WELL THERE IS CHINA AND INDIA.

Not so long ago, we had unprecedented access to the films of China and India - and not a few more - in dedicated cinemas and video stores. Where did all that go? Well not really all that far. The multiplexes now run their product in late sessions, sometimes to empty houses and occasionally in sold out auditoria.

Wuershan’s grim new Block Buster Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is getting a down town first run. This one offers big budget myth as a special effects piece and is being touted as the second biggest earner in the history of the Chinese film. Actually it logs in about number twenty eight but its owners are talking it up big with an eye to the overseas market -  European musical scoring and script participation by James Schamus, long time collaborator with Ang Lee, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The film opens with the usual captions on graphics explaining the descent of the Shang Dynasty from the Gods, to rule a China divided into four territories, the governor of each having to send a non-heir son to the Shang court to participate in the hostage Legion of the Disinherited. It is this that the Shang ruler sends against a rebel province (where have I heard that description before?) under the command of his own son Fei Xiang who is scornful when the commanders are repulsed by a fire barrier, which their horses will not cross and sends them back with the animals blindfolded.

The now defeated governor is pursued by two of the Legion Commander sons, who overtake him and his alluring daughter Narana, that they feel it would be wasteful to slaughter with her father. They bring her back to Fei Xiang for his victory celebration. Bad move guys! Her pupils narrow to those of a cat. Yes she’s a Fairy Fox in human form, who sets about bewitching the macho leader. His solution to the disturbances is to have a massive funeral pyre which - promises, promises - he will ascend to assuage the wrath of the Gods.

It’s not long before people are assassinating their children or parents as part of the royal struggle and the concerned gods dispatch ancient sage, comedian Huang Bo in loads of make up, with the enchanted message stick, to impose control. The convoluted plot is spaced by mass action footage and, rather better, a bit of erotic by-play like the scene of the power couple bathing together naked in the milky pool with  Narana’s floor length hair trailing in a circle round them.

Fei Ziang & Narana

It's about time we had some monsters and the effects guys and a Taoist sorcerer oblige with suitably spectacular examples.

Seems like things get sorted but a couple of epilogues tell us that the fox demon will have it all going again for part two.

We recognise a mash-up of Shakespeare, Eisenstein, John Woo and Kurosawa (the fake head in the bag is instantly Ran). Westerners would be battling to follow events or to find a focal point for their sympathies in three hours of all this violence within power families. 

Origins in the Chinese classic “Investiture of the Gods” from sixteen hundred AD would be known to its home audience, if not from the original, then from adaptations like the Xu An’s 2016 Feng Shen Bang / League of Gods  3D, which similarly buried Bingbing Fan and Jet Li in CG effects work.

It all left me yearning for the great days of Chu Yuan and the Shaw Brothers whose fantastic costume melodramas packaged this kind of material with welcome self deprecating comedy -  at considerably shorter length.

Bring back Lo Lieh and Lia Chia-hui!

The great days of (mainly) Hong Kong Chinese movies were succeeded by the great leap forward in Twenty first Century Hindi Cinema, which followed the arrival of MTV in India. Front runners were the Yash Rash productions with their imposing stars Shah Rukh Kahn and Amitah Bachan, who now make joke promotion videos about giving roles offered them to one another.

Despite the diffusion of interest through Bengali, Tamil and Sanskrit regional cinemas (not however their English language productions), Yash Rash is still a thing and director Atlee’s new Jawan is a big hit for them. It proffers the old Yash Raj over-production even before SRK shows up again.

Our superhero first surfaces looking spectral as he arrives to take down the hoard of red star soldiers conducting a village massacre. It’s not long before that looks like him again running the hijack, terrorising the commuter train with ransom demands by ‘phone to the minister and providing his own casualties, like the bank bandits in Un Flic, before blending in with the crowd like the team in the 1981 John Huston Victory - all backed by his personal Charley’s Angels. While we are processing that, our hero, rendered youthful, shows as the governor of the model women’s prison sheltering lines of green uniform inmates (OK digitally populated aerial shot intro) which provides a haven for arrestees who never re-offend. Confused - that’s the idea.

