OLDER & DEEPER IN DEBT 2014.

Another year at the movies. The following titles that I saw for the first time impressed me.

Grand Budapest Hotel

MARLON BRANDO; an actor named desire (Documentary by Phillippe Kohly) FROZEN (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee), DIAZ: Don't Clean Up This Blood (Vicari), Las BRUJAS de ZUGARRA MURDI  (Witching & Bitching: De Iglasea), PHILOMENA, Feuerwerk (Fireworks; Kurt Hoffmann 1954) La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven: Petri 1971), KAGYUAMIME NO MONOGATARI (The Tale of Princess Kaguya: Takahata), A SERIOUS MAN (Coens), TRESPASSING BERGMAN (Jane Magnusson, Hynek Pallas), INSIDE LLEWELIN DAVIS, CHAIISAI OUCI ( The Little House:Yôji Yamada), DAST-NEVESHTEHAA NEMISOOAND (Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mohammad Rasoulof), The Grand Budapest Hotel, Always san-chôme

Orlac's Hands: Veidt & Kortner

noyûhi (Always - Sunset on Third Street: Takashi Yamazaki 2005) Jûsan-nin no shikaku (13 Assassins: Miike), The Book Thief (Brian Percival), L'autre Dumas (Safy Nebbou 2010), Der ganz große Traum (The Big Dream: Sebastian Grobler), Calvary (John Michael McDonagh), Win Win (Thomas McCarthy), Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn), Winter Passing (Adam Rapp),  Yôkame no semi (Rebirth: Izuru Narushima), Oblomov (Nikita Mikhalkov 1980), Bai ri yan huo (Black Coal: Yi'nan Diao), Mickey Mouse In Get A Horse! (Lauren MacMullan) Neskolko dney iz zhizni Czlowiek z nadziei (Walesa: Man of Hope: Wajda) Gan  (Wild Geese: Shirô Toyoda 1951) The Wolf of Wall Street, Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac: Robert Wiene 1924), Jersey Boys.

This works out as Two documentaries rating significantly high this year, nine multiplex releases, two on TV, ten at events - festivals, film weeks, ethnic screenings etc, four on DVD, one streamed and one (here's a change) on a plane.

Barrie Pattison.

 Sydney Italian Film Festival 2014

More than thirty new Italian movies in impeccable sub titled digital theatrical copies - sound like film nut bliss? The down side is the cost, to which Palace have made a minor concession issuing season tickets that knock a couple of dollars off a film. To get the prices to a still hefty twelve bucks, you have to buy five, ten or twenty. That makes a bad choice expensive.

.I only worked through part of the schedule at those prices. The films I saw were quite presentable, though I do miss Gian Maria Volonte exposing corruption in high places and Lino Banfi doing fat jokes and there was nothing by Avati or Scola - not even his recent feet-off-the-pedals account of his association with Fellini.

We did get A Lonely Hero/L’intrepido the new movie from heavy hitter Gianni Amelio (Porte Apperte, L’America). Antonio Albanese (traffic cop in To Rome With Love) takes Milan fill-in jobs, while his grown son fails to straighten up and fly right. The location filming is superior, the ending too oblique.

The Mafia Only Kills in Summer/ La Mafia uccide solo d'estate is a distinctive job of mood juggling, juxtaposing Palermo Mafia outrages and the comic story of the kid who grows to be director Pif  and his pursuit of the winning Christina Capotondi. The ending is particularly effective, where he shows his own son monuments to the seventies events which he didn’t understand at the time.

The Worst Xmas of My Life/ Il peggior Natale della mia vita is the sequel to Alessandro
Genovese’s broad Worst Week of My Life, with current Italian star comic Fabio de Luigi’s
character back, starting a family, with Signorina Capotundi again, in Diego Abatuantuono’s
castle.

Those Happy Years/ Anni Felici is the new Daniele Luchetti film, an agreeable addition
to his imposing credits, again recalling the Seventies, when action painter Kim Rossi
Stuart finds wife Micaela Ramazotti demanding the same freedom he exercises with his
models and pairing with Martina Gedek,  observed by the young 8mm. camera owner son.

Christina Capotondi

Blame it On Freud/ Tutta colpa di Freud is another handsome multiple narrative from Paolo Genovese, dealing with the three daughters of shrink Marco Giallini and their love lives. The big romantic moments play well. The people are beautiful, the homes are beautiful and the scenery is beautiful. Two hours of it is like making a meal out of maron glacé.

