MIFF 68 1/2: Festival of Ether

In a world where celebration was life one festival stood up...

They were falling like dominos. Performance feasts like Melbourne Comedy, crowd magnets like the Grand Prix all tumbled before the microscopic player COVID-19. When I read that my beloved MIFF, too, was plummeting from the sky. And then toward July the wreckage stirred, dust blustered out and the thing rose to its feet and declared it would be going ahead, it would be a little different, given the times, but it would be there for us. It even gave itself a cinephilic joke as a name: MIFF 68 1/2.

The program was up by mid-July. It was expectably slimmer than normal and the pricing was acceptable (mostly). You couldn't do anything with the information on the handsomely refurbished website. Members were given earlybird benefits and were the first to be let loose on the fare but, really, apart from the festival itself that reaped some extra lolly, who really got anything out of membership this year?

I wasn't caring a deal about that as I was trying to work out how ticketing was being handled. Minipasses? Single Tickets. What delivery were we looking at? It had to be streaming but what was the platform would they take advantage of the flexibility? Finally, we'd see an end of the sold-out session or the issue of popular titles being uncomfortably full (when it's a physical event, I have switched tickets away from too full sessions). All of that would, however temporarily, be a thing of the past. Right? Later....

PROGRAM
At first glance it looked bland and unadventurous: documentaries, contemporary auteurs, verite. Then I noticed Dau. Natasha a product of the infamous Ilya Khrzanovsky's Dau. project (Google it) but then I recalled the film 4 from a few years back and passed. The plain packaging of Women Make Film almost had me passing on it, too until I realised how massive and compelling it might be (and was) A few more picks later and I had a modest five or so which was enough to take a week off work from home and feel like I was part of an event. The second week brought new titles and I added three.

What's Happening?
It was hard to find out how it was going to work until a breath before the festival itself. This made it difficult to plan. Were they going to replicate the effect of physical screenings by limiting their availability. Would there be a bulk deal like a minipass? What platform were they going to use and would I be able to plug into it? And so on. Without knowing most of these I decided to play it safe and take the second week off work from home (yes, that means something). It meant that, worst come to worst, I'd have a work free week off. The shape of the festival and access to it were to remain mysteries until the big launch on YouTube. It felt like an attempt to juice up the sense of event but it just felt like a grasp at the old normal.

The Website
The website was redesigned from the ground up and was an attractive and useful thing, eventually. I failed to get in until I asked on the FB group and was told that the redesign required new account creation from everyone which should have been on the landing page. Ok, done but I used to be able to go back and check previous years' activity which could come in  handy. That's gone forever.

If you used Chrome on Windows 10 it was anyone's guess where to click on the thumbnail to get to a given film's page. It really did seem randomised. On other platforms it was more consistent.

Ticketing
The main thing was the admission that there was no control to be had as to the numbers of viewers per household. Indeed, the sole means of policing was the silence in the streets after curfew (for Melburnians, at least).

There were bundles offered of like films for any who wished for a more controlled experience and these were well priced. While there was an adjusted membership pricing and benefit list it held no better lure than under the old circumstances. I could still have done with a minipass but as the pricing was acceptable I went with a list about the same size as a mini.

Pricing was in two tiers: $14 (most of them) and $20 (spotlights) which is more or less on par with services like Apple Movies. Exceptions included the epic Women Make Film series which was $20 for the lot (viewing windows per episode, a relief for a 14 hour series).

Delivery
When it was unveiled the delivery method was via the website with a number of recommendations. I chose plugging a laptop into my tv via HDMI which mostly worked a treat (problems I had with this were pretty much due to which device I was using). Once started, punters were given a decent 30 hour window to complete the film which allowed a rewatch if needed (see below for issues with this).

Anyone puzzled by this or without the means was stuck with watching on a computer or smaller screen device.

If you needed to pause a film for a later resumption within the window you were faced with the entire introductory slideshow and ads again, you couldn't just pick it up. So what? Well, the slides for sponsors etc., while I understand why they're there, are on screen forever as the ridiculously high volume background music throbs. Then you get a few commercials. Normal fare and then an age restriction warning and any notes about the screening itself (captions etc.). Is there no way at all to allow that to be bypassed for a resumed screening? I timed it a few times and was able to potter about getting food or drinks ready while it blared away.

Films designated "Spotlight" were unable to be played until a given timeframe on a single date. This struck me as an idea to inject a sense of moment to highlighted features, to add a feeling of communal festival going. Wouldn't that be most effective if the after chat (or the simultaneous chat) were allowed by agreement between friends who'd organise it anyway? A complete absence of popular participation in available forums (Twitter and FB were crammed with publicity posts which caught a very few responses by comparison with previous fests. I used to enjoy seeing the live Twitter wall at MIFF venues; it really gave out a sense of community. I can't, then, quite comprehend the decision to limit particular titles to such constrained windows when the advantage of having a VoD platform is that it frees the punters of that entirely.