Throw in intrusive production numbers, like the one where our high stepping hero does his routine in the red shirt, the “Fly Away Little Birds” song all becoming progressively more imposing till we get to the finale, where a couple of him dance together while the motion capture camera weaves around them.

As a follow up to the red star soldiers, we get Bhopal style industrialists, backed with goon squad heavies and money from the Mafia (who are making a comeback as movie villains - Equalizer 3) Our heroes out smart them by holding the country's voting machines ransom, when it looks like the election will be bought, complete with the spectacular highway stunt action piece where the veteran biker retainers fan out to make a moving wall and truck loads of bribe money blow in the wind. It takes a super cop to battle our super heroes, so Sanjav Dutt (Munna Bhai himself) makes a late appearance - ripple of audience recognition.

Jawan - SRK in the slammer.

Despite virtuoso touches, this one is too nasty, too loud and too simple minded to recommend to the outside audience that once lapped up their industry’s Lagan, Mohabateen and Robot - when they had the chance.

The current sample is (far) too small to make any real generalisation about the state of non endorsed foreign language film but it isn't all that encouraging.

Barrie Pattison  2024

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Above -  Beatrice Béjo/The Movie Teller

In the local 2024 Spanish Film Festival, La contadora de películas/ The Movie Teller, directed by Lone (An Education) Scherfig, looked the most promising entry. It had name stars and an interesting premise but I can’t say I was taken with this odd and not altogether satisfying Chilean account of growing up in a Saltpetre mining town - where school is mainly about the industrial uses of rock salt. Sunday movies make a welcome break in the grim life of the miner’s family headed by Beatrice Béjo (The Artist) and Antonio de la Torre (Marshland).

Dad de la Torre steps up when the explosive charge doesn’t go off and (like the Gilles Carle Red) is caught in the unplanned blast, becoming an invalid. The owners move on their Company-Owned house and it’s only manager Daniel Brühl who holds them off, because he has eyes for Béjo. All this in the bleak environment where daughter Alondra Valenzuela glimpses the bar stripper’s act through an open door. It has been too much for Béjo who takes the motor coach to the city.

Only able to afford one movie admission, when the other children can’t deliver, Valenzuela takes over the task of relating the film stories first to the family and then adding neighbors, who gather on chairs in the street, their contributions boosting the family income stream. Doing the dubbed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Some Like It Hot, Tarnished Heroes, “Yo soy Spartaco,” Les Patrapluis de Cherbourg. becomes intertwined with their life - Paths of Glory’s poilus cut to the miners in their lookalike helmets and the rape scene in Johnny Belinda standing in for the storekeeper demanding sex with the girl. Her brother’s revenge doesn’t much concern the locals who had debts at his shop cf. Cabin in the Cotton.

Grown to be Sara Becker, the movie teller daughter takes over servicing Brühl. Her would-be poet beau quits the dying salt-mining community. The girl goes to the town, sea wall prominent, and locates the vaudeville theatre where her mother is performing her fire dance act.

By now there is TV to show the military government taking power. Years later, when Becker brings her own child back to visit her old home, become desolate, they sit in the ruined cinema before taking the same bus. This is a handsome film with vivid characters but no involving narrative line. Notice that in films like this or The Last Picture Show, Cinema Paradiso and Babylon, their early days as movie freaks always lead to glum outcomes in the lives of the characters. Not encouraging. 

Isabel Coixet worked on the script of that one and you can’t help looking for a connection to the event’s retrospective of her work as director, which I only knew from her stunningly boring 2008 Philip Roth adaptation Elegy, with Ben Kingsley as a randy academic. They included that one and her Ayer no termina nunca / Yesterday Never Ends, what used to be called “a two hander” with the only significant parts being Javier Cámara and Candela Peña as a pair of twelve year separated lovers facing off in what turns out to be a decaying former mortuary. Developers are talking about turning it into a casino.

