppressive state.

The impact and importance of social media on the fledgling revolution, is an important part of the official narrative we hear of the Arab Spring. The film gives social media credit for empowering ordinary people to act, but also gives it a place within many other important factors. Perhaps the moment when the film first opens up away from the story we expect to see, is when the film visits the office of some local film-makers, they talk about who they are and their experiences of filming the progressing revolution, the tiny space packed with equipment and the wall behind them lined with tapes. Suggesting months, if not years, of careful, circumspect work, recording and logging the brutalities of the regime and countless acts of protest. That one of the film-makers appears to be the cousin of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young man who infamously immolated himself into the history books tells its own story. Implies a refusal to let the act go unnoticed, forgotten or its meaning defamed by the authorities the way others had. It leads us on to other young men who had killed themselves in public acts of protest at the system that had crushed them. Which in turn leads to other ‘martyrs’ in other cities, of a fuse running further back than the official narrative acknowledges.

Having spent so much time over the last few years seeing the revolutions in Egypt and Libya through mostly European perspectives – and even the reports from the locals or ex-pats were largely mediated through Western media – it was a welcome change to hear viewpoints on those revolutions from a neighbouring country. To see the joy on a bookshop owners face as she proudly sells previously banned books, the consternation and struggles to adapt of local journalists, faced with an end to the censorship they’ve worked under for so long. In particular when we hear so much about Western aid it was nice to see the practicalities of even small parts of the relief effort for refugees arriving in Tunisia from Libya.

At the heart of this film for me, was a questioning of the idea of the single narrative, of the fallacy of trying to apply the same model to all the countries impacted by the Arab Spring. It begs the question: if this many stories can be told from Tunisia, how many more are waiting to be told and heard from across the region? How many will we be allowed to hear, and how many have already been silenced?

Compare and Contrast: Documentaries Old & New

Due to my misreading a headline I saw, I thought that this week was the Sheffield Documentary Festival (one year I will remember when that’s on and actually go to that) and thus was an excellent excuse to write about documentaries, when in fact this week is actually the Shetland Film Festival (which I attended last year and where I saw a couple of excellent documentaries).

Regular readers may recall that when I did my annual review of the previous year’s documentaries back in January, I challenged myself to watch a documentary a month this year. I seem to have been running two behind the target all year, and likewise I’m currently at 7 so far for this year. Though that’s an improvement on last year already. (If you’re interested: Nesvatbov (Matchmaking Mayor), His & Hers, Helvetica, Waste Land, The Great White Silence, Life in a Day and American: The Bill Hicks Story.)  I have already answered the second question I posed in that challenge, whether there were enough feature-length documentaries released in the cinema to manage that. Despite the fact that of the documentaries I’ve watched so far this year, one was on DVD, another was on the iPlayer and another was made in 1924 I can reassure anyone worried that there are definitely enough documentaries being released in cinemas here to manage one a month. Possibly not if you don’t live near a good arts cinema, but if you do then you are, if not exactly spoiled for choice, certainly given a good selection.

At the beginning of last month, I pottered off to the MacBob to see two documentaries in fairly short succession. Despite their being, on the surface, almost as different as you could possibly imagine two documentaries being – having been shot nearly a century apart – seeing them so close together (just over a week apart) made certain similarities really quite noticeable.

The Great White Silence is proper pioneering documentary work. As it was made before the grammar of documentary filmmaking was properly established but still recognisably a documentary to modern eyes. Whereas Life in a Day is arguably an attempt to revitalise/reinvent the genre itself. They have a similar mix of capturing life in action, staged performances for camera and random bits of what are essentially mini nature documentaries. They are both camera operators’ films, telling the story of the world as they see it, showing the audience places they would and probably could never have seen before. Breaking all the ‘rules’ to create something new and interesting.

There is also a certain distance between the director and the footage in both cases. Life in a Day is essentially a crowd-sourced film, with people all over the world contributing their footage of their life on a particular day in July of 2010. The director was absent from all of the shooting and has absolutely no control over what was shot and cannot re-shoot. He’s looking at thousands of hours of footage and trying to pick out themes and stories that will somehow tie all this disparate footage together. While the director and camera operator are one and the same on The Great White Silence he also has to contend with a vast amount of footage taken over the best part of a year in hostile conditions in an evolving style, with no way to go back and re-shoot. And as for distance, well the film wasn’t finished until 1924, over a decade after he’d returned from Antarctica, if that doesn’t count as distance I’m not sure what does.

One particular moment of synchronicity between the two films were two entirely different moments of human tragedy that you know are coming but somehow forget about watching the film. The last third of The Great White Silence covers the expedition to the pole itself and over this entire section hangs the audience’s knowledge that they aren’t going to make it back. No matter how determined they are to get back or how heroic the sacrifices that they make are, we know they aren’t going to make it back. (The film came out 12 years after they died, and I was watching it nearly 100 years after their deaths, it must be rare that anyone sees or saw this film without knowing the outcome) It feels oddly voyeuristic viewing as they battle their already known fate. That horrible creeping foreknowledge struck me in one section of Life in a Day too, watching crowds enter a music festival in Germany, early happy crowd shots giving way to carnage and injury. The moment the camera, held aloft in the crowd, takes in that tunnel you know that this Love Parade and that you are about to witness why it isn’t held any more. There’s something weirdly claustrophobic about both these scenes that combines with this voyeuristic feeling that you shouldn’t be watching this and this conflicting feeling that you owe it to the people on screen not to look away, to bear witness to their fate. As though the camera operators in both cases are trying to make sure you remember what they cannot forget.

1. Samson and Delilah

Tags

film

So second round; first film.

