MIFF Session 16: THE SEARCH FOR WENG WENG

Weng Weng was born with dwarfism into a poor family. Virtually sold to a Fillipino film industry couple, he rose to fame in the movies in the 70s and 80s as a kind of toy James Bond. The roles dried up. He died in poverty.

All of those facts are on screen in The Search for Weng Weng. So are a lot of other things. Those things build up so solidly that the life that this documentary celebrates becomes obscured on a regular basis. We are treated to a good amount of images and recollections from the man's life and when the film faces the task of telling that life it does so with sincerity. But this piece suffers too greatly from a lack of discipline.

The problem is that it doesn't quite know how to resolve the footage from Weng Weng's screen career with this. We are openly invited to laugh at the conceit and the lo-fi filmmaking with its awkward dubbing and cut rate effects. There is no apparent appreciation of either the triumph of this man against his own odds nor much affection for the schlocky films he made. There is no celebration. We hear the interviewees softly remember how uncomfortable this chapter of Fillipino film history is but the next minute we're snorting at the next naff action sequence.

So, is there another angle, here? Am I witnessing the changes in the director, a notable figure in the cult video scene, as he gets to understand more of Weng Weng's life and the issues it brings out? Does his obvious enthusiasm for this cinema pick up some depth along the way? I believe it does but there is still too much left unresolved for me. And there are too many irrelevant digressions. The Imelda Marcos sequence is almost extraordinarily pointless, considering the paucity of her memory of Weng Weng, and would make a great DVD extra. Really? Imelda Marcos? Surely there's some intriguing sociopolitcal angle there? There is, and we see it, it just has no direct connection to the subject and serves only to make the film feel like it's wandering. This is a pity as there are some excellent interviews here that are getting swamped. While we indulge Imelda and her unhinged rituals and pronouncements we have forgotten all about Weng Weng.

I have heard others who saw this at the festival defend this approach by claiming it is a more personal one, an attempt to create closeness between subject and chronicler. Maybe, but between the exploitation of presenting the clips, the obscured interviews, and the genuineness somewhere in the cracks of what's left I felt mostly that I was being asked to indulge the filmmakers. Look at us! We've made something worthy AND entertaining! Maybe it's just me and I should relax a little. It's their film and they can make anything they damn well please. Is it personal? Sure, but what if you don't like the person (and I don't mean Weng Weng)?

MIFF Session 6: PARTICLE FEVER

One of the physicists featured in this film tells his lecture audience that there are two answers to the question of what he is doing: the easy answer and the right answer. The first is true but the second requires the working to be shown. This constantly diverting and pleasurable documentary is big on the first but lets the second slide. A good science documentary needs to make the second feel like the first.

The basic concepts are easy: it has taken decades for this gigantically proportioned machine and team to assemble and test a series of ideas about some very tiny things that concern the fabric of the universe (assuming there's one ... actually, no need to assume). The footage of the plant and diagramatic animations of the scale and operation are supberb and serve to keep us riding along.

These scientists are good communicators. That's why they were chosen to tell their parts of the tale on screen. What they have to say is fascinating but delivered with a toothsome serve of intimidation to amp up the excitement. This is a tale of breakthrough and discovery. The excitement felt by the scientists as the crucial moments is infectious and we enjoy the empathy as much as if we were watching effective fiction. In fiction, though, we would know why the excitement was so intense, why the various possibilities will either vindicate or disappoint according to the outcome. We need more of the first kind of answer.

That said, the narrative flow is firmly helmed with a good eye to the identification and release of tension. And when it remembers it's a documentary and can't push this too far (the taunting between theoretical and expermiental physicists is funny once) it can legitimately fall back on showing the epic-sized machinery for our wonder. While I never felt condescension I too often felt underattended.

There are a handful of concepts this film made new to me which I will now pursue out of interest. My problem with writing this review now is that those things that I wondered to see and smiled at hearing are memories rather than lingering moments. This is some of the most significant scientific endeavour in centuries but I still quite know why.

MIFF Session 1: LIFE ITSELF

Globally revered film critic Roger Ebert died in 2013 after a decade of cancer as persistent and strong as his writing. This, in itself, forms the chief life lesson on offer here. The raconteur's illness attacks him voice-first. Ebert's thyroid condition spread so vehemently that his lower jaw was removed and only the skin of the jowls and chin were left. They dangle over his constantly bandaged throat like a surrealist sculpture, immediately making us wonder if he wouldn't be better off without them which is followed by the thought of how bizzarre he would then look. The spectacle of this is at first intensely uncomfortable to look at. The camera does not flinch from it and it remains central to the present tense passages of this life story: a memento mori that its possessor has long passed needing but one guaranteed to make all of its viewers ponder their own eventual deaths.

It's an interesting frame for a biography of a film critic screened at a film festival in this era when the role of the world's Eberts is threatened with the same fate. That's why this documentary cannot settle into the kind of warming eulogy that I was hoping for as my first session of the fest. I would have been happy enough with a string of gaffer-taped golden moments and talking heads saying praise him or ouch after their experiences. According to the narration by the filmmaker Steve James Ebert expressly wished against hagiography (despite some being inevitable considering the recency of his death), preferring some weight delivered by his journey to death. There needs to be little in the way of reminding us that the age of the film reviewer as frowning demi-god is coming to an end when we see it all too graphically throughout.

Ebert's serious and effective embrace of online access and social media has meant that his transition to immortality is in less danger than his cells. Meantime, we get to see how a restless and difficult child grew, through a fiery-mouthed prime to an eventual peaceful equanimity. A forced euqanimity? Sure, why not? If a life threatening cancer doesn't make you question how much of a dick you can be then you shouldn't be surprised if the relieved sighs of your loved ones aren't more profound than your own.

Keith Richards once described Mick Jagger as vain but added that you want someone like that out front. The decades of public bitchiness between Ebert and his professional other half Gene Siskel are shown to a joyful depth going from near operatic duets where they agreed to barking contests so intense they went through their tv show's credit sequences and beyond the audio fade at the production badge. The figure of the critic as social leader gets some pretty thorough exposure here. If the film shies from plumbing those depths it does at least show us enough of them for us to form our own questions.