The talented lead duo are outmatched by ponderous dialogue exchanges, spaced by black and white “thinks” interludes where they monologue in unidentified desolate areas. Two hours - and I thought Elegy was tedious! When Stanley Kramer put Lilli Palmer and Rex Harrrson in one of these he had the sense to space their scenes with UPA animated sequences. I can’t help feeling Isabel Coixet’s output would benefit from adding a few nice toons.

Rather better is actress Itsaso Arana’s 2023 Las chicas están bien / The Girls Are Alright, an account of an all-women group preparing a play in sunny rural isolation.

The women arrive at the locked gate of the country home they’ve booked where pre-teen Julia Leon has the key and takes them up to the house for their welcome. There follows all the settling-in routine, moving the four poster to the barn to rehearse, getting used to the costumes they will wear, finding the village they want to cycle to and stock the kitchen. Which pair gets to share the double bed? There is a sequence where they each in turn get to stage an entrance – one of the places where rising juvenile Irene Escolar registers – along with her trooping round the river bank in skirt hoops.

The Girls Are Alright - Barbar Lennie, Irene Escobar, Itziar Monero.

The body of the film is the women learning to know one another, exchanging experiences. A teen age looking girl comments that she keeps on getting movie parts in flashbacks where she plays the star’s youth. One is pregnant. One is lesbian. One prompts that Marx said “Shame is Revolutionary” They bond and develop the performance. Add cell ‘phone conversation with the world they have left. Like using an electric toothbrush, such touches of modernity disrupt the timelessness established.

It’s not till the film is half gone that we hear a male voice, when impressing her group one girl manages to pick up Gonzalo Herrero the bar help at the village dance. He’s the only one to go topless despite all the David Bailey touchy-feely stuff with the girls in their petticoats. Herrero stays with the group and shows them to the river for a dip and the discovery of a toad which promotes jokes about kissing it.

Laying on a pile of mattresses Leon tells the story of the princess and the pea, getting the group’s applause and, when they pack up, Herrero follows as they go like Anthony Perkins in This Angry Age. The toad has the last word.

Scenes come punctuated with tapestry pictures. We get Bach and Keith Jarrett on the track. There is no real narrative development, just the cast being winning. It’s all very female. The girl, who was only other person in the theater at my session, was delighted with the film. I felt excluded, like the women I used to know who complained about watching Randolph Scott movies.

Casa en flames/ House in Flames proved to be a surprising Spanish-Catalan-Italian mix of comedy and drama among a misfit family. Writer-director Dani de la Orden hasn’t come my way previously, underlining the point about our poor access to Hispanic material. He emerges from this one as a kind of Spanish John Cassavetes - only better. There’s a bit of Adam Sandler in there too.

An unsettling start has grandmother, Catalan celebrity actress Emma Vilarasau, finding the several days dead body of her aged mother with the TV still playing too loud, while Vilarasau’s lightweight son Enric Auquer (also in The Teacher who promised the Sea) is downstairs in the car, too busy flirting with fiancée Macarena García to come up and visit his granny. After a brief panic attack Vilarasau is not going to let this turn of events disrupt the long planned family reunion gathering in their about-to-be-sold Cadaqués house on the Costa Brava.

There we meet family members and their partners, daughter Maria Rodríguez Soto (who makes the most impression) has brought her easygoing husband José Pérez Ocaña and their two children, which doesn’t get in the way of a bit of hanky panky with the beach cafe guy - close up of Vilarasau spotting his fingers resting on Soto’s bare shoulder. Divorced father Alberto San Juan, given to attacks of sciatica, is with his lover and former Gestalt therapist Clara Segura. This is convenient because she is there to give thumbnail summaries of these studies in disfunction.

