Change Your Image
kima-6
Reviews
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)
Filmmaker as gleaner
Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I celebrates the notion of "freeganism" or what the French call "gleaners." Unlike the punk antics of activists, gleaning in France is not so much a matter of rebellion but a matter of rite. There is a tradition in France from days of old that allows people to come behind a harvest and pick up any fruit and veggies that weren't elected by the grower to go to market, over-sized or heart shaped potatoes for instances. "This apple is like a stupid ugly woman," says one person of the discards, "zero value." Here, gleaners give new meaning to the phrase "having a field day." (Although gleaning is forbidden in precious Burgundy wine country!) The film moves from these rural gleaners to the urban gleaners as Varda talks with a wide variety of interesting characters: drunks, gypsies, artists, activists, rappers, volunteer teachers... many with a very "lived" look to their faces. Gleaners come from all walks of life and here they include a gourmet chef and a psychoanalyst. Picking a patient's brain is too a form of gleaning as the therapists is in a state of poverty, a state of not knowing.
Varda uses this film as her owns means of self-exploration. It is told in a very self-reflexive style that you will either enjoy or be irritated by. We are subjected to extreme close-ups of her gray hair or her aging liver spotted hands as she says, "we enter in the horror of her hand". The beauty in her choosing to take home a clock with no hands is symbolic of the overall poetic style to this work - "an emotion film." Long shots of her lens cap dancing in the wind, repetitive shots of trucks on the highway, and of course, her fascination with the heart shaped potatoes - food that warms the heart.
There are many words to describe this gleaning behavior: stoopers, pickers, retrievers, recyclers... Some see found objects as dictionaries - helping us to come to an understanding of humankind. Varda has a fascination with old paintings showing gleaners, like Millet's famous Gleaneuses (pictured here), but she unearths many others - from op shops to the storage basement of a museum. Marey, an early innovator of photographer, even gets evoked somehow and the combination of all her elements gives this film a very ethnographic feel.
Varda describes herself as a gleaner of images and she explores this idea in a 60 minute follow-up 2 years on (an extra on the DVD). Here she not only revisits some of the characters in the original documentary but she also meets with new gleaners who flooded her with letters and gifts in response to the release of the first film. She looks at the impact the film had on her and those who participated, the characters who share their "confidence and confidences." The Gleaners and I is a delight to watch on so many levels. It is a meditation on waste, of living on the fringes of society and conversely, what this says about people we don't see in the film: the thoughtless consumers. To me, the film is not only about the discarding of objects, but of the decay and disenfranchising of the aged. Finally, in a subtle way, this film is about self and our relationship to the world through the eyes of a very creative filmmaker for whom low production values equates to high art.
Century of Cinema: Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill (1995)
NZ films explore dark psychological interiors
Ex-pat actor New Zealander Sam Neill takes a personal journey through the history of New Zealand cinema, starting from around 1950. We are left in no doubt that this take is as viewed from his driver's window. He argues that New Zealand cinema reflects a lonely place. He sees the desolate roads of Aotearoa as symbolic of the role that journeying plays in this nation's narratives - both physically and metaphorically. He holds movies like Good Bye Pork Pie up as examples.
This documentary was made the year after Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures put him on the world stage. Neill grew up down the road from the real-life murder in this film and uses this tie-in to take us back through his childhood in Christchurch to show what New Zealand was like in the 1950s and 60s for the rest of the nation. (As narrator, he goes a bit too far setting the reminiscent mood by riding a kid's bike while wearing a child's baseball cap.) Growing up in this era, film was a night out and a part of the social fabric of society. The material on offer, however, was almost always foreign and New Zealanders liked it that way, hankering as they did to be "somewhere else." This was the days of "bodgies" and "troubled youth" watching forbidden cinematic fruit (fast cars, shoot-em-ups and Jayne Mansfield). At one point, the army was brought into the town square to control the movie-going youth.
