Innehållsförteckning för No. 196 från Metro

You’ve probably been to a dinner party where – after a few too many chardonnays or lagers – the conversation degenerates into an avalanche of ‘remember when’s. Described by The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) as the ‘lowest form of conversation’,1 these discussions balance on a knife edge of warm nostalgia and barely concealed bitterness. An anecdote about a family outing turned disastrous is one-half ripper yarn, one-half implicit criticism of your parents’ responsibility (or lack thereof). Stephan Elliott’s Swinging Safari (2018) is that dinner party writ large as a raucous, often-crude comedy. It’s an ode to 1970s Australiana thickly slathered with signifiers of the era: platform shoes and fondue parties, Mr. Squiggle and Number 96, lava lamps and lamingtons. In many respects, the film is a loving portrait of…

‘For the last fifteen years, I have been a frustrated director in an actor’s body.’1 When David Wenham made this declaration during a Q&A at the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival, he had been acting for exactly thirty years. Starting out with bit parts in local television treasures like Sons and Daughters and A Country Practice, he soon became a familiar face for Australian audiences. Though he never made the permanent transition to Hollywood, he did have his fifteen minutes of international fame when he landed the role of Faramir in two of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (2002’s The Two Towers and 2003’s The Return of the King). And he’s not done yet. After three decades, Wenham’s career as an actor is still booming; in the past…

On 15 September 2017, director Mohammad Rasoulof was returning to Tehran from the Telluride Film Festival, where his film A Man of Integrity (2017) – which premiered at Cannes that May – had screened. At the airport, his passport was confiscated, meaning he was effectively unable to leave the country.1 On 3 October, he was then ‘interviewed extensively’ by Iranian intelligence, with charges looming for crimes against the state.2 Rasoulof is no stranger to run-ins with Iranian authorities. In 2010, in an event that drew international attention and screen-industry condemnation, he and fellow filmmaker Jafar Panahi were arrested and charged with ‘assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic’, for having dared to make a film in support…

Blade of the Immortal (2017) marks the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike. This number may be uncommon among his cinematic peers, but he breezed past it with no apparent effort – the film is, in fact, one of two that he completed last year, the other being JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable – Chapter 1. A triple-digit filmography seems like an achievement more likely to be reached by a director with half a century (or more) of experience under their belt, or perhaps by an experimenter or maker of shorts, distributing their work to a bespoke audience through some obscure online platform. But Miike has only been working since the early 1990s and, though he cut his teeth in the wild frontiers of Japan’s quick and cheap direct-to-video…

In Blue (2017), writer/director Karina Holden asks the audience to dive into the ocean and witness firsthand the way humanity has allowed our most valuable resource to come to the brink of irreversible destruction. It’s a tough film, yet one with the message that, hopefully, not all is lost. Known predominantly for her directing work on nature documentaries and for having produced the factual programs Luke Warm Sex and Changing Minds: The Inside Story, Holden shows adeptness at marrying the classic nature-documentary style of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough with the politically charged ‘enviro-doc’ trend of recent years.1 Blue is the kind of film that dazzles with beautiful imagery of a sea turtle swimming peacefully among the reef before confronting viewers with footage of men clearing Cape York’s pristine white…

When Roller Dreams (2017) skates across the screen, offering a chronicle of the roller-dancing scene in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach, it glides by on a memory and a question. The first film by Australian editor-turned-filmmaker Kate Hickey, the documentary can be traced back to her love of the Olivia Newton-John rollerskating movie Xanadu (Robert Greenwald, 1980) and her nostalgic desire to seek out the area that sparked the film – and the roller-dancing trend – when she first arrived in the US. Hickey didn’t find what she was expecting, however. Though a wave of late 1970s and early 1980s titles had featured roller dancing, what she saw was ‘[f]amiliar but markedly different too’, as she describes it in her director’s statement: I was shocked to discover these were the original…