South Is Nothing/ Il Sud è niente  on the other hand is a murky, enigmatic drama of the Mafia bearing down on Calabria fish shop man Vinicio Marchioni and androgynous daughter Miriam Kalquist. After watching him play a mute in Blame it On Freud, it’s startling to find Marchioni has a deep rich voice.

Marina is the prestige offering, the story of Rocco Granata, Italian singer-accordionist in Belgium, who had the surprise hit in the fifties. Made by Stijn Connix director of Daens, it fields a two dimensional musical biography in which the admirable Luigo Lo Casio and Donatella Finnochario find themselves stranded as rounded characters acting out a persecuted immigrants narrative. Jersey Boys it’s not.

A Lonely Hero - Albanese & Amelio

Turin on the Moon / La Luna su Torino is Davide Ferrario back in the city he determinedly chronicles. Bike riding Giacomo Leopardi is not having much luck with his crumbling family home or fetching tenant Manuela Parodi, in among the tourist attractions. OK.

Sydney Sibilia’s I Can Quit Whenever I Want/ Smetto quando voglio is a broad comedy with an interesting idea that’s already been thrashed in Breaking Bad. The retrenched chemistry professor and his colleagues go into the drug trade complete with king pins, shoot-outs, police stings and rehab. Striking, contrasty reversal colour.

More knockabout with A Boss in the Kitchen/ Un boss in salotto from Luca Minero and

rather more simple minded than his hardly cerebral Welcome to the South. Alleged
Camorista uncle Rocco Papaleo, previously represented as dead, is placed under house
arrest in the suburban home of aspiring ad man Luca Argentero. Suddenly every one
cultivates the family for its mob connection. Agreeable lightweight.

More somber Bruno Oliviero’s The Human Factor/ La variabile umana has the ever
admirable Silvio Orlandi as widower Milan police inspector called back from his desk job
to deal with the murder of a socialite the same night his own sixteen year old daughter is
arrested using his pistol.  Dim scope images slowly record the film’s intriguing, detailed
exposition.

Barrie Pattison

MANUSCRIPTS DON'T BURN

Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand/ Manuscripts Don't Burn

Probably the most resonant of the stew of  new releases pouring through the national weeks here is this latest production by Mohammad Rasoulof, still under his twenty year prohibition from film making but out of the jail, where he was sent for undermining the Iranian state with his movies - and now possibly restrained within it’s borders or possibly living in Hamburg, where the interiors of this film were shot. Information is hard to come by.

Local press coverage was predictably non existent and a $35 a head price tag forbidding (must admit the buffet was tasty but they didn’t do free drinks for reasons more ideological than economic). However to the audience that did make it past those barriers, mainly the local Persian community in their best clothes, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is the most confronting film they are likely to encounter. Several Iranian viewers found it irredeemably grim.

 

Commentators squirm away from questioning the appropriateness of using agit prop as up-market entertainment. Here it was clearly the intention of  Rasoulof and his anonymous associates that their work reach a wide international audience via art cinema showing and their straight ahead treatment of secret police activity wipes away even the most sober of what we are used to, films like The Lives of Others or A Most Wanted Man - no bursting through the door pistols at the ready or black clad, absielling SWAT teams here.

Less well know than fellow sentenced director Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof had appeared to be
the lesser artist but this new film is more substantial than any of their earlier work.

The parallel lives of a duo of  assassins and the intellectuals they persecute are shown in
washed out digital colour and scope.

We kick off with  Morteza the driver (reputably Rasoulof  himself) waking in the parked, window fogged car and heading off to pick up a blood stained colleague running from a pursuer. He asks him “Is he dead?” The new comer is more concerned with finding an ATM, needing money for his young son to go into a hospital which won’t accept him without the  fee in advance.

Action switches to a middle class home with washing on a clothes line in the living room, and a poet friend calling on the wheel chain bound husband. When alone, they talk about clandestine book publication. The Net’s more a tool of the hedonist youth, which did not share their forty year old struggle.  They finish their discussion from the down stairs doorway, using the intercom because the ‘phones are tapped. However a headphone wearing surveillance officer is watching from a vehicle with its windows covered.