Packing away family memorabilia, like the buried tin of obsolete standard video cartridges, triggers the weekend’s revelations. Infidelities, complete with a used condom, shady business dealings and rejection phobia, all sketch these people as self-centered inadequates but we come to like them.

When we’ve had enough talk, De la Orden spaces events with some dangerous looking action set pieces – a break up where the participants are harnessed together in a first parachute jump, a distraught mother being carried against the shoreline rocks by high tide, convinced her children are in the water, and an impressive house fire. The forward motion of all this is Vilarasau’s scheming, which she claims is in the interest of her family but, in a corrective to all those British sitcoms where star actresses manipulate their near ones and it’s meant to be charming, we come to doubt her motivation.

De la Orden’s characters are more vivid than we are used to seeing and his staging is impressive. Everyone involved is so good I feel I should know more about them. They didn’t get that way without a substantial run-up.

Simón Casal expanded his Justicia artificial / Artificial Justice from an hour TV special, where the idea might have played better. We learn that a Multi-National company is selling the Spanish Government their idea of computerising the courts, the way has been done with medicine – or self diving cars. The judge in charge of the commission of enquiry is murdered and lawyer Verónica Echegui (Tony Servillo’s personal trainer in the 2020 Italian Lasciati andare / Let Yourself Go) now has the Algorithmic Justice files on her desk with the hint of political and corporate manipulation. Her persistence is not being well received.

The filmmakers know that their best idea is the nighttime ocean radar scan which reveals a floating human body, so they put that on the front of the film and bring it back for the climax. In between the office manager who wants to be Verónica’s chum won’t depart from procedure to get her crucial files and her gynacgologist is giving her bad news. “Your body has expelled the embryo.” There are a lot of earnest meetings in corridors or parked cars, motorway tunnel driving and tracking devices. Information is exchanged on iPhones, because Self-Driving cars don’t get into accidents. The hacker released despite the computer’s recommendation, is accused of being a pedophile. It’s going to be a face-off on the TV talk show. What we end up with is an overlong, cut-price, doctrinaire imitation The Parallax View. La Syndicaliste blows this one away.

Echegui is the film’s most familiar face, though Alberto Ammann turned up last week in SBS's ’ ham-fisted El año de la furia / Year of Fury. 

Heavy sledding.

The payoff in a largely unremarkable event proved to be El maestro que prometió el mar / The Teacher Who Promised the Sea a from one-time script clerk Patricia Font, which pulls off the remarkable feat of planting predictable plot developments and then making them compelling when they arrive. From the first few images, it communicates that this is going to be better than the other films included and indeed most of what we see as new releases – something closer to Anatomy of a Fall or La part d'une autre. The word doesn’t seem to have spread on this one yet but it impressed someone enough to put it into an extended run here.

From the first images, we sense that something substantial is involved. Laia Costa (with Ricardo Darin in Nieve negra) who is already under stress, has to deal with the fading awareness of her grandfather Felipe García Vélez in his so nice beachfront retirement centre. Following hints in the old man’s papers, she sets out for his childhood village, where she finds crews excavating a trench mass grave – cataloging and collecting skeletal remains.

Speaking to now-aged survivors takes us into the story of teacher Enric Auquer - who I’ve seen in La vida padre & the event’s Casa en flames without him registering. Here he impresses up as a teacher in 1930s Republican Spain, appointed to the abandoned community school. This would be picturesque if the shadow of history wasn’t already hanging over it.

Living conditions are Spartan and only a few children turn out, Alcalde Antonio Mora’s daughter Alba Hermoso prominent. A dairyman father confronts Auquer saying he’s the one who knows what’s best for his absentee son. Used to being beaten for any infraction, a boy cringes as Auquer approaches his desk. They start to relax but it’s back to rigid posture when village priest Milo Taboada enters the classroom to demand why the crucifix has been taken down. Auquer confronts him saying that now that Spain has elected a Republican government, it is officially a secular country and religion doesn’t belong in the classroom. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t go down too well.