And what's with limited ticketing? Is that really a licencing restriction? A technical one; is there a limit to the amount of connections? Any of these might be true but because they are so constricting it would be useful to know why this is so as it makes it a lot easier to deal with and plan by. If anything like this form of MIFF happens again, just tell us why you are constrained to limit certain films. It will be a lot less annoying knowing that it isn't just someone's futile attempt at creating buzz.

What I Saw Ranked

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema - An encyclopedic epic of how cinema works using only the output of women filmmakers. Mesmerising and ocean deep.

Shirley - Good stab at biographical film that uses the themes of the subject over a timeline of significant events and creates a film that would be interesting if it were about anyone.

She Dies Tomorrow - The thought of mortality as a virus plays out among some ten percenter Californians. More effective for its subtlety.

Prayer for a Lost Mitten - A cinematic poem of charm and quiet power.

The Tango of the Widower and its Distorting Mirror - A puzzle rewarding the adventurous.

The Go-Gos - A good rockumentary tells of how an act works, for better and worse

Black Bear - A serpent of invention eating its tail.

La Llorona - Sombre and deep felt magical realism about the resonance of tyranny.

Anne at 13,00 Ft - Effectively difficult. Too effectively difficult.

So...

I had gripes about the teasing approach which felt tiresome rather than exciting and the delivery method could stand a lot of work and a few other whinges but, look, after all the other major events had to cancel, MIFF found a way of forging ahead and provided a decent generalist program that still shied form the mainstream. They delivered.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 28 9 pm SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE DEATH OF STALIN

After a final act of negative influence, a kind of accidental bullying, the great leader and teacher of all the Russias and peoples of the greater Soviet metropolitan area dies. A few localised fumbles later and the party cogs roll into the room and try to work out what to do while watching what they say because they don't know who's listening but they also know who they are talking to. And that's the top people.

Armando Iannucci's hard satire swings between gallows humour and the real gallows as the fallout from the death of Stalin hurtles downward through the ranks. Why bother doing this now? Couldn't someone have come up with it in the '50s when it was a fresher story? Political muscling, whether self avowed or not, doesn't easily regenerate without a contest of people near the top who want themselves to be where the boss was. You can extend that to the bizarre state of information bending and bullet dodging of elected officials here and now. Stalin and his crew set themselves to reality redefinition as though it were Sunday lunch and everyone knew what happened to anyone who might cry: "but you said...!"

The mind who gave us Veep, The Thick of It, and In the loop knows that there are times when satire need only be applied as a thin sheen over reality. With the event of the title of this film Ianucci has, if anything, only to restrain himself until the emergent truth of its chaos appears. The Stalin story is particularly poignant as it brought up the confusion that occurs when succession raises its head after the death of an autocrat. Who goes next? The party light or the relative? Did this roll the sequence from Tsar a full circle to a replacing autocrat?

In the end, after all the brutality and paranoia, Ianucci delivers us from gut punch to belly laugh without ever having to err into cuteness or over-earnestness. That along with a dream cast and some great comic timing, gets us here to where the lampoon meets the wall.

Join me, won't you?

MIFF Session 10: WOMEN MAKE FILM: A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA

The title of this does more than simply describe the contents of this massive documentary series, it expresses its approach. How to present cinema directed by women without potentially alienating audiences through politics? You make the entire thing a primer in cinema itself from focal length, editing to representing the meaning of life but you only use films directed by women. If you come out of this thinking "not all male directors" this experience has left you on the side of the road. This is a celebration and everyone's invited.

The framing device is also in the title. The various narrators are seen driving cars or unseen as the dashcam takes down winding roads while the story of cinema and how it is created is told by voices such as Tilda Swinton or Jane Fonda. That established we are given 40 chapters that inform us of what cinema is, how it is constructed and how its part of the essential bargain with the audience.

The size of the instalments is daunting (all but the last are three hours long) but the focus on the issues is kept so focused and accessible that viewing becomes a question of how to interrupt it rather than how much more you can take. This would work better in a tv on demand setting when the resumption of a paused episode was not prefaced with the masses of sponsor messages and advertising that every screening in the MIFF context was given. There are around eight chapters to an episode so the lines are pretty clearly drawn for the time-poor viewer. This would be essential on ABC or SBS on demand services.