But then we must return to the hospital bed which whenever we see it might also be a death bed and the voiceless man of opinion typing his own commentary through a laptop's synthesis. The computer's voice is much advanced from that we think of when we think of Stephen Hawking; it even resembles Ebert's own voice (perhaps through design) and however tinted by electronics it is the words it delivers are those of a master conversationalist. His facial mobility is limited to an upper row grin of the type he seemed incapable of in his younger years. His eyes above this have all the intensity of the intellectual furnace that blazed to the last. Between them and the strange, misshapen cartoonish grin we recognise someone who knows he is being judged as rigorously as he took to anything he witnessed. The film's final words are his, delivered in his own voice: "I'll see you at the movies." So he did.

Review: DOWNLOADED: Paradigms Lost

A common misaprehension of Napster at the time was that it was a big store of free music. The fact that it was actually a facillitator of access was less sexy as a public demon and the record industry's response pushed the misconstrusion because it was easier to do. The protest from the hapless giantsupermegacorps dug in through the courts with the outrage that the artists themselves were being robbed blind. Only in comedy was it touted that the companies were getting shafted at their own game of artist exploitation.

I remember the brief flash that was Napster. At first, it really did look too good to be true; people sharing their music collections. Anything new you'd heard about to old chestnut albums you'd never got around to or just wanted again. Dowload times could be slow. Boomers with public profiles joked crankily about it being like getting it in real time or longer so it was worse than cassettes in the old days. Well, cassettes was what it was like and not just because of the load time or reduced audio quality. It was like cassettes because that's the way albums got around at school. Someone would get the big buzzy LP and you'd give them a tape. If you dug it enough you'd shell out for the record because that was the real thing. If you drove a car you'd have tapes of everything anyway and when those mangled up you'd just make more (assuming you hadn't got sick of them in which case you wouldn't bother).

That's how I and a lot of others saw Napster. The only reason I hung on to some mp3-ed albums or burnt them onto cds was because of zero local availability. The industry didn't see it that way. When it heard about Napster it tried to shut it down. Eventually, the corps had the rug pulled out from under them anyway when things like itunes, that got the point of Napster, changed the game forever. This documentary is about that as much as the vision and ingenuity of the creators of Napster as a program and concept. The companies were shown the future and they dug their heels in. It took the bits and bytes team to use it properly.

We all have some version of this story as we were present during the time when the music industry went from empire to a post colonial shell and the real money went back into live performance. Radiohead gave their new album away online and kept filling stadiums. DIY retail sites gave anyone the equivalent of a record deal (without the promo machine but the times had allowed for that in a way they never had for the indies of the 70s and 80s).

So, while we have an idea of what happened we don't know much about the people who brought it to us. This film addresses that and the almost unsettling self-effacedness of the principal players is one of the reasons why I began with all of that rather than anything about the movie. Shawn Fanning and Shaun Parker along with a crew of hoody wizards revolutionised music culture from a larder sized office because they knew it would work the way it did. Even though they operated in the grey they also knew it was only time between the revolution and its suppression.

There is a real poignancy in the straightness of this documentary. A series of talking heads tells the tale between blocks and bites of news footage. No attempt is made to cute up the concepts with animation or amp the ironies through editing. Its plainness serves some of the trickier concepts involved that reveal the mistakes the suits made when they found out. They all talk about the scale of the copying and how it outstripped anything passed on by direct means to that date. They all, wittingly or not, admit to failing to see the massive shift in the paradigms of marketing and distribution. The only way they could think of to monetise it was direct pay to play rather than using the light speed peer spread that was already happening. The passages about iTunes etc have a quietly triumphant feel to them because of this and the absorption of Fanning and Napster into the machine a moment of sadness but only in passing.

See? Again, I'm talking much more about the issues than the movie .... maybe it's just a good documentary.

DVD Review: DEAR ZACHARY: Documentary as Naive Art

This film does something familiar to an unfamiliar degree. Like many documentaries, when it needs to represent the opinions of a number of people it uses a rapid fire montage of interview bites to create an overall impression before settling down to deliver the depth. Dear Zachary opens this way but so breathlessly and for so long that by the time the last bit freeze frames and the director/narrator says,"wait, you need to know what happened," I'm gasping for breath.

The clippets have gone past so feverishly that in some cases there has been an image of an interviewee with another's audio playing underneath it. This is not a mistake but nor is it Eisenstein 1+1=3 as there is no extra meaning to be found in these first few minutes by the sound/image juxtaposition as we are still waiting to be introduced to most of them. Apart from the central figure, Andrew Bagby, who is repeatedly shown in stills and video from childhood to his early adulthood and a very few other figures we are not invited to acquaint ourselves with these many faces and voices.

There's a solid reason for this. This film was made by a close friend of Andrew Bagby. Those are his scenes from the teenage homemade feature films that star Andrew. This breathless overture is not information, it's memory. Not nostalgic memory with an art directed composition and rhythmic pacing but hard sense memory: face statement question light expression sound quizzical look laugh scout uniform ceremony parents dialogue from film... This is how this movie felt behind the eyes of Kurt Kuenne, writing, camera, direction and "editorial". After it looked like this he started to make a lucid logical documentary, which most of the screen time here is. But then he went into his editing setup and created the opening explosion of sensual return that we start with, it must have taken weeks to assemble. What at first looks like amateurish jumble begins, especially as the approach recurs, to take on the face of deliberation. We are watching a documentary like no other. There are costs to this but rewards to which - Wait, first you need to know what happens.

This is a very easy film to spoil so all I'll do is lay out the premise. Andrew Bagby was shot dead by a woman he jilted. She fled the scene from the US to Newfoundland and evaded justice. Bagby's parents pursued the murderer and sought custody over the grandson she was bearing as the American police attempted extradition. The old couple were warned that the law is slow and indeed were forced not only to witness the killer go free but agree to her terms on visitation rights with the child: they had to be nice to their son's killer. Courts miscarry, government departments fail, the killer dictates terms. Things get worse.

(CAUTION: if this review stirs you to pursue a viewing of this film be very warned that if you are not screaming by the end of it you should consult with a psychiatrist about your empathy deficit.)