Neill puts forward New Zealand as place seething with horror and madness, especially citing Janet Frame's Angel at My Table and the killing spree at Aramoana. Until the release of Sleeping Dogs, 1977, (starring Neill), New Zealanders on the whole didn't much care about seeing New Zealand film. Dogs (dir. Roger Donaldson) depicted authority as violent and foolish. Scenes featuring rioting protesters being subjected to police brutality eerily foreshadows the later real riots of the 1980s Springbok Tour (as covered by the documentary Patu!). Neill suggests that New Zealand film is often focused around authority or a strong patriarch that would remain with film well into later films like Once Were Warriors. Fear was a subject of study for Kiwis filmmakers. The work of early New Zealand directors like John O'Shea and John Laing (Bad Blood) is looked at to support this. In contrast to depictions of what Neill calls "psychological interiors," however, was the portrayal of New Zealand as a picturesque place, epitomised by the release of the nationalistic scenic This is New Zealand (1970). This now iconic film was produced by the National Film Unit while Neill worked there as a trainee director.
In the second half of this 50-minute documentary, Neill argues that New Zealand's national cinema gains distinction by its performers as much as its auteurs, such as the archetypal "man apart" Bruno Lawrence. This recurring "man alone" figure (based on the book) is hand-in-hand with the image of the road and the promise of freedom and anarchy that it represents. Neill sees cinema as a reflection of a nation. In this case, the reticent New Zealanders had gotten over their initial disapproval of homegrown films and began to show a real approval and enthusiasm for their own cinema. The old cultural cringe of film in New Zealand was slowly being broken down, giving rise to a cultural renaissance of film. Around this time, Vincent Ward helped bring New Zealand cinema into an era of art-house. Film also began to reflect more political commentary and a sense of Maoridom and Polynesia started to really surface.
Neill's sometimes pretentious one-sided view of New Zealand's national cinema is peppered with some quirky funny moments in his narration. Whether one agrees with his analysis of New Zealand as a place of psychological distress, he puts forward an argument worth watching. Who knew that in the ten years following this documentary, New Zealand film would rise to the meteoric heights that it has internationally.
Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History (2004)
Hurley: Camera artist or fraudster?
I recently watched a one-hour documentary about celebrated Australian photographer Frank Hurley. Hurley had been famous for documenting Shackleton's doomed 1914 trip to Antarctica. His film footage of a blizzard on an earlier trip is seminal in the history of photography - often considered one of the first documentaries. His work helped people realise the power of photographs through his images of great events from the 20th century, but it was revealed that some of his stunning photos were elaborate concoctions and others were outright fakes. He was a conjurer with a camera. Dramatic skies were added in later, for example, and scenes were reenacted when he had missed them on film. The rescue shot is another example of his forgery - it was actually a shot of Capt. Morsley leaving them to go find help, not his return shot.
For Hurley: "Photos should reflect a different truth." He portrayed the struggle between man and nature and man and man and was telling the oldest myth of all: the hero's journey. He was a camera artist versus a pure documentarian. He melded art and history with his thick 10 x 8 glass negatives. Interestingly, they found this phrase written into his Antarctic darkroom "near enough is not good enough." His work raised serious questions about whether photography had to tell the truth exactly and what place photo art could play in documenting truth.
Soon after in his career, he was sent to Palestine. During battle there, he complained that "shells will not burst when required." Because he couldn't get the shots he wanted, he made composites from his negatives. Was this historical painting rather then photography? Purist photographers and historians were horrified and he clashed with his supervisor, who was a zealous objective dismayed at what a showman Hurley was. Even his diaries were written with an audience in mind.
Hurley destroyed and manipulated things so much that in Papua New Guinea, him and zoologist companion McClough were investigated for being anthropological pirates. Not long after, McClough committed suicide from all the undue public attention on their dubious methods. Oddly cute in the film are the interviews with Hurley's elderly identical twin daughters, Adelie and Toni, in matching outfits as they journey to Antartica in their father's footsteps. Adelie was Australia's first female press photography, with no credit to her absent father.