In an office with a photo of the Ayatollahs on the wall, an official censor strikes out a news paper passage. He visits his one time associate, urging him to turn over a MSS about a ”bus incident” in order to obtain permission to leave the country and see his daughter before he dies. They exchange comments on the censor as a one time dissident himself , who now rejects his past as unpatriotic. The writer reluctantly complies, warning that copies he has distributed will be published if anything happens to him.

The two man hit squad has another assignment, though the ill child’s father wants to go to the hospital. He is refused but their employer uses his influence to have the child admitted. The driver says his associate should thank the man when they meet. Someone is locked in the boot with an improvised hood over his face.

The plot elements connect when they home in on the poet we have already seen, to find copies of the MSS and use him to gain an unobtrusive entry to the wheelchair bound writer’s flat. Their methods are chillingly plausible.

We learn the killer’s back story, which the film connects to an (allegedly genuine) 1995 Heyran Pass incident  when a group dissidents were chosen for elimination by driving their coach  into a ravine. Waiting for a victim to succumb, the hit man makes a sandwich from the contents of the refrigerator and shares it with his colleague.

The assassin father dreams the film’s one fantastic, violent image, himself in the shower with his son, as the water turns bloody.

The argument is detailed. "Fighting and change were 40 years ago. That's over now”, justification under Sharia, the evil “Cultural NATO”,  printed books against the web, the country’s Chain Murders of the nineties, the boy witness, whose fate we never learn, is the same age as the ill child.

We have no way of telling how accurate a depiction of present day Iran we are seeing but the sober, well crafted film making carries conviction. As acts of defiance go this one must come near the top of the list. It should have been on TV at peak hours followed by a panel discussion but  that’s someplace else. I guess without featuring a CIA plot it doesn’t qualify as serious.

 

Horrorshows

 HORRORSHOW.

Australia is already the most parochial film environment in the developed world. No surprise there.  Look at the horror stories that litter the national cinema time line. Think burning Amalgamated's library and the holdings of the ethnic distributors, freighting the lending collection to Melbourne and back at they say a million a time, cancelling the Lillian Gish tour, flogging Cinema Papers to a team unable to get past three shonky issues, the aborted Sydney Quay Cinematheque.

The dismantling of the National Film Theater must be most alarming. It's no accident that that organization's establishment coincided with the development of an Australian feature production industry acknowledged world wide and it's disappearance marked the end of consistently plausible product -  and that is just a side issue.

The money spent on ill informed production alone could have made this country a world leader in cinema savvy. We're only on the third paragraph and were already looking at lost hundreds of millions.

The fact is that film (of which theatrical features are the high water mark) is the major form of expression of the Twentieth Century and on into our own time and that Australians have never had the access to it that people in other places take for granted.  This shows up in areas central to life here - education, entertainment & comment -  as well as production.

The National Film Lending Collection was the one point at which government threw a bone to that sleeping dog. (Pretty good for a mixed metaphor!) While they are poor relations to their real world counterparts, ACMI, the Arc, The Chauvel and the Brisbane Cinematheque, along with the volunteer film societies, which drew on on this, were the few attempts to deal with the problem, plaster on the cracks.

Programs, publications and screenings have been systematically whittled away from a very modest peak. This area was always seen as something to asset strip in the name of local production and, in parallel, it's preservation.

This is not just short sighted but stunningly naive. The Paris Film Museum's Henri Langlois, who faced similar pressure, understood this problem six decades back. He knew that it was not just sufficient to hold productions that could be entered into his data base and make his operation look imposing. "We cannot turn our Cinematheques into cemeteries" - it sounds better in French.

It was and is essential to spread awareness of the existence of historic materials and their part in a wider picture - their value. With all the short comings of his Cinémathèque Française, Langlois had it figured. The work had to be shown - under ideal conditions. Enthusiasts would watch it and ripple effect it outwards from those showings. It was because Langlois admired and repeatedly screened the then unknown NOSFERATU in his small screening room that it became a draw card there, in film museums round the globe and eighty years later you can buy it for a few dollars at your corner DVD store or stream it into your home computer. That story multiplied by thousands is the story of Cinematheques.

Not every one shared his point of view. The British Film Institute once hired in someone to tell them which of their Maurice Elvey films they could safely burn! It's not sufficient to have the work. You must deploy it or some bean counter will want the shelf space it occupies.