While all of this is happening we see an increasing presence of video memory appearing centre screen. Kurt Kuenne drives across the US by way of a trip to the UK, gathering video memory for the letter he is narrating to Bagby's son, Zachary. The barely controlled audiovisual explosion of testimony that began proceedings makes sense. More, it begins to feel natural, as though Kuenne is reviewing his own memory and the new material as he drives toward Newfoundland. The convergence of his journey to deliver his message and the grandparents' efforts to allow this safely by taking legal control over the child's welfare forms a plot that in the midst of the video turbulence, feels effortless.

So far this could be the work of an Errol Morris disciple amping up the personal involvement. But there's something else happening here and, at first it's not obvious. The rough-hewn home video look of the piece and the breathless editing of the memory outbreaks show only bare control over the material. The sheer positivity of sentiment towards Bagby including much in the narration itself (which more than once makes it through to the sound mix choked by emotion) can overwhelm. This is not just one side of the argument it is a howling cry of pain from nothing but love. While facts are presented that would not trouble the most severe courtroom the burden of this film is to support them with an emotional foundation so strong and woven it feels tribal. The documentary here is not so much of the case but of the loss, of the response, of the physically felt chest pain or the dizziness of a suddenly realised futility. At moments it feels how I imagine a panic attack feels, vertiginous, hopeless, bloodless. At one stage when Kuenne inserts a still of a violent splash of colour and beats a loud male scream beneath it we feel like screaming ourselves.

Documentaries have a duty to inform but the best have a tale to tell and position to sell. I find the pranking of a Morgan Spurlock or Michael Moore too often self-defeatingly cute. And even Errol Morris can give in to the sensationalism his pieces claim to expose. Dear Zachary makes no concession to balance. To be fair it's really all there in the title: Dear Zachary: a Letter to a Son About His Father. That is what I paid for.

But if this is documentary then I'm a monkey's uncle. This is the news told at the campfire, the ballad recalled for transmission at a single hearing. There are facts in the case, and nothing seems to lie, but the tune and the rhyme are the things here, a family epic on hand made instruments. And there is a real eerieness to the packaging of the dvd (see image at the top of this review). A digipak with multiple gatefolds reveals a naive drawing that runs from the cover, across the inner walls all the way to the rear, family tree, images of crime, family and justice and a figure either sleeping or lying dead near the top. At first I thought that some of the panels of the gatefold held a booklet or some extra printed matter but that's only because the assembly feels a little rough and folky, as if the whole family gathered for a weekend of folding and pressing and then feasted, surrounded by the artefacts of their communion, a naive art masterwork which warms like Christmas cards drawn by children and sounds like a church pew when you knock on it.

Against my better self I looked up Kurt Kuenne on the imdb and found that his film career seems to be progressing. It's still indy level but you can see an arc still travelling upwards. I wanted to think of his subsequent films just being more of the treehouse Tarrantinos we see in this film. His most recent is a chronology mash in the mould of Memento starring one of he cast of Bones. It looks fine. But I want the old Kurt, taking a seat at the kitchen table with a six pack of Bud and a mic. But that Kurt is lost to us forever now.

Top 10 Docs 29/04/13

Crumb: A psychological autopsy of a mind that reveals, more than in any comparable documentary, that the path to creativity is lined with monsters as well as wonders. That's before you get to the state Crumb's brothers are in. Though the material is a weave of past and present the overall effect is of a thorough linear examination of a life and the sense of compulsion that an artist might live by. After seeing this often disturbing film I solved problems I was having writing a story by drawing it as a comic.

Grey Gardens: Decaying American grandeur in flesh and marble on display as we meet a mother and daughter who might have been trapped in a Samuel Beckett sketch. At first this feels like a freak show but before you know it you are living with these strange people and you are the one rapidly becoming a frog-eyed alien. The Maysles brothers gave us some of the most inspired acts of documentary and this might well be the pinnacle.

Let There Be Light: John Huston's record of the use of hypnosis in the treatment of what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder is quiet and observant and fascinating from go to woah. Huston had taken part in a big fake up of a US military action which he would have never lived down if it had been released. This is a kind of redemptive act. It also fuelled his extraordinary fiction about Freud and more recently, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. Good value, that.

Dig: Two bands, one led as a faux democracy is headed for the underbelly of the big time, the other a miasma centred around a dictatorial mental case whose diastrous caprices lead him to the brink  career suicide easily and regularly. Friends become enemies. This is a very authentic record of how bands work which serves as a hard reminder that these people that fans admire as the chroniclers of their age and agegroup are themselves just immature narcissists (ie people in their 20s). The difference is channeling that self-worship into either career drive or compulsion to create. Guess which band is better: Syd's Pink Floyd or Vanilla Fudge?

Mr Death: Fred Leuchter is an expert on and designer of termination devices for condemned prisoners is drawn into the holocaust denial movement which drops him like a hot spud the moment his findings are questioned. Leutcher's apparent absence of self awareness has not steeled him against his exploiters or does he not care as the attention is too enjoyable. He maintains his convictions well beyond their demolition and claims innocence of the knowledge of his hijacking as well as any notions of historical revisionism. It's hard to know whether to laugh or shiver when he begins to adopt the German pronunciation of his name (like Loihchter) when he had introduced himself as Fred "Loocher".

Listen to Britain: Yes, it's a propaganda piece but look how it does it: the sounds of air raid sirens, marching feet, bomber engines, a charity concert, children playing. Civilian life = wartime life. Under threat, Old Blightly is at war from Lancaster maintenance to hopscotch. I saw this film as an assessment piece in second year of university and then caught every screening I could.

Urgh! A Music War: Not an argumentative piece but still a document of transition between punk through post-punk to the coming absorption of those by the mainstream which is a kind of argument by default. So you get Gary Numan almost in cryo driving what we'd call a disability scooter, creaking through Down in the Park, the frenetic Devo making intriguing use of wireless tech, to The Police on the last leg of their journey to the top of the mainstream.