Off hand, I can’t recall another film where they spell out atheist sympathies quite so explicitly - Larry David's Regulious maybe or the Elmore Leonard The Big Bounce, with Owen Wilson explaining “God is an imaginary friend for grown-ups”.

This one is existing in two time zones but a shadowy third is added by Costa investigating records, and mementos and memories of the grandfather’s aged surviving classmates. In particular, the one-time Alcalde’s daughter, now Elisa Crehuet, is hostile

It seems to have been concocted to get all knees jerking, the old “Lost Horizon” justification - “I believe it because I want to believe it.” I sense formula - warm hearted Spanish teacher opens the world to his young charges despite Falangist heavies.

However, The Teacher Who Promised the Sea develops unexpected conviction and involvement. Auquer discovers that the ocean has a fascination for his class who have never seen it. He organises a school vacation trip there.

The Priest and the Alcalde are determined to bring Auquer down and organise an unannounced visit by Schools Inspector Xavi Francés, convinced that his use of the "Frienet Method" where the chidlren move freely about the classroom and produce booklets on the teacher’s portable press, will be exposed as leftist stupidity. Auquer is explaining the Golden Mean, when the group arrive and demand to test his charges, including the son of an imprisoned communist, who we know was illiterate when he joined the class. At this point what we see becomes exceptionally compelling. It is the departure for a succession of remarkable scenes.

Without spelling things out, The Spanish Civil War, already a charged subject, becomes a reference for even more complex and substantial ideas. This one deserves all the support it can get. I rather like that it washes up here before dissection in more influential circles.

Barrie Pattison 2024.

Kiepura, Helm & Gallone.

Helm & scenery - The Singing City.

Another deep dive into YouTube reveals Die singende stadt/The Singing City a dimly plotted 1930 romance with music. When Italian veteran Carmine Gallone took on this German-speaking production and its parallel English language version Farewell to Love, he was fresh from directing what has been claimed as the first German talking film, the Conrad Veidt, Australia-set Das Land ohne Frauen, with its twenty-five minutes of dialogue.

Die singende stadt is an all-talking vehicle for the talents of the immensely popular Polish tenor Jan Kiepura but its interest value is in co-star, the glowing Brigitte Helm making her second sound film. At this stage her English was good enough to get her through the British version of L’Atalantide and Herbert Wilcox’ Blue Danube but they didn’t trust her enough and had Betty Stockfeld debut in the Helm part for The Singing City. Stockfeld was assured and winning but - come on guys – this is Brigitte Helm. They talk about the camera loving Gary Cooper but Gallone knew that he only has to let his female lead wander through the coastal foliage to quicken pulses.

If you're actually going to watch it, hold off reading this till you've finished. 

At ninety-four minutes Die singende stadt was then quite a long film. It kicks off with extraneous material of Italian urchin Franz Maldacea, who works the tourists with his limited language skills, passing himself off as a fellow national. This is backed with the unrelenting Neapolitan scenics – imposing white seafront buildings, fishermen working on nets, a goat herd playing his flute, small boats in silhouette against the reflection of the setting sun. There’s even a demo of the Capri Blue Grotto acoustics.

These interruptions were then, and maybe still are, a major incentive to watch the film but we do eventually get around to listless young widow tourist Brigitte. (“If only I knew what I wanted”) Her companion proposes sightseeing and Kiepura, who is in an informal family grouping with Maldacea and his sister Trude Berliner, works as a tour guide and is hired. This gives him chances to go into his act in a doomed attempt to be more interesting than the lovingly composed close-ups of Brigitte listening, the lighting creating a blonde halo.

Well, one thing leads to another and Brigitte whips Jan off to the bright lights of Vienna where she promotes him as "The finest voice since Caruso." Jan and Brigitte are an idyllic couple, leaving the field with Berliner clear to visitor Georg Alexander, who starts educating the grateful kid brother.