Which brings us to current situation where we learn that, as part of archive policy, the National Lending collection is about to close it's doors. Rough luck media courses, volunteer groups or anyone who wants to use what are often the only copies in the country. Feel confident that your tax payer dollars are being used instead to digitize local product into formats which are likely to be obsolete before the process is finished.

The mistake of putting archiving and screening under the same roof has been evident for some time.

This situation repeats the need for the action that has never materialized. Movie enthusiasts in Australia have a dreadful record as lobbyists and it's caught up with them - an echo of the Maurice Ogden poem "And where are the others that might have stood side by your side in the common good?" "Dead," I whispered; and amiably "Murdered," the Hangman corrected me; "First the alien, then the Jew... I did no more than you let me do." 

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL 2014.

By picking my way through the schedule I managed to avoid any Bella Tarr imitations or accounts of oppressed South American Marxists, which may have been concealed in the Twenty Dollars a Ticket Thicket. What I saw would have fitted comfortably into the neighborhood Multiplex or the art cinemas down the road, where sure enough a swathe of them appeared the following week. This was good news/ bad news.

Particularly intriguing was Bai Ri Yan Huo/ Black Coal - Thin Ice a curious departure for the Chinese/Hong Kong cinema, a crime piece without the hustle of their action cinema. It did manage to field an on screen last man standing shoot-out and a murder with ice skates but even these are staged in an accidental, half realist style. Harbin cop Liao Fan screws up a body fragments in the coal conveyor belt investigation and finds himself drawn back into events involving the purport victim's impassive widow. It is both a noir with a femme fatale and nocturnal, Edward Hopper influenced images and also a record of the tackiness of Chinese provicial city life, the two making an unfamilar mix.

Director Diao Yinan made a winning personal appearance, nervously fronting the screening and fielding questions in Mandarin. We can hope to see his short filmography extending now.

Isao Takahata's exceptional Tale of Princess Kagyua.

Even more impressive was Kagyuahime no monagatori/ The Tale of Princess Kagyua the probably last film of animation Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata, whose 1988 Grave of the Fireflies made up half of the company's retrospective. The new film is a genuine masterpiece turning the Tenth Century narrative into an entertaining, complex, alien experience, which takes days to absorb and maybe years to understand. Forget Lord of the Rings! We're not used to seeing the  fantasy mystery elements or the elaborate court life of the Japanese costume movie animated in these water colour tones.

Takahata had always been overshadowed by his associate Hayao Miyazaki and it's no surprise to find the same thing happening in Mami Sunada's Documentary Yume to kyôki no ohkoku/ The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, concentrating on Miyazaki making As the Wind Rises, while Takahata struggles with Princess Kagyua in a building down the road. The studio's white cat gets more attention than Takahata. The film is instructive when watching the crews working away on paper, with not a computer in sight, or seeing the voice tracks laid down successively to still and line animation images. It it goes into the valuable record box.

Other documentaries included Frank Pavich's Jodrowsky's Dune, a handsome film-that-never-was account fielding Jodo and some of the celebrity talents drawn into his wake. Steve (Hoop Dreams) James' Life Itself was much grimmer, spending a disproportionate time on Roger Ebert's cancer wracked decline, brave as it was. It didn't do justice to critic Ebert's individual contribution to the film scene.

Characteristic of the festival was Daniel Burman’s Argentinian El misterio de la felicidad / The Mystery of Happiness - more middle class feel good in the manner the director's Family Law. We know pill popping blonde wife Ines Estevez is going to take off her glasses and we’re all going to go to the sea side but it’s agreeable. It has the edge on Zach Braf's I  Wish I Was Here, which kicks off nicely with a character based jokey account of wannabe actor Braff facing a crisis so severe that he has to take his kids out of Jewish education, while father Mandy Patinkin sucumbs and brother Josh Gad     prepares for Comicon.  The film sags at the end, with Kate Hudson struggling with the more sentimental material. More of the same but not as good was Sophie Fillières' Arrête ou je continue/ If You Don't, I Will with Emanuelle Devos and Mathieu Almaric as a prosperous middle aged couple, whose marriage is coming apart. Films like this will devalue the currency of the admirable leads to Audrey Tatou level.