I saw this with my eldest brother and some of his friends. One of the latter kept in my ear about how unoriginal it all was and I had a rejoinder for each attempt until he gave up. I did the same thing decades later until I realised that there was no longer a useful line to be drawn between mainstream and indy and the market for revivalism as contemporary culture with no possibility of innovation was too fast set to budge through use of mere commentary. Urgh is almost a document of the last time there was innovation in pop music before it lay back down to resume its original purpose. Once upon a time....

American Boy: Martin Scorsese's extended interview with Steven Prince is rivetting from the word go as Prince responds to questions with anecdotes that reveal a great talent for storytelling. The moment he reaches the climax of his gun story looks both impromptu and utterly scripted, it is so arresting it's both impossible to tell and care if it was planned, it just feels like great cinema. Maybe that's what Marty should be doing now instead of his diluted new narrative features. He's a killer at doccos.

The Great Rock and Roll Swindle: Don't I mean The Filth and the Fury? No. While I enjoyed that and was grateful for some of the gaps it filled I was annoyed by its sentimentality a quality completely alien to Swindle which, for all the narcissism of its dramaturg, is a truer document of its times than the latter (even though Filth presents a lot more direct evidence from the late 70s). This is not the history of The Sex Pistols it's what Malcolm McLaren dined out on for the rest of his life. If you couldn't invite him to your table you could fork out for a cinema ticket (cheaper that way, anyhow). So, true story or good story? Shut up, you can have both.

One Plus One: People get this wrong. Maybe I do but I think I avoid the mistake of expecting it to turn into a documentary about the Rolling Stones. It isn't. It's an essay that says: group of successful rock stars who don't have to get out of bed when they don't want to get together and slowly fashion their new cultural H-bomb:  group of urban guerillas with nothing to lose waste their time writing dogma from cassette tapes, engaging in futile paramilitary manouvres and getting into groupies: what is wrong with this picture? The sole act of real subversion depicted is graffiti by a woman who stands outside of these schemes.

The cut with the title Sympathy for the Devil misleads the audience with that title and misunderstands its own material by playing the finished song in full at the end. Not the point.

HRAFF Review

Mohamed Nasheed Q&A at festival finale.

Well that was my first Human Rights Arts and Film Festival and I've learned something. I love documentaries. I know, you're meant to love them the way you're meant to love going out and seeing live music when it can be one of the most humdrum nights out imaginable. But I've just seen four documentaries that have to varying degrees delighted me because they were good at being documentaries, not just films about things that interest me.

What do I mean by that?

Well, here's a contrast to start with. There were two doccos at the 2005 MIFF on the same subject street that left me hot and cold respectively: Punk: Attitude and Kill Yr Idols. The first was a powerhouse of jammed archive footage and great talking heads. The second was a wishy washy germ of an idea that festered rather than grew. I disagreed with a major premise of the first (the annoying crap of punk starting in America and getting exported to the UK: don't care about the timeline, find me the influence of Marquee Moon on Never Mind the Bollocks) but it was made to a perfect fit for its audiences and formed a good welcome to anyone on the outer. Kill Yr Idols, on the other hand, began as a celebration of New York's No wave scene of the late 70s and early 80s and provided a lot of information I only vaguely knew before. Then it went on to ridicule the current crop of New York bands as pale imitations. One the one hand it was very pleasant for me to see these new rockists take a hit: the new breed are happy to accept the mantle of the No Wave tradition but their "new" music sounds like old Top 40. On the other hand I was frustrated that it went from fawning on the old guard to a kind of daddy-pleasing ridicule of the new. I, too, laughed at Karen O. coming across as having approximately 2.5 brain cells but the better angles of my grinder bade me take that with a pinch of the sharp stuff. Kill Yr Idols can't make its case because it's too busy working out how to declare its great fat hammy fist. Punk: Attitude annoys me with its too many stretches and special pleas for me to regard it as a history but as a celebration it's tops. It's also a better documentary, however much I might bicker with its premises.

I only saw four of the eighteen full length documentaries on show at HRAFF but I picked four good 'uns. You can read my reviews below but the upshot is that I got something out of every one and was touched by some expert filmmaking that went from the glassy video-looking low means to the full force of major budgeted beef. The irrelevance of conventional production values stretches, for me, to fiction cinema and there my sole criterion for good vs bad cinema applies as it does with doccos: is there truth in it?

By truth I don't mean things that I hold absolute but moments on screen where all the other stuff, the earnestness, the comedy, the drama and the noise wash away and the central nerves of a film are visible. This happens a lot and most comfortably with fiction as we are happily surprised to find an individual's conviction laid bare. We probably rejoice in it less in a docco because the idea that documentaries should just report is so ingrained in us. But a documentary is just as potentially wonderful when it's an essay, an argument, rather than a slide show of events, people and places.

Planet of Snail delighted with its approach=equals subject poetics. An African Election satisfied with its meaty no nonsense hard journalism. Beer is Cheaper than Therapy and The Island President wore their hearts on their sleeves but didn't forget the facts 'n' figures. I saw all of this in one week and it felt nourishing. Which leads me to my main thought on the festival overall.

Not all the films presented were documentaries but the festival, angenda-ed by nature, has the opportunity to be this city's unofficial festival of the documentary. Unofficially, of course: if they were to try and sell it as a week of doccos they'd have an even tougher fight for attention in this festival-oversupplied city. But as the time of year when the doccos come out, from the beautiful to the challengingly ugly, the politicising and the soberly informative, that's what would drag me back. I don't suggest they lose the title that defines them but maybe just a little push towards donning a curatorial mantle, the convergence of purposes could be clarified to a bright and shining ticket sales chart. I'd bloody go.

HRAFF Review: THE ISLAND PRESIDENT

The Maldives, 2000 islands and 3000 years of human history, are being swallowed by the sea. The language-defyingly beautiful archipeligo is the resort of the elite among the haves, the holiday destination of the .01 %, the choice vacation for the drivers of the forces that push the ocean levels up in the court of King Caractacus and the Islands, like the tourists, are just passing by.