Jan is told to rest up for his big opening, arranged for the next night, while Brigitte will resist the temptations of former suitors still pursuing her. However, tuxedo playboys, who lust after Brigitte in all her movies, prevail and she is lured in her best formal to The Jockey Club with its black barmen, art deco styling and pop orchestra, which provides distinctive musical backing. 

Keapura & Helm

Meanwhile, Jan has been invited by doorman Carl Goetz to inspect the theatre, where he will perform the following evening, and the accompanist, who is rehearsing, joins in his "La donna è mobile." However, the fact that he’s only got the gig because Brigitte picked up the hall hire comes up and enrages our hero. He sets out to face her only to find that she has left for the Club, where they confront. Argument – champagne frothing in the bowl cut to waves and Jan is back in Naples, meaning that Alexander has to pack his bags, leaving Maldacea in tears. Well, that bit was mildly unexpected. 

Not only is Singing City an early sound film but it is one of the first multi-language sound productions, no longer a matter of cutting in new title cards. Only Kiepura and the non-speaking accompanist, who they never thank, are in both versions. Unlike the exact reproduction seen in F.P.I. Does Not Answer or the Garbo Anna Christie, one can spot odd differences between the German and English editions. The West End of London replaces Vienna as the bright lights. Marriage is not discussed with Betty Stockfeld. The English characters don’t invoke Caruso. Brigitte accepts the admirer’s invitation to join him on the sofa during Jan’s number while, being a nice British girl, Betty refuses Ralph Truman’s advances. Heather Angel never utters a note though singer Trude Berliner gets a brief chorus. London doorman Miles Malleson, who also worked on the English script, gets more of the exposition. Several of the English cast are beginning their film careers. The scene of his sponsor-lover seeing Kiapura’s unexpected appearance over the lip of her champagne glass is noticeably smoother in Die singende stadt, suggesting the common practice of keeping the best takes for domestic versions. Duping appears to not have been as advanced for these as it was in Hollywood and additional original shooting may have been needed.

The film was a challenge. Production company Isadore Sclesinger's ASFI had links to Tobis and British Talking Pictures which closed down that year after one more production. Decades later Associate Producer Bernard Vorhaus told Kevin Gough Yates about their dramas. Hungarian-German cameraman Arpad Viragh, died of food poisoning to be replaced by by Curtis Courant (Le Jour se level, Monsieur Verdoux). Three competing sound systems were tested - de Forest, Tobis’s own and, finally, variable density Klangfilm using a Westinghouse Kerr Cell. A month's shooting in Italy was junked meaning a restart right down to sound tests. In the final edit, re-mix and polish, five thousand feet were scrapped with single frames doubled up or cut to improve synchronisation. It's a tribute to the team that little of this shows in the remarkably polished end result.

The excellence of shooting offering all the best European production values of the day can’t disguise the much recycled plot, (at least five versions of the script) whose outline would become familiar -Alfred Piccaver and Nora Gregor in Adventures on the Lido, Richard Tauber and Leonora Corbett in Heart’s Desire on to Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine in Serenade. Editor-directorGallone tries to quicken attention with the occasional montage. However, the Italian appears to be unaware of the over-ripeness of English dialogue like "Do any of us know what we're really like?" or Betty reproaching Jan "You big baby!" Gallone’s most intriguing choice is to have Brigitte in constant movement through the film, even when she may only be reacting to the other players - until the final scene listening to the phonograph, performed motionless.

Brigitte Helm - Abwege

The director's English language career persisted with two Elstree based comedies with the totally irrisible duo of Arthur Riscoe & Naunton Wayne. First up was the 1933 Going Gay, retitled Kiss Me Goodbye (I wonder why?). The leads' attempt to make a star out of Romy Scneider's equally winning mother Magda ends with them piling into a plane, which sets up their presence in Signor Gallone's Italy again for the second film, For Love of You - this time Venice rather than Singende stadt's Naples.