Kool Shen & Huppert Abus de faiblesse.

Catherine Breillart is someone else whose market value takes a pounding after the quasi autobiographical Abus de faiblesse/Abuse of Weakness, where Isabelle Huppert is a stroke victim movie producer taken for everything she owns by a none too plausible con man, echoing the Breillart/Christophe Rocancourt affair. It lacks the transgressive impact we value in the director's work. The Dardenne brothers are establishment critics’ fetish film makers - no frills coverage of Blue Collar issues. In Deux jours, une nuit/Two Days One Night having Marion Cotillard along among their regulars does no harm at all, as she tries to convince fellow workers keeping her job is more important than their bonuses. The film carried off one of those dodgy festival awards.

Even closer to the film festival norm we get Louise Archambault's Gabrielle, with mentally challenged Gabrielle Marion-Rivard demanding an adult life she is not able to sustain. The improvised scene where Canadian celebrity singer Robert Charlebois rehearses with the thrilled choir is particularly endearing. Enthusiastic co-star Alexandre Lamy showed up to field questions.  Ritesh Gartra's Indian The Lunchbox is a local colour romance that has made a surprise cross-over into international art house hit. Endearing characters are undermined by implausibilities. Add Two Faces of January a Patricia Highsmith adaptation with Virgo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac a trois in an uninvolving Greek  sixties intrigue and Frank which is pretty much what you would expect when the British Film Institute gets into movie making - moments of interest with Maggie Gyllenhall doing "On Top of Old Smokey" and Michael Fassbender in a dome head.

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Michel Gondry’s high contrast doodling played over Noam Chomsky’s pondering on Big Issues is something new. Not My Diner with Andre revisited. With Willow Creek  the endearing Bobcat Goldthwaite does Blair Witch but there’s some Island of the Dead in there too. The shift from tourist trap gags into scary movie is remarkable. David Gordon Green's Joe takes the Pineapple Express/Eastbound and Down lot into grim. Nic Cage is the strong man among the Austin bottom feeder tree killers. The ultra violence may be too much for the multiplexes.

Time was when the Sydney Film Festival was the highlight of the local year. Now it's become a chore. Though the aim is pulling in crowds that see the banners flapping on lamp posts, determined or even casual film goers can still find things to enjoy but the days of risk taking, when to ignore it could be to miss a once only chance at something substantial, seem to have passed, along with a program book that gave you detailed credits and retrospectives that introduced major unknown talents. Are these films really more substantial than the work of Leonardo Petraccioni, Alex de Iglesia or Feng Xiaogang to pick a few names that assert from a bit of travel or checking ethnic DVD sources?

We are left with the same question. Where is there for the serious movie enthusiasts to go now?

SPANISH FILM WEEK 2014.

This year's Spanish Film Week looked like a way to burn seventeen bucks a ticket in it's early stages.  It's always possible that the pay wall kept me out of the better work. I had to miss new films with Ricardo Darin and Elena Anaya. You can't help wondering about this at an event where I sometimes found myself sitting in single figure audiences.Earlier events sweetened the mix with low comedies and animations of the kind this schedule could have made use of. We don't know whether these missed out or have vanished.

 

Invitee and part time X Man Alex Gonzales showed up in Daniel Calparsoro's Combustion, a dumb piece of road race thick ear action. Leon Siminiani's Mapa was a video diary that goes on too long without delivering, Paolo Fernandez-Vilata's Pearl of Jorge is a dialogue bound drama about writer Roberto Alvarez  sequestering himself in the isolated beach front home. Three 60 is an unthrilling thriller about organ theft, with bizare walk-ons by Geraldine Chaplin and Segundo Segura. Fedderico Luppi is as always commanding but Jorge Algora's Inevitable fails to use his blind man character to effect in an account of Dario Grandinetti's sex life. Ariel Windgrad's To Fool a Thief/ Vino Para Robar is a glossy but not clever enough caper piece.