From thirty years of political stability (ie repressive dictatorship) came the bloodless coup of Mohamed Nasheed who reversed the oppression (that victimised him among many others) and began a campaign of climate change awareness, calling for political unity in a land which wasn't going to be a land much longer if political disunity was allowed to run wild. It's not just that the Maldives are more easily seen as the victims of climate change because they are islands, it's that, as low set islands, they are potentially the first country in the world to drown en masse. The Maldives sport the world's lowest highest point at 2.4 metres. You could cartwheel over that. Quite literally, it's sink or swim time. Well, there is another way...

Nasheed has been campaigning for reductions in carbon emissions since before his presidency. The Island President is his story but it is also the story of his drive to Copenhagen 2009 to gatecrash the big backslap with a personal plea to the devastators, or a well aimed ging stone in the eye of Goliath. If he can't get a commitment for the big emitters to calm it down to 350 ppm (parts per million) there might be no reversal of the damage possible (even if there isn't a stabilisation from compliance). In other words, first we take the Maldives and then Manhattan (where a lot of its tourists come from, island to island).

This film that makes a plea for unity is itself made from it; Nasheed's struggle is indistinguishable from The Maldives' and by extension the world's. If the spectrum of what a documentary can be goes from plain reportage to propaganda, it must be said that The Island President is firmly in the latter half. But this, too, presents a document, an argument for itself. As such it becomes something closer to primary historical source where a more even handed approach would weaken the signal. It's only dangerous if you expect your culture to do your thinking for you. If you apply the critical filter to this that you must to your own life events then you should find it invigorating.

Invigorating it is because Nasheed himself compels attention. He's a gift to a documentarian: good looking, driven, unignorably intelligent with an understated cheeky archness to his humour that somehow continually surprises. We have no trouble at all travelling with him from his repression as a political prisoner to tireless underdog to president to the humbler of giants because he gives us so much centre screen. Even his fellow players come in like injections of nutritious information on Nasheed's life and career, political history and climate science. And then there are the Maldives themselves. Phew!

Phew! Aerial shots of these islands set in the stippled jade sea move at a glacial pace but never seem long enough. Closer shots of that gem coloured water slinking up along the porches and roads like the most beautiful seamonster on earth and the great white explosions of the tide against rocks only just behind kids playing cricket bring this home ... home. In the first of his many funny assertions, Nasheed describes the Maldives as a cross between paradise and paradise. That's what's at stake. This beauty that almost makes you feel like a voyeur to gaze at is about to vanish forever. The ache of this, the sheer bloody ache of it is what makes this resolutely old fashioned documentary so strong. When you start to enjoy the manipulation you are experiencing, at least until it's over, you are in the presence of cinema. No, CINEMA.

If you see this film, don't forget your critical faculties (I don't mean the sad bullshit of climate skepticism, I mean the criticism that adds perspective). If you do, you'll be googling and wiki-ing until you know more. Documentary mission accomplished.

HRAFF Review: AN AFRICAN ELECTION

Ghana, 2008. It's election time again? So what? Well, what was an ancient empire subjugated by Europe in the grab for Africa, decolonised late in 1957 and subjugated to political bloodshed and anger for decades until the coup of Jerry Rawlings left it under a dictatorship that suspended the constitution and outlawed political parties. Once party politics were allowed again in the 1990s, Rawlings ruled it for his two permitted terms and then stood back to enjoy the power without responsibility of a political grey eminence. His old party The National Democratic Congress has never left the field and remains one of the two major parties in the country. The other is The National Patriotic Party. Early on in the piece we are told that there is effectively no political difference between these parties. If either wins you get the same.

Now if you started wondering what your Facebook timeline looked like while reading the above join the club. I have some interest in politics but the process of it tends to make my eyes water. The team behind An African Election know this about me and most of the rest of you. But they can't just make a movie highlighting the dramatic aspects and squeezing it into quasi-fiction because they must also serve their subject matter and provide a pithy report on its events. The way this is done is quite conventional but its conventional documentary making with added concentrate.

First, by a few necessary black and white title cards we learn the salient facts of the case as it progesses (you don't even need to know where Ghana is to watch this film). Second, the key figures of the election, including the "retired" Jerry Rawlings are shown up close and more personally than you'd always want. Third, the commentary comes from media representatives in to-camera interviews which come in easily digestible portions. Last, the most affected group in the country are almost always on screen, the Ghanian people are so claustrophobically present in this film you might think the streets of Accra and everywhere else in the country are so full of animated bodies that there is no possibility of traffic. One warm spot in the film involves Rawlings in his car trying to explain a point of local and international politics and growing so excited about it that it takes him minutes to realise that his car has been stopped by a crowd of his adoring public who ogle him through the windows with huge smiles.

I'm not going to relate the progress of the election as told by this film as it does such a good job of drawing its audiences into its moment and offering a sample of the weight of the events as they unfold but I will say that never have I known a film about a political occasion to leave me with such an organic appreciation of what it was showing me. As far as political campaign documentaries go I'd happily put it up there with The War Room,   the extraordinary film of Bill Clinton's '92 campaign. This one, however, takes us further than the powerbrokers who are, after all, still at the mercy of the crowds around the ballot boxes.

The ballot boxes here are the humble but hot centre of the film. They are surrounded by standover men and gangs that need police in riot gear and even, in one case the presence of a tank to keep things nice. The sound of discharging weapons is a shock initially but soon becomes part of the overall cacophony. They might take their dictatorships seriously in the east coast nations of Africa but when they are given it they will meet the democratic process with a vicegrip. If you are like me and dread the queues at the polling places on election day you should see this film. I needed to.

Review: LIFE IN MOVEMENT

I can't dance to save my life. Once upon a time, as a protest, when everyone else hit the floor I'd do this one legged jig, just lift my foot off the floor a little and swing it around. It was funny the first time.

While the art of dance eludes me I do admire anyone who is able to speak through it. Still, when a friend of mine pressed tickets for a docco about a choreographer I hmmed and haahed. Then she sent me to the page and I said I'd see her at the Nova.