This is a Mark Cousins project and features his writing. This is usually lucid and informative but can stretch into hyperbole and go spinning out of control in the space of a single sentence. It can also at times crawl under the viewer's radar when the thing it is meant to define is proving elusive and the accompanying footage presents a question that is not answered. These moments are not frequent but I can recall them and when you're talking a fourteen hour stretch that's something. Cousins' own voice on other series like The Story of Film has a Northern Irish lilt that stays on the right side of monotonous or grating but here, putting his commitment where his creativity is he employs some of the most sonorous voices he could find to tell the tale.

So, fourteen hours of cinema instruction and history that highlights the contribution of women film directors later and I'm ready to follow up on a mass of titles (listed here: https://www.womenmakefilm.net/) And I have a strong sense I have just experienced a marvel. This series starts at its title to tell you what it intends but, outside of a few lines in the opening credits of each episode, it is free of political agenda, concentrating on cinema that, increasingly sensed throughout, demonstrates that good films are good films. The potential for a kind of monument to tokenism quashed, we are given the key and the movies beyond the door are waiting.

MIFF Session 9: SHIRLEY

Rose and Fred are newlyweds who turn up at the household of celebrated writer Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley, college professor and literary critic. The couple move in until they can find their own home and Fred's academic career can get a good start. What follows is a version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for depressives as the blocked writer stirs to find amusement and then inspiration in manipulating the young couple. Stanley parades and philanders, stifling the ambition of his own protege, Fred. Rose becomes fascinated by Shirley and begins her own invasion.

Fiction based on historical events should not serve the timeline. I don't mean that it should not be true (truth, however abstract, must be its purpose). I do mean that it should not admit events into its own timeline just because they happened. Most biopics ignore this notion and play out like pageants, leaving the interrogation of the life in question behind the mask of worth. Exceptions are rare but telling. Amadeus plays out as mythology, pitting one figure against another, each representing something about their art and creativity in general, ending in a showdown of the worldly and divine. This is not the place to begin a biographical study of the composer but it offers great insight into the mind and motives of a skilled mediocrity (its narrator, Salieri). Nowhere Boy about a teenage John Lennon takes care to omit the name of the band he is forming by the end of the story: that he became famous despite and/or because of the emotional torment of his youth is what lives on the screen and the images of the fame serve an end credit sequence.

Shirley comes from this kind of place. Her famous short story The Lottery is mentioned in several scenes (including the opening where it's spoiled) but she, as yet has not written a novel. More intriguingly, she is on the trail of a missing student from the local college from a few years before. In a moment of communion Rose offers an insight into the case that lights the moribund Shirley's eyes. These are characters in a story first and foremost. We are given no signposts to particular works from Jackson's output (no scenes where she is served by a timid clerk named Nell or meets a bestial college wife called Theo) as the idea of a writer crawling from the slough of despond through the opportunity to exercise power over another after years of dominance by her husband (which sent her to the slough to begin with).

These are the things that give this tale of sustained powerplay its darkened mood and near Gothic atmosphere. As such it performs a far better ground to approach an understanding of the writer of such iconic horror tales. Elizabeth Moss, the world's go to character actor, brings the light of rage into Shirley Jackson, one who knew the deadliest blows are dealt in embraces.

MIFF Session 8: SHE DIES TOMORROW

Amy is convinced she will die the next day. After an opening scene in which she is farewelling a character we don't see (unless it's the guy we see through a doorway who appears to be ranting) she returns to her house, puts the Lachrimosa from Mozart's Requiem on loop (well, it's vinyl so she just keeps putting it back to the start of the track) and does stuff while getting progressively drunk. She tries calling a friend who doesn't seem to hear her that well but says that she'll ignore her family commitments and come and visit Amy. Amy gives up on the call and keeps doing stuff.

Jan does turn up, lets herself in and talks Amy down from a wall (not suicidally high). Amy tells Jane about dying the next day. Jane observes Amy's falling off the wagon and cautions her against rash decisions but Amy isn't talking about taking her own life. Then what? She's just convinced she has less than a day to live. Assured that Amy is essentially fine, Jane leaves and goes to her sister in law's birthday drinks, interrupting a bizarre conversation about dolphin sex (which the other two guests are not comfortable with) with her own conviction that she, too, will die tomorrow. She's already tried to call Amy with this but got no answer. It got into her head and it won't leave. Eventually she does, going back to her strange home studio. We hear a conversation between the two guests who have also caught the thought and then back at the brother's house the couple both get infected. They go to their daughter's room and cuddle paternally.