Things picked up with Javier Ruiz Caldera's lightweight Three Many Weddings/ Tres bodas de mas featuring Inma Cuesta (Biancanieves) trying to convince us she was unglamorous because she wears glasses and breeds lobsters.  Santiago Zannou's Scorpion in Love/ Alacran enamorada,  proved a very visceral piece about Spanish Nazis with Xavier Bardem and Alex Gonzalez back again to more effect. He wants us to know he is really ripped - playing half a reel with him and Judith Diakate from Night of the Sunflowers naked & covered with drops of shower water. This one gets attention with lots of bodily fluids and a strong narrative contrasting the disciplined world of competition boxing and the destructive black shirts. Fernando Trueba's brother David did the appealing light weight Living is Easy with Eyes Closed/ Vivir es facil con los ojos cerrados featuring Almodovar regular Javier Camara, who uses Beatles lyrics to teach English, setting out to see John Lennon filming How I Won the War in Almaria and collecting a couple of teenage hitch hikers, Natalia de Molina and Francesc Colomer from the great Pa Negra, which puts two ticks against the career of a young actor whose just starting.

 

Star turn and the one thrashed in the publicity was the new Alex de Iglesea Withching and Bitching/ Las brujas de Zugarramurdi,  kicking off with body painted Jesus Christ knocking over a gold exchange with the aid of Minnie Mouse, Squarepants Sponge  Bob and the Invisible man and that's just the start of a piece which runs to cannibalism, car crashes, earth religion, a witches' gathering with nuns prominent, Carmen Maura making cell phone calls while standing on the roof and Caroline Bang in her black scanties  It’s take on the female condition is a show stopper. De Iglesia is on a roll following Ballad for a Sad Trumpet and As Luck Would Have It. He rates as one of the most important film makers in the world and it's disturbing to notice his reputation has yet to catch up with his achievements, while the critics still dote on Pedro Almodovar.

Abroad

Abroad

This rambling account covers my attempt to up-date myself with the European movie scene - once my home ground. It took place in an environment that still has an ability to surprise me, as when I came round one corner off the rue des écoles and there was a teenager necking with an Asian girl a couple of yards away from a man on the footpath polishing a new coffin - only in Paris.

Street music is worth an article on it’s own - a thirteen piece string orchestra determinedly doing Vivaldi in the Chatelet Métro or the Seine bridge, which they closed in the evening so a jazz band could set up there, not too far from the racked seating in the Notre Dame forecourt, where a man had the crowd there joining in the choruses of “Stand By Me” - inEnglish. For virtuoso I nominate the Mexican group outside the restaurant in Milan, where the leader ended the round playing two trumpets, complete with fingering simultaneously - and very well.

First thing I noticed on getting back to London was that Time Out has vanished or, as it turned out, been reduced to a super market giveaway. In Paris, L’Officiel des Spectacles and Pariscope are both still going gangbusters. The English magazine saw itself as a rallying point for the politically correct and the Internet blew it away, as soon as it’s one time readers found it easier to get the prices and starting times they’d bought the magazine for from the net. In Paris, their publications see their function as informing the people, who want to pick through the city’s smorgasbord of enjoyments and their public is still in place.

Those who confuse the two are delusional - not wanting to point the finger locally.

Photo: Jaqui Wise.

The range of movies available in walking distance from my left bank Paris hotel was
staggering. It takes a lot to beat having an impeccable digital transfer of The Trouble With Harry in theatrical exhibition five minutes away, at ten at night.

The aging of movie enthusiasts was obvious looking at the turn out for a Lino Ventura season at Le Desperado there. That one did provide us gray beards with Molinaro’s nouvelle vague style Un Témoin dans la ville from a Boileau & Narcejac story and William Dieterle’s Die Herrin der Welt, a companion piece to Fritz Lang’s Tiger von Eschnaper. The Bercy Cinematheque played the 1938 Conrad Veidt-Jean Dreville Joueur des echecs in it’s fourth auditorium, the Salle Lotte Eisner, actually a viewing theatrette up four flights of stairs, and after that climb, there was an alarming amount of heavy breathing among the (almost all) senior citizen audience.

The pickings were thinner this trip. Bercy was in the middle of a Michel Piccoli retrospective, a giant talent but one whose work is largely familiar. I’d hoped to see the Great Man himself but he didn’t show for the sessions I attended. I did watch his l949 debut Le point du jour with some interest - the only mining film without a cave in? However Piccoli’s previously unknown work as director proved heavy sledding. TheirCiné Club was pretty scary too - terrible film, weak intro, feeble discussion - and this is movie enthusiast central! 