Time’s up and sexual harassment will no longer be tolerated within the Australian screen industries. That’s the clear message being sent by Screen Australia’s new Code of Conduct to Assist the Prevention of Sexual Harassment. The policy strictly enforces long-existing sexual-harassment laws and makes funding directly conditional on compliance – it’s the equivalent of posting giant neon billboards at every corner and threatening massive fines. According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, one in five women and one in twenty men report sexual harassment in the workplace. As Screen Australia’s chief operating officer Fiona Cameron stated in a February press release, ‘The Sex Discrimination Act was enacted in 1984, but that has not stopped sexual harassment occurring in Australian workplaces, including in the screen industry.’ Spurred on by international and…

About one-third of the way into Three Summers (Ben Elton, 2017), there’s a sex scene. It involves a theremin, a fiddle, a crowd of bemused onlookers and, at least in literal terms, no actual sex. The encounter primarily involves Keevey (Rebecca Breeds) and Roland (Robert Sheehan), two very different musicians who – in the classic way of a romantic comedy – have been fighting their attraction to each other. Keevey is wearing step-dancing shoes and tapping out a beat as she plays traditional folk music on the violin. Most of her life has been spent on the road accompanying her father’s Irish band. Roland, conversely, is as pretentious as a musician can get. He has classical musical training in more conventional instruments but has instead opted to focus all his…

In the last century, movement across national and cultural lines has led to an increasing intertwining of cultural narratives. Within the arts industries, these layered, multicultural experiences prompt the question: where does one draw the line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation? Or perhaps: how do we tell another’s story? Can we create cross-cultural art that is both nuanced and sensitive – and what would that art look like? For the majority of the twentieth century, our cultural myths and narratives were told by an elite few, and this lack of diversity in the screen industries led to drastically skewed narratives. In terms of the representation of East Asians within Hollywood, acts of yellowface, racial stereotypes and whitewashing were often perpetrated, and still persist today. Mickey Rooney’s now-infamous Mr Yunioshi…

WHETHER IT BE TAKEN AS A FRIVOLOUS FILM IN WHICH CINEPHILES IDLE IN ONE OF THE SCREEN’S BELOVED CITIES, OR AS AN EXTRATEXTUALLY RICH WORK THAT LETS ITS CREATOR REFLECT, BY PROXY, ON SOME REAL-WORLD FOIBLES, CLAIRE’S CAMERA REVEALS MUCH ABOUT WRITER/DIRECTOR HONG SANG-SOO AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWERS OF MEMORY AND THE MEMORIALISED IMAGE, WRITES DAVE CREWE. The choice to have Claire’s Camera (Hong Sang-soo, 2017) open the 2017 Queensland Film Festival seemed entirely appropriate. Opening-night films tend to be lighthearted affairs, screened to accompany hors d’oeuvres and sparkling wine. Running at just under seventy minutes, Hong’s Rohmeresque film of romantic and professional complications intertwining on the outskirts of the Cannes Film Festival fitted the bill perfectly. The critical response that followed Claire’s Camera’s out-of-competition premiere at (the real-life) Cannes…

‘An ancient story was handed down to me. This is the truth. When you feel it sinking into you, then you will know.’ A Yolngu senior law man and father, Djalu Gurruwiwi is one of the last living leaders of his people’s country in the Northern Territory. His words open Westwind: Djalu’s Legacy (2017) – by director/co-writer/co-producer Ben Strunin – in subtitles as lightning cracks over blue storm clouds in fast motion. A master yidaki (didjeridu) player, Djalu is not just a songman but a custodian of the Galpu clan’s songlines. He knows his time in this world is almost up, however, and his son Larry Larrtjanŋa Gurruwiwi1 and the youth of their community have not yet worked out how to sustain their culture and country. A production for the…

On a beach in remote New Zealand, an unstoppable tide surges towards a large shipping crate that contains a piano. Its owner, Ada (Holly Hunter), looks on in horror from a nearby cliff as she’s forced to walk away from the instrument through which she, an elective mute, is able to express herself. Michael Nyman’s rousing composition ‘The Promise’ plays as Ada watches waves creep closer to her piano. At the end of the film, Ada forces her lover Baines (Harvey Keitel) to throw her ‘spoiled’ piano into the ocean as they journey by boat to their new home in Nelson. Slipping her foot into the coiled rope that trails the sinking instrument, Ada sees herself pulled in after it. Her large black dress billows underwater, her arms go slack…