Samson and Delilah is the story of two teenagers growing up in a dilapidated Aboriginal town on the outskirts of Alice Springs. Samson lives with his musician brother and abuses solvents, while Delilah looks after her Nana and helps her with the traditional paintings that are their livelihood.

To begin with the film follows their awkward yet somewhat endearing courtship, as Samson attempts to win Delilah over with all the grace and finesse of fourteen-year-old boys everywhere. They are both as stubborn and quietly determined in their courses of action, that they cause considerable amusement to Nana who clearly thinks that they will be a good match for each other. Almost as though knowing her granddaughter has found a suitable partner has given her a kind of peace, Nana promptly passes away. Which promptly throws both the protagonists lives into utter chaos.

While Delilah has hardly any dialogue and for much of the film seems a mostly passive character to whom things happen (mostly horrible things too, including assault, kidnapping and a car accident), the film is far more about her journey than it is about Samson’s. Samson spends the story trying and failing to prove that he can take care of her, can protect her. Delilah on the other hand takes a long and dark path to complete rock bottom, before coming to understand that she is the strong one and that she needn’t be a victim of her own circumstances. That he needs her to protect him from himself every bit as much as she needs someone to look after. There’s even a fairly symbolic moment with a wallaby for both of them that seems to demonstrate the way they swap roles towards the end.

Although the film never directly deals with the way the two worlds of Alice Spring do not overlap, in that none of the characters actually talk about it, it is nonetheless an aspect of the reality these characters inhabit that no one watching can avoid.

Despite the film having a, if not happy at least a hopeful, ending, it is not a sentimental or idealised view of life. Samson remains an addict and Delilah cannot escape the knowledge that love will not be enough to heal him. However, we get to see that she makes her choices with her eyes open, that this is the only way she can control her own destiny, that this might just work for them.

12. The Fall

Tags

films

I missed The Fall when it was originally in the cinema, but it was showing at my local arthouse cinema this weekend so I finally got the chance.

One of the film’s two central characters, Roy (Lee Pace), promises early on that his story will be an epic tale of love and revenge, and for all his comment is meant as hyperbole to capture the attention/imagination of young Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), it’s a fairly accurate description of the film that follows. Though that’s perhaps underselling the complexity of the story (Love! Revenge! Betrayal! Adventure! Death! The shadow of the silent film being made in the background makes itself felt throughout) and Alexandria – one of the realest children I’ve ever seen in film, her actions and reactions are not those of the idea of a child, but rather an actual child – would probably argue that it’s a story about love and forgiveness.

An interesting aside for me was provided by the story Roy tells being loosely based on the silent film he was injured making. He bases his characters on those from the film, one of whom – we discover later – is supposed to be a Native American ‘Indian’ complete with impressive headdress. However, we know from early on that Alexandria has a little Indian elephant in her box of trinkets, given to her by one of her friends from the orange grove. So because we see the story through her eyes, there is a strange and knowing dissonance as we see an Indian warrior wearing a turban and carrying an impressive curved sword, and hear Roy talking of wigwams and squaws. Looking back on the film, this is arguably the first major indication the audience gets that Roy is not, and cannot ever be, entirely in control of the story. It is Alexandria’s story too and both it and he will eventually have to bend to her will.

The film is without doubt visually stunning; colour is used to signify the different worlds we find ourselves in during the course of the film. Black and white for the shooting of the silent film, faded and sepia tones – as though we are seeing the action unfold entirely in dappled shade and lamp light – for the hospital and vivid, heavily saturated colour for the story. It’s not exactly a magical realist film, but I’m not sure how else to describe the way the lines between fiction and reality blur and shift, in the face of Alexandria’s strength of imagination and the fragility of Roy’s mental state. The film is a fantasy in almost every sense of the word, with a truly epic scope, yet a tiny focus. Everything is ultimately about the unlikely friendship between two patients in a 1920s hospital; one full of hope and the other dominated by hopelessness.

I’m not sure that I can be remotely objective about this film, because it engaged me on an emotional level early on and never really let me go. It’s not as though I don’t often get invested with characters in cinema or even that I never cry in films, I do, I’ve come away from a lot of films heartsore and do this strange crying out of one eye thing I do when watching sad bits in films. However, this film joined the ranks of the few films that make me cry properly. Alexandria and Roy do some fairly heartfelt crying towards the end of the story and so did I, proper ‘have to take my glasses off to wipe my eyes because I can’t see’ crying. I literally cried like a little girl. I wouldn’t want you to think that this is a depressing film, far from it; I didn’t leave the cinema feeling remotely sad or heartsore. I left the cinema rather full of hope and with a serious case of the warm and fuzzies.

11. 24 City/Er shi si cheng ji

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films

It’s not a proper unexpected public holiday without a wee trip to the cinema for a foreign language or documentary film. Somehow it always feels like I’ve stolen the day from my slightly more tired, busier self. So this Monday’s effort managed to qualify on both fronts by being a documentary in Mandarin and Shanghainese.

Africa In Motion

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africa in motion

Another mini film-festival post, which has sat half finish in the drafts folder since the end of the festival.

Africa in Motion: Edinburgh African Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Edinburgh since 2006 and this year ran from 23rd October to 2nd November, before touring around various arts cinemas around the UK. Between November 21st and 26th the tour was in residence at the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling (appropriate given that the School of Languages, Cultures and Religions at the University of Stirling had been a major sponsor of the parent festival). Although necessarily for a touring festival there could only be screenings of a fraction of the 40 films from 22 countries that made up the original, however those presented succeeded in providing a varied program that gave a flavour of the wider festival.