Carmine Gallone

It's Carnivale of course – location filming of Gondolas passing the Lion of St. Mark, gondolas with fire works, gondolas (yes) in silhouette against the setting sun, while they try to convince us that the film wasn’t shot in the Elstree tank got up with tilted striped mooring posts. Back projection has been added to the formula.

We soon settle into a bedroom farce plot with the English tourist duo booked into the suit next to Carnivale entertainer Franco Foresta (later a New York festival entrepreneur) and wife Diana Napier, on whom Riscoe moves, while Foresta is engaged with duties that surround him with girls in scanty costumes. Pearl Osgood, in her only film, homes in on him, meaning that the boys get to squire Napier but the headliner takes a break from doing numbers in front of the process screen and threatens to shoot Riscoe, who in the manner of these, ends up dead drunk sleeping it off under the couple’s bed, while Wayne tries to get him out of danger into their own space. About now Diana gets into her scanties and trousers start falling down.

Reasonably accomplished handling of a mix of location filming, white studio decors and unmemorable vocals Some curiosity value – miserably un-funny. I can’t spot Valery Hobson. Thorold Dickinson did the editing.

Now I find these bits of the film history jig saw fascinating but I will admit that I do start to feel isolated. Being a vintage movie enthusiast in Australia is an uncomfortable experience.

Barrie Pattison - 2024

Late Welles

Robert Random & Oja Koda

Looking at the current run of Movie Movies, where characters impersonate stars or go through the motions of making films on screen, it wouldn't pay to ignore the belated arrival of Orson Welles' last, chaotic project The Other Side of the Wind, finally available on Netflix in its posthumously completed version. Some people who saw an earlier version by an academic for festival showing say they prefer that.

What ends up on the screen is surprisingly coherent. I get the impression that Welles just filmed as the mood took him, never expecting to have to deliver a viewable product and then got Peter Bogdanovich to promise on screen to finish the job. As in F for Fake, material is shot in whatever screen shape was on hand but here digital production means that a copy which respects all these formats is possible. The film within the film (lots of the then Mrs. Welles naked - striking features, big butt) is in widescreen colour and the framing incidents of the night, which moves from the party where guests assemble to see fictional director Jake Hannaford’s The Other Side of the Wind, is covered in whatever form happens to be available - Oscar for the laboratory work?

The restorers have managed to construct what is probably more narrative than Welles intended, as his retinue gathers at Hannaford/John Huston’s ranch party for the screening of his latest movie, which will follow lots of drinking and quote-intended dialogue exchanges among those assembled - one time leads like Edmond O’Brien, Susan Strasberg, John Carroll, Benny Rubin or Cameron Mitchell (first seen as a sound man being fired on camera), old associates Mercedes McCambridge, Norman Foster, Paul Stewart or later generation filmmakers like Claude Chabrol, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom & Bogdanovich.

Huston, Welles & Bogdanovich

Hanaford is more a portrait of John Huston than Welles - casual about the hardships he creates for co-workers and his one-liners are less resonant (“Movies & friendship, those are mysteries”) than the ones we got from Welles in person. The film also has a truth coming at sunrise as in Huston’s Maltese Falcon and Freud. Huston the actor clearly relishes playing Huston the director.

Material that has no real place is included because someone must have liked it - the interview with Countess Lili Palmer, conducted by an off-screen Welles using one of his radio voices, the ice cube girl or the singalong with John Carroll. Dwarfs deliver liquor and dummies, to be used as targets at the party, and share transport with the actors. I can see Welles making jokes about critics attributing meaning to this.

His fascination with lenses and projectors is very evident with the battery of press cameras. The penile imagery is crude - the microphone introduced into the interview or the plastic-wrapped column in the film within the film material.

Film critics get more than a few sideswipes and Hanaford/Huston explains that it’s all right to steal from others but not from oneself - which doesn’t sit too well with Kodar’s slashing with the scissors in the way that the sword attack is done in Welles’ Othello. Can’t help wondering whether Edmond O’Brien prompted the line lifted from Pete  Kelly’s Blues (the producer who’s so crooked he has rubber lined pockets to steal soup) which commentators who aren't familiar with the Jack Webb movie now quote with relish.