Tanja Liedtke was only twenty-nine when she won the top spot at the Sydney Dance Company, succeeding living legend Graeme Murphy who had reigned o'er the SDC from 1976 as a kind of nimble Czar. You could call that history making. Liedtke was about self expression from the word go. When this urge took wing as the choice to use movement she launched and took off: dance and theatre studies in Madrid, ballet school in London, touring with the Australian Dance Theatre, productions for Channel 4 in Britain, fellowships, awards, notice, praise and finally, Artistic Director of the Sydney Dance Company before she hit thirty. Can you say GO? Then she was run over by a garbage truck and was no more. STOP! You couldn't write that as fiction (unless you were Samuel Beckett). STOP! A great lightless void where there had been a dynamic and seemingly unstoppable force.

We see that force in a processed image of Liedtke executing one of her complex moves in what looks like an old magic lantern image. The body is twisted copied several times across the screen. Beneath it a nocturnal landscape speeds by. Then we're in the movie.

The film is built of a small number of blocks that begin looking like something quite quickly which becomes the story of the piece. One is Liedtke's video record; private sketches and tests on home video, video from school days. Another is the cast she left behind when she died, reconstructing the show they were working on in a delicately balanced mutual direction. Then there are the documents; news footage, stage videos, everything that testifies to the truth of the story. Finally, there is testimony; her family, colleagues and friends between them build a portrait of her life, career, psyche and creativity.

Touchingly, it is this last element that provides the most sag in this portrait. Not because the interviews are unconvincing but because the intrigue created by everything else, the rush of impressions, seems to say much more about Liedtke than the shared memories of her nearest and dearest. I'm going to consider this a compliment to the film as the craft involved in the scrapbook of stills and moving images is impressive, especially images of Liedtke herself almost frighteningly intense as she jams on a gesture, channels something strange and shrill as a schoolgirl or in one extraordinary sequence in close up when she repeatedly slaps herself, hisses "pull yourself together", and twists her face into solid panic.

Thing is we do need the talking heads. We need the gaps filled in the timeline and the other ones left by those intimate videos. The dual themes of this biography are right there: intimacy and creativity. Liedtke was on with a  high voltage charge in creative mode and sweet, quiet and personable when the switch was flipped.

But there's a problem with these interviews and it has to do with the decision made by the filmmakers to remove the coverage of the accident that killed her. What we get visually, instead of this, is pretty good. A series of tyre-level tracks around the streets of inner city Sydney in the very early morning (when it happened) accompanied by a series of memories of how her intimates found out about her death. On the one hand we expect this. We've already shared some important and illuminating time with these people who were so inspired by Liedtke that we do need some indication of how her demise hit them. On the other hand there is so much of it it falls easily into repetition and makes a few minutes of screen time seem like half and hour. Then, at the very end (can't see how this is a spoiler) there is a moment of the cast of the show acknowledging Liedtke's life and inspiration that carries almost no words but says much more.

The posthumous piece, Twelfth Floor, is taken to her birthplace in Stutgaart. It is a triumph. Backstage the dancers toast Liedtke with champagne. All of them are gently tearful. The camera performs a slow searching pan. Here one towels her face. There another avoids the gaze of the lens and looks away. It's not choreographed but it is movement charged with a quiet understanding of survival. Cutting into this we see again the magic lantern image of Liedtke against the night time landscape rolling by. Is this her entry into the afterlife? Afterlives only need memory. That's what we now, movingly and by genuine cinema, see. My one-legged dance is now no more and will never be again.

Rock on Film part 15: Living in the Material World vs Autoluminescent

... OR: THE CORRECT USE OF GRAPHIC EQUALISATION

George vs Rowland

Big themes so let's start with a couple of lists:

Toy copy of George's "Rocky" Strat

Fender Jaguar similar to Rowland's

Similarities:

Both came to initial fame in influential bands.

Both were guitarists to one side of an impressive front package.

Neither was considered a guitar hero in any traditional sense.

Both died before old age of natural causes

Differences:

The ex-Birthday Party members continued to make music equal or superior to their work in the seminal outfit. The ex-Beatles' output continues to be dominated by grinding mediocrity.

The Beatles remain the biggest band in the known Universe. You have to find out about the Birthday Party.

George Harrison left drug experimentation behind for a committment to spirituality. Roland Howard's lifelong pessimism led to a kind of romanticism in which spirituality was never more than a handy notion.

Almost everyone who watches the Harrison documentary will do so across the great chasm of the subject's fame and their capacity to cope with the difference will determine their enjoyment of it. In the small cinema where I saw Autoluminescent I could almost guarantee that everyone in the half filled seating either knew or had met Roland Howard or any combination of the interviewees. That does change as soon as you place the screening outside of Melbourne but consider that the first proposition doesn't change wherever it's shown.

Equalisation:

The Beatles' magnitude demands that any attempt to render them identifiable to the great unwashed needs more than a little push to be believable. Rowland Howard's life story can tolerate a great deal more praise from pit and peer due to his relative obscurity. In both cases that's what happens. If you want to see it not happen that way go and watch the 1989 hagiography Imagine John Lennon.

ok...

GEORGE

As a second or third generation Beatles fan (ie one who turned teen in the 70s) I easily picked out Harrison's contributions for their distinct darkness of tone. His first composition on a fabs disc was the brooding sneer of Don't Bother Me. It's all odd percussion, great guitar tone (a Gretsch through a Vox amp, using its yummy tremolo) and a big putdown vocal. Then there's the lashing Taxman, cheeky Piggies and the big late night spookiness of Long Long Long (how else do you follow Helter Skelter?)

The story goes that against Lennon and McCartney he had to struggle hardest of all to get one of his songs on an album so they really had to shine. Well, for the most part they do. This doesn't make him a great songwriter but it does show his determination and individuality. And it gives him a great reason for quitting to move out by himself and fly free. He did. And then, like all the others whose initial albums had the strength of   triumphant escapees, he settled down to a long determinedly alright graze thereafter.

Living in the Material World doesn't tell it like this. We follow an individual from plucky youth into a maturity of caring and sharing and then an untimely death. Veiled admissions from the likes of Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton provide a womanising side to the quiet one and there are a number of songwriting breaktroughs which are given the status of narrative sign posts by director Martin Scorsese. A clear sense of a teenager from a cheerful working family becoming a benign landed lord emerges but there is a significant amount of shade lost in the telling.