The spread of the thought is then assumed to make its way throughout the city. Jane, wandering aimlessly, later comes upon two young women who are having a stunned but quite happy conversation about it. And then at one point we see the end of the chain that brought it to Amy and, while it answers no further question than that we understand that it is an ongoing malaise.

This feels less like a simple outbreak of meditations on mortality than an epidemic of existentialism. It bears the same message to everyone it touches but they respond differently. Against this the baubles of the old normal as activities, possessions and the trappings of reproduction and nesting are on display in a presentation that swings from video-verite to purple psychedelia. Once the nagging bug of an idea gets in everyone is changed, regardless of whether they will die or not, bodily or not.

Kate Lynn Sheil redeems herself from the winceable mess that was Kate Plays Christine and provides a strong central or starting figure of sliding chaos that will envelope the rest of the cast. The ever welcome Jane Adams brings her dependable convicted fragility to Jane. The scene with the doctor that morphs into a sex scene but doesn't is powered by her wonder, eagerness and barely concealed disappointment. Tunde Adebimpe whose role becomes more profound that we might expect shows us great subtlety in his polite uninterest in the party conversation which expands into the strong but quiet conviction in the subsequent conversation.

She Dies Tomorrow flirts with a kind of indy mumblecore drama but refuses to give in to it. There is pretty much nothing cute about it (which immediately tears it from those conventions) but there are stretches of warmth and authentic concern. I almost gasped to see the main production credit go to Benson and Morehead, a team whose films as writers and directors have built a growing cosmic horror realm including the adjacent After Midnight/Something Else (2018). This film bears little of their stamp but rather doesn't disagree with their branded Lovecraftoverse. It would be an apt entry into a B&M marathon. On its own, it stands as a creditable absurdist what-if. Points!

MIFF Session 7: ANNE AT 13000 FT

Anne goes skydiving and loves it. She misses it so much that even on playground duty at her work as a teacher's aide, she asks a colleague to lift her as she closes her eyes. She's good with the kids, enabling their bright imaginations, and well liked by the other staff. But all is not well.

In fact almost all of the seventy-five minutes of running time that feel like about three hours, things start at barely controllable and progressively disintegrate for the rest of the time. Anne has an undisclosed mental illness which drives her into combative episodes, leaves her confused most of the time and takes her further and further away from the euphoria of the gloriously controlled fall in the opening sequence.

While there is no condescension or judgement levelled at Anne at any time by the film itself we are kept both aloof and taken to physical intimacy. Almost the entirety of this film is shot in close-up, giving it a breathless, inescapable feel. It's hard to empathise with Anne as all of the conflicts we see are the result of her hitting out against her own lack of control. In one sequence a teacher confronted with a particularly hostile response repeatedly asks Anne if she needs assistance and the most forbidding of exchanges is: "I don't know how to help you."

Deragh Campbell in the title role brings a solid commitment to the task and we are not given a moment's break from Anne's state, from her lashing out, a helplessly drunken episode or the teetering wedding speech she gives for her colleague. All of the performances around her follow in the verite documentary style and none fail to convince.

However, without a space for the audience to assess if there is any hope to be had for this woman, there is little for us to do but witness the torment of her life. The potential for her engagement at the beginning is never fulfilled here and the sole hint that she might find some is packed into the final sequence which involves a moment's hesitation before a certain decision. Even there, as it is hard to judge where this happens on the timeline, we are still none the wiser. Perhaps that's the point, distressing as that is: we stand and walk to the exit as the late '60s sounding song groans over the end credits of this late '60s feeling film and leave her there mid-air.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 21 2020 SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE CONVERSATION

You remember the song Torn Between Two Lovers? An MOR hit by Coloradan Mary McGregor way back in 1976. Well, this is the same thing except that it's more Caught Between Two Godfathers. Yep, Francis Ford Coppola was riding high on the breakthrough success of The Godfather and was only a year away from the equally celebrated sequel when he found the time to get a lot grittier, recall his indy roots and tell this tale of a man burdened with a secret.

Harry Caul (whose name sounds like a beard mask if you have an American accent) knows one thing more than anything else and that's surveillance. His pre-chic industrial digs are an impenetrable fortress against prying attention as he is the embodiment of such stealthy invasion. One of the best in the business he records a conversation between two lovers that sounds like a murder plot. He's been there before and let it happen. Does he break his professionalism or give himself another lifelong sack of rocks to haul uphill.

Gene Hackman gives his intense best, here, containing chain reactions behind his sober, knowing face. And he's just one. If you know your New Hollywood movies (and you should) most of this cast will feel like old friends. With everything so served up these days, especially in lockdown, it's easy to forget how the intention behind this work is the thing that hasn't changed: it's just got easier to do.

Join me, as I'll know if you don't.