 At one stage, I had operations going on three floors of the Bercy building, selecting Sergio Corbucci photos in their Iconotèque, selling books to their Librairie, and watching the L’Herbier Mystere de la Chambre Jaune, first of an early sound Joseph Rouletabilletrilogy, in their Vidéotheque, while waiting for the library staff to get back from lunch.  They cut off my viewing on Autant Lara’s L'affaire du courrier de Lyon because they were closing the video area early to lay out the champagne flutes for the Cohens' opening their retrospective.  

I was happier at the Les Halles Forum des images. Their Vidéo space is more luxurious. You can book a conference room to watch items from their libary in a suitably dimmed luxury area - and it’s in the centre of Paris. The outfit’s one screening of Edgar Neville’s La torre de los siete jorobados filled up before I got there but the box office lady let me sit on the floor, she said because she liked me, though more likely having a lost looking Australian tourist show up to see an obscure nineteen forties Spanish fantasy movie appealed to her notion of strange.

Having competing film museums in the one city - that’s entertainment. Boy Do We Need It Now! Between these they have seven auditoria. How come Sydney has zero?

Gerard Jugnot opened in the new Francis Veber play to some enthusiasm. I got stuck with

a terrible seat and found the piece was full of techno jargon about financial advice, that out distanced my broken French, so that didn’t work out too well but it was interesting to see Jugnot, an ultimate movie actor, absolutely in his element on stage. Later in Verona, the town was packed out by tourists come to see the arena presentation (!) of “Romeo and Juliet.”  Tony Servillo was doing Eduardo de Filipo there but I felt I’d paid my dues to foreign speak live theater by then.

You have to work hard now to find the movie memorabilia, which used to be an industry but I was agreeably surprised to pick up a nice repro Testament of Dr. Mabuse poster (for the French version with Jim Gerald!) in Spitalfields Market. The decline in movie book shops is near complete, with Contacts in Paris closing while I was there, following Ciné Memoire. Even so, there are more copies of my Litvak and Curtiz books on sale in Paris than there are in all Australia.

Of course European TV puts our local operators to shame. In Lille, I found one French speaking channel half way through a William Wellman season going back to the thirties. While I was in Italy, Giuliano Gemma died. Next day, TV Iris managed an Angel Face (the Morricone theme name of his Ringo character) evening, following The Return of Ringo with Damiano Damiani’s impressive 1980 Un uomo in ginocchio/ Man on His Knees. What their public made of the Ringo copy, when it turned out to be dubbed into French, is speculative.

Everywhere I went in Italy I saw closed movie houses, which was a bit of a downer but, for a foreigner it was a was a disappointment that the world's most beautiful cinema, the Odeon Space in Milan was only showing dubbed US movies. I enjoy visits to that one.

However their DVD business is fabulous - even though the few subtitled discs are likely to be for deaf Italians. Every little neighborhood video store is packed with unseen-in-Oz work by Leonardo Pietraccioni, Puppi Avarti, Daniele Luchetti and the rest, following their commercial releases there. Better, one proprietor in Venice was able to casually pull off the shelf  the seventy year old De Sica Maddalena zero in condotta and Castellani’s Un Colpo di Pistola. Ricordi Milan, in the historic Galleria, has an entire bay filled with silent movies - in with a few that they think are silent. That’s several times over the BFI Filmstore and the Cinémamathèque Française Librairie combined.

And there was always the thought that no matter how good it all was, it was going to get better when I made it to Pordenone for fifteen hour days of unfamiliar silent movies under optimum conditions - usually. Years back I said to David Robinson that if I got to stage his event (which drew more than a thousand people this year) in Australia, I’d be doing well to get twenty souls. Subsequent developments seem to indicate that was a good guess.

So what did I learn? Well the enthusiast sector has changed - and not for the better. There is still interest - now in the enormous pool of specialist movie material that video has generated - but how it’s communicated, if at all,  is no longer obvious. Whole areas, like Eurotrash movies, porn, experimental or activist films have all but vanished from theatrical exhibition, along with the sixteen millimeter circuit. Kevin Brownlow doing his five hour version of Napoléon is still a buzz event but it only happens on his rounds once in a decade. The crowds that used to chatter with excitement in the foyer after one-off screenings, clutching their favorite movie magazines, seem to have evaporated. God, a lot of them are dead!

... I miss all that. 

 

Barrie Pattison