Later in his life, Hurley worked on quite a number of studio films set in the jungles, the Antarctic and finally, he worked to promote Australia. Except his images of Australia were sanitised idealised versions aimed at selling "migration to Australia" to foreigners: not an Aborigine in sight in his images. They were very propagandist and nationalistic. His manipulation had matured so that simply by leaving things out, editing out what he didn't want people to see, he created as much of an effect as his early techniques of photo composites.
Decasia (2002)
A film student's remediated wetdream
The premise for this film project is deceptively simple. Take a whole bunch of decaying old film negatives, splice them together and viola: instant art film. This highly recommended film by Bill Morrison creates an effect similar to the visual kaleidoscope you'd see in the Kowaanisqatsi trio of films. Opening with shots of a whirling dervish who punctuates the beginning, middle and end of the film, Morrison sets up a series of "action" shots that when watched slowed down with their naturally occurring decay, take on an otherworldly feeling. Decaying celluloid takes on emotional meaning, reflecting the new readings that the viewer brings to the film. What were probably once quite banal scenes of nuns overseeing children walking through a courtyard, for example, take on an eerie ghostly effect and a scene where a man makes untoward advances on a woman is given heighten tension by the angry swirls the rotting film creates. Some segments were disturbing, others funny, many just beautifully impressionistic.
This 70-minute film is quite trippy to watch and your mind will try to make sense of it by finding "things" in the shapes the crackling celluloid creates. (Is that mould? Is it waves crashing on the shore? Neither?) The dramatic score for the film seems lifted off of the disintegrating film, with its odd, oft-times sinister, octaves. At some points near the end, the onslaught of music combined with the repetitiveness of the images was almost too much. Interestingly, no colour film was used. On the one hand it would be difficult to even call this a film, on the other it is actually a film made literally of film. Think Vertov's A Man with a Movie Camera meets Bunuel/Dali's Un Chien andalou. All up, this is a beautiful study in remediation and a film student's wetdream.
Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale (2000)
A compelling story of man's journey to understand humanity as much as himself
Documenting a documenter. That's one way to describe Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale. This film follows anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, who in his late 70s went on a journey back to the places he spent time as a participant field researcher over 40 years ago, first to West Papua and then Peru. Tobias is a full-bodied character: a gay Jewish artist anthropologist who eeks out a living on a cruise ship teaching gawking tourists about the cultures he has come to have a deep respect and understanding for. Author of several books documenting his time with both the Asmat people of West Papua and the cannibalistic Amazonians in Peru, Tobias has been haunted by what happened in his time in these places and how intimate his connection and relationships had become. Yet Tobias' constant wonder and appreciation for the places he got to know is admirable and a real pleasure to watch. One can only hope to ever achieve and retain such humility themselves.
Tobias makes a compelling subject for study as the experiences he faced in immersing himself in these two tribal societies has left him fundamentally changed. This film challenges the notions of morality and "naturalness"- e.g. nudity, homosexuality, cannibalism. (Watch for the graphic circumcision scene). When questioned as to why he engaged in some of the local practices that others would morally denounce, his non-judgmental nature asks: "Why Not?" Who is to say the way of other cultures is right or wrong? This little sleeper is a must watch for not only National Geographic types, but also those interested in the art of documentary making. This film shows what can be done shot on video. The editing provides a quiet revelation of Tobias' life that leaves you watching in fascination. At times, he despairs at being pushed by the film crew to make the emotional journey back, especially considering his age and physical frailty. We can be but grateful that Tobias allowed the tables to be turned on himself, perhaps sympathising with the desire to understand humanity and one's place in the world. The filmmakers provide some moments of critical balance, presenting for example one anthropologist who believes that Tobias predetermined his findings (of homosexuality in this case) based on his personal interests. That said, you can't decide when to stop being shocked and when to take this man home for a cuddle. Move over River Queen, this is the best river ride I've taken in a while.