The pioneering Concert for Bangladesh was plunged into controversy as the proceeds were variously held up or mysteriously siphoned off (probably by everyone's favourite depspoiler of rock royalty, Allen Klein). The event is celebrated but its purpose was left ravaged by the greed it attempted to redress. While much is made of George's development as a songwriter and musician the music after the big early albums fades into silence in quiet admission of its decreasing quality. Handmade Films, the company Harrison established because he wanted to see Life of Brian, did some fine work but also would have altered Withnail and I into a goofy forgettable mainstream waste of time.

The reason I can go on about this is that Harrison's factsheet has been posted upon the wall of public memory so gigantically that any attempt to slip one by is doomed. It's why Imagine John Lennon is so winceable. We know Lennon wasn't just some nice bloke that all this happened to. Similarly, Harrison had to be as forcefully competitive to retain his position as any of his fellows. There is some hint of this in Scorsese's film but it's kept nice.

As far as the equalisation alluded to above goes in this film it arrives in the accounts of how Harrison behaved toward the women he loved. Pattie and Oliva Harrison both offer quiet and dignified testimony of a lover and husband. A gesture here and a word there depict someone you'd want to know regardless of how competitive he had to be otherwise. It is these moments (and his son's account of George as father) that have stayed with me. Apart from them, Living in the Material World is a very slight step above Imagine John Lennon.

ROWLAND

Rowland Howard has a lot of music with his name on it but all of it is over shadowed by one song: Shivers. He wrote it when he was 16 in response to the emotional turmoil he saw around him as he and his friends paired off and then split asunder again and again. The lyric is a sneer at the resultant over-emotion, even beginning with the line "I've been contemplating suicide though it really doesn't suit my style." If you made it through your adolescence without having that thought then you probably behaved yourself and I hope the pool extension is all you hoped it would be. The chorus begins with one of my favourite lines out of any song: "My baby's so vain she is almost a mirror". Who, capable of coming up with that at 16 along with perfectly fitting music, could not be destined for greatness?

Well, Rowland Howard, actually. Autoluminescent, though it might try to pull the other way, is a story of mounting defeat, showing a vulnerable individual continually beaten by a life against which his talent offered no protection. His is the story of every bedroom rockstar there ever was with the exception that he acted on his daydreams and pushed himself into a career. And it worked ... kind of.

His lean, high cheek-boned pallor allowed him effortless access into Melbourne's alternative scene which was morphing from punk to its posty form that allowed a greater range of expression. A series of talking head testimonies tell of this but nothing does it more eloquently than footage of Howard, Ollie Olsen 'n' co. slinking catlike down Fitzroy St in the late 70s. They stand out from the crowd through clear visual and personal style, aliens among the mud men.

But then something happened when Howard joined the Boys Next Door halfway through their only album. He brought a wild chaos to the sound that lifted it from good to original and he brought Shivers. The song he'd been performing with such cool sarcasm in his first band was taken by Nick Cave and turned into a straight emotionally wrought ballad. That's how I first heard it and it almost made me cry. I didn't have the Door Door album but I had the Shivers single with the creepy and compelling Dive Position on the B-side.

A lot of interviewees in the film have an opinion on the change in the song's mood. Cave himself who'd done the dirty deed concedes that Howard should have sung it which seems a pointless thing to say now. The fact is that Howard allowed the song to be so used and doing so allowed it in turn to enter history with its name on the door. A montage of alternative versions includes Marie Hoy's from the Dogs in Space movie which restores the sneer (actually more clearly than Howard's original).

The Birthday Party's career takes them from, to paraphrase Howard, massive fish in a tiny pond to frog spawn in a massive ocean. Penury, antipathy and heroin in London to localised celebrity in Berlin where their style and drug of choice changed the scene completely. Wim Wenders (a far better interviewee than a film maker, IMHO) offers some very useful witness here.

It was in Berlin that the Birthday Party ground to an end, with Howard being elbowed out over the widening chasm between his and their direction. Other groups formed from this, most durably Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It's at this point in the film where Howard's decline begins and continues on to his demise. It's also where the account gets both more guarded and more intense with Howards drug and health problems equalised low against the strength of his musical output.

And here we come to the crossroads of any biographical account: do you show everything? It leads to the question of what you're trying to say by telling someone's life. A friend of mine complained about Tim Burton's film Ed Wood, saying that it left out all the ugly seediness of his final years. Burton's purpose was to celebrate the act of filmmaking and chose an unusual but highly useful starting point: Wood might have produced laughably inept films but he'd had a genuine force of vision. That comes through easily. If the film had gone on to report it all it would have descended into the kind of earnest yawn that Oliver Stone so deteminedly gave us in the '80s and '90s.

So what's the big message of Autoluminescent that buries the bad bits under a few hints? Persistence. Howard kept going, kept finding collaborations and writing and recording and playing, regardless of how low his profile was to remain. His music was crucial to his life and while that could be said of other aspects of his days on earth his music remains. It stands the cool removal test (ie imagine if it had been created by someone you "shouldn't" like) and travels well beyond its makers' life.

SO, IN BALANCE...
Of the home/movie/slideshow/talking head rockumentary format, which is better? Autoluminescent is more of an a/v feast as there is a lot less mainstream reverence to get through before you see the subject in any kind of clarity. On the other hand Living in the Material World doesn't have Nick Cave reading a fairytale version of the story over brooding gothic imagery. George's son reads his fathers letters home which becomes emotionally very efficient.

Autoluminescent begins and ends with a fetishistic tracking shot of Rowland Howard's career-long choice of weapon, an Olympic White CBS era Fender Jaguar which he is seen playing almost exclusively throughout and it's there on the soundtrack, wall to wall. Not a word is said about it but it's there. George Harrison was the Beatle who did care about his guitars and amps and was always happy to discuss them. But the only time we see them is in vintage clips. Where are the close-ups of his beautiful old Gretsches, his iconic fireglo Rickenbacker 12 string, the cherry Les Paul or the rosewood Telecaster? Neither word nor sight up close. But there's the difference right there.

Material World is about a famous person whose music became apparently less and less important to who he was as wealth, fame and comfort took over. If you didn't know how he was and hunted his later music down as a result of this film (and it's lack of representation of it) you would probably experience it once, incompletely and put it quietly back where you found it. Rowland Howard slung his Fender Jag where he went and kept plugging it in right up to his final (and pretty damn good) album.