Within the opening seconds of Australia Day (Kriv Stenders, 2017), we’re off and running. The film cuts between separate pairs of feet pounding the pavement, the thudding score driving us forward with them. As the faces of our three protagonists are revealed, desperation writ plainly across them, we become locked into their breathless beats for the remainder of the film, with little chance to exhale. The three paths we follow are those of April (Miah Madden), a fourteen-year-old Aboriginal Australian fleeing from domestic violence and a police chase that left her sister dead; Lan (Jenny Wu), a Chinese woman whose broken English prevents her from communicating the terror from which she is escaping, but who is adamant that the police won’t help; and Sami (Elias Anton), a second-generation Iranian-Australian accused…

‘I don’t want to be reborn as a woman. Not all over again.’ In Angels Wear White (2017), by Chinese writer/director Vivian Qu, receptionist Lily (Peng Jing) says this line between gasping sobs, keeling over in obvious agony. She is in a dingy hotel room after having her hymen surgically reconstructed; the pain that rips through her body is not just physical. A woman is taught that the biologically female body will tear at the point of first penetration – that the sharp pain of ‘virginity loss’ is a rite of passage, an inevitable part of sex. A woman is also taught that it is her responsibility to keep her virginity – and her vagina, if she has one – cloistered until marriage. This unmarried woman’s mutilated body is her…

As two women approach a bridge, one abruptly stops, kneels down and prostrates herself. The other walks on – obliviously at first, and then, having glanced backwards, more hesitantly. Later, as they sit together on a park bench, the topic is furtively raised: what was the purpose of this act? ‘[It was] just a prayer,’ the first explains, ‘to try resolving what it is I really want.’ There are many such bridges in On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong Sang-soo, 2017), though mostly of the metaphorical variety: the plane trip that might reunite geographically separated lovers; flailing attempts to connect via language; the moment of waking from a dream. Physical contact, the elimination of empty space between people, is also a bridge; but here it is mostly absent, making…

The concept of the Stolen Generations is likely impersonal, distant, even archaic to many non-Indigenous Australians. After the Apology (2017) puts a face to the thousands of women and men dispossessed by successive Australian governments in the twentieth century. The first feature documentary from author and activist Larissa Behrendt, it gives a voice to the Aboriginal families still being displaced by current methods of forced child removal. But the film’s greatest asset is its dedication to deep listening – a spiritual skill that requires presence, empathy and resilience from all parties. It’s hard work, and everyone’s got to do it. On 13 February 2008, then–prime minister Kevin Rudd issued a long-awaited formal apology to Australia’s Stolen Generations: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples removed from their families by Church…

It all begins with three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. From this vision in Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil to Peter Hanlon’s 2017 ode to the iconic documentary, Atlantis, Iceland,1 the figures we see symbolise something unobtainable and ethereal, referred to by both films as ‘the image of happiness’. As the voiceover in Marker’s film recounts: He said that […] he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: ‘One day, I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a long piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’ Marker’s exploration of life in the early 1980s uses footage primarily from…

The subject of the film, if there is one, is the recording of the most intangible and elemental stuff: movement, sound and interaction, the interplay between Taylor and Tanaka a kind of physically manifested call-and-response. Amiel Courtin-Wilson is that most unclassifiable of Australian directors. Since completing his first film, the documentary Chasing Buddha (2000), at the age of nineteen, his subsequent works have straddled the boundaries between documentary, narrative filmmaking and the art world, while employing ever more intensive modes of collaboration. The Silent Eye (2016) represents an uncompromising distillation of these tendencies: it is a portrait of three improvised performances by free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, held at the former’s Brooklyn home. Commissioned by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art as part of a…

It might seem odd to reflect that, when I first embarked on making documentaries, I learned more about that art from a writer and director of fiction than from anyone in the documentary business. Inverting the more typical relationship between narrative and documentary conventions, Sue Brooks’ fiction filmmaking seems, to me, to be largely informed by a documentary sensibility. This marks her work as special in the Australian screen industries (and as uniquely Australian, too, I will argue), with her most recent feature, Looking for Grace (2015), embodying a fascinating case study. The late Dai Vaughan, a master of documentary editing, said that the difference between film and reality is that ‘film is about something, whereas reality is not’.1 This describes the nub of the dilemma inherent in storytelling. Essentially,…