I am more a Beatle fan than one of the Birthday Party and its descendants. The fact of the Beatles is so impenetrably armored by their fame that I feel no lack in enjoying their music without caring even slightly about who they were as people. I was never likely to have met George Harrison and remain unbothered about it. While I cannot claim to have known him, I did meet Rowland Howard on a few occasions, and outside the musical context (ie not at gigs) and I'm glad I did. I found him witty, intelligent and personable.

Neither film alters those impressions but the one I'm grateful to have seen at a cinema is clear to me. Odd for me to write this but in this case at least, between Richard  Lowenstein and Martin Scorsese, Scorsese loses.

MIFF session 9: Pom Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold

See that title, see the movie. It does what it says on the tin. Morgan Spurlock sets his sights on nefarious comedy of product placement, financing a documentary about it which ... is about it.

A series of meetings with a spectrum of intimidatingly urbane whitecollars, self perjuring Hollywood high-fliers, social commentators and consumer guardians takes us through the concept of co-branding as the arc: we are seeing this film pre and post natally at the same time. Spurlock cuts deals, thrills at acceptance and sighs at rejection and gets his film made. Here's proof!

We watch the erosion of everyday variety into a focussed travel from one product to the next from those who have coughed up the most to dominate the film until we are getting full 30 second tv syle commercials right there in the middle of a feature documentary. Spurlock keeps it light but our eye is always on his central question about integrity.

This film is never boring. It can't be. It's targets are the same as ours and they are easy to shoot. Does what it says on the tin. But here's my problem:

It can't work.

Everybody knows about product placement and few in any of this film's audiences would be under any delusion about commercial cinema being .... commercial. Spurlock's films veer even closer to the flame of entertainment over veracity than Michael Moore's. He did get away with it once. Supersize Me had an agenda and, by aiming a home made ging at a corporate Goliath none would quibble over his popcorn sensibility.

He's good at what he does. There is a lot of information in every minute of this film and it is served in perfect bitesized portions. Who cares that it's information we either already know or can guess at from what we do know? It's fun. Who cares that making a infotainment such as this needs only the very slightest of veils of commentary to give its creator's sellout an ethical cool? Dig? Morgan Spurlock isn't selling out, he's buying in. Morgan Spurlock isn't six of one, he's half a dozen of another. And the lossless march of market-proof irony goes on.

But it can't, really. At the bottom of all of this jokey dance with the devil and self parodic lamentation about artistic integrity is the idea that there is an art so pure that the most ethereal breath of Mammon woud kill it on contact. Without this point the film is next to meaningless and yet it cannot stand the most casual scrutiny. It is surely beyond cynicism. (Have yet the hallowed halls of academe produced a concept so apt, so progressive, so superliminal and so ... dicky as post-cynicism? No? Time.)

This is a clever prank but like most pranks can only be clever. The statement about money owning art is as old as human settlement. Playing corporations by playing into their hands is ok but then the film was made and did look as it did. I can't damn this film, it's brief eighty-eight minutes are packed with amusing and sometimes thought-nurturing material but the choctop that I didn't bother getting beforehand would have been similiary sugary and flavoursome, packed with enough scooped ice cream to give the impression that it's a legit dessert. Yeah, it's entertaining but so are the blockbusters whose posters we see repeatedly throughout in the offices of movie moghuls and on walls and the sides of buses.

I'd leave it there but for one thing that ruined my tolerance. In his quest for possible backers, Spurlock is often seen lurking around the shelves of supermarkets. He picks one bottle from a shelf and can only share it with us through helpless laughter. It's a shampoo for use on both human and animal. This is funny until you realise...why shouldn't it be? Hair is hair. Shampoo cleans it. Shooting at name brands is shooting cheap. Shooting at nonbrands (wih an assault weapon) is bullying.

"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"

In the spirit of the neopostcynical environment let me be the first to say: Bullshit!

MIFF session 5: Tabloid

Joyce Mckinney, a poster girl for southern U.S. clean livin' tells the story of her life's great love and how she snatched him from the clutches of the Mormons who then snatched him right back. Between claim and counter reclaim is a tale of forced sex (she upon him) and cultism that ignited the gutter press and resulted in a police investigation and trial, forests fell for the next days' fish and chip paper.

As one tabloid got the exclusive rights first they followed her version of events. Its rival in chief dug for dirt and found a continent's worth of it. Far from the wronged southern belle her version held as essence, she was a thoroughly experienced sex worker, offering myriad services for the gentleman half of the great unwashed including, crucially, a lot of role play.

Ok ... if that's true why did she drag a licenced pilot and bodyguard to accompany her to the UK (where the Mormons had sent him), financing the entire jaunt. Publicity? She didn't want for clients back home. Doesn't gel unless the part of her story about her life's great love is actually true. Alright, call it psychotic obssession, her motives here are not entirely impure. There's more to come which you will NOT expect but for that you'll have to see the movie.

Errol Morris pioneered a technique whereby his subjects are lined up to look him and his camera in the eye, allowing for a conversational warmth and relaxation to pervade their testimony. This works here as it always has; the connection between the speaker and the auditorium a solid current.

Next, Morris injects two other tropes, a series of tabloid fonted statements which flash over the image like Fleet St headlines, adding irony to, often contradicting and now and then very cheekily correcting what is being claimed behind them.

The second device is the use of campy old footage from various sources to the same effect as the headlines. This can fall like a lump of granite through a frog pond but here the choice of material is so sharp and precisely timed that it serves to support the form AND luxiuriate in the embellishment and fabrication that we are experiencing. The central turth alluded to above, thus is rendered curiously inviolate, however little we can eventually credit the speaker.

This was an all but full house which roared along to its mastery. That's another reason why I love MIFF: I can wash and bash around in the cinematic equivalent of a mosh pit in front of films that I might otherwise quietly enjoy at home accompanied by few or all on my lonesome.

You could easily point to the timeliness of this project, given the current story of the stories, but what it damns and celebrates are timeless things: sin and human curiosity.