Edmond O'Brien - Pete Kelly's Blues

In with all this, there is a hint of a plot about juvenile Bob Random walking out on Huston’s wide-screen color art movie where he partners with the bare-assed Ojar.

There is so much happening and so much of it resonates with off-screen activities that it is possible to be carried along with the flow. I enjoyed it but I still can’t help wondering whether this one should go onto the list of last films by celebrity directors that they should have pulled up short before undertaking - The Big Fisherman, A Countess from Hong Kong the final productions of Maurice Elvey and James Cruze.

Barrie Pattison 2024

The 2024 Sydney Film Festival.

Well, we've just had the seventy-first Sydney Film Festival, twenty venues, two hundred movies they say. Include an IMAX spectacular about Russians scaling a half built Maylasian skyscraper and a live-scored Hellaraiser, at $69 a seat.  No one person could have seen the lot and it would be hard to find someone who wanted to. Is this really the event that started  at Sydney University as a one weekend grab bag of films? It's outlasted sixteen millimeter, film societies, home video, the porno and ethnic circuits and appears to be holding its own against streaming. The criticisms that could have been leveled at its predecessors still apply. They put a roof over work that comes distorted to fit festivals - esoterica from Lav Diaz, Miguel Gomez or Radu Jude. A competition that dangles a bag of money in front of this lot is, to say the least, suspect. Down the years when popular cinema filmmakers with a genuine connection to their public showed up (think Bong Joon Ho, Wagner Moura or belatedly Jackie Chan) we were able to watch festival regulars react with amazement.   

Doing this event justice would have meant neglecting the regular film supply. I backed off.  The near random selection I did catch however showed familiar patterns.

Portuguese auteur director Miguel Gomes' Grand Tour is a classic example of a film that could only survive in the iron lung of a film festival, with maybe the odd escape bid into the Paris Left Bank. It's a third the length of Gomez' Arabian Nights but obviously from the same hands. We get the 1918 British Empire as bogus Von Sternberg studio period settings and present day location (everyone comments the motor scooter traffic backed by "the Blue Danube"), colour and black and white all alternating for no better reason than they happen to have had a crew about to shoot them during covid restriction. 

Gonçalo Waddington's Edward, a British white-suit official, who may be involved in secret government business, is on the Mandalay pier where they load bananas, to meet his fiancée of seven years but instead hops a steamer on the start of travels that take him through Myanmar, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Osaka, Tibet, Vietnam, Shanghai and Chengdu. Chirpy Crista Alfaiate, the dogged lady in question, takes off after him and we would follow their adventures if they weren't being interrupted by travelogue material - a Ferris Wheel with a handler acrobatically ducking the rotating cars, Raffles Hotel, street scene panoramas, opium smoking and puppet shows. These last are actually quite impressive - dolls imitating people and people miming marionettes. 

Along the way, there's a train wreck (they can afford to overturn one four wheel car) with a monologue by a woman we never see again, about the baseness of humanity, and diner at a Captain's table, where planter Cláudio da Silva is taken with Miss Alfaiate and offers her the no strings hospitality of his residence. There she partners with his companion Lang Khê Tran to continue her pursuit of Waddington, long since vanished from the screen. What happens to Reverendo João Pedro Vaz' donkey? This is punctuated by bursts of music - a Sinatra "My Way", the opera singer passenger who bursts out in an aria when the scene has played out and an on-screen needle drop of "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." 

Grand Tour - Crista Alfaiate,  Lang Khê Tran.

I quite enjoyed some of this the first time I saw it in sixties films like Antonio das Mortes or Pierrot le fou but I found myself checking my watch in this one, when it became obvious that the maker was totally indifferent to the attention span of his audience.

Radu Jude's Romanian Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii / Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World was also what the festival Audience would expect.

We follow blonde Personal Assistant protagonist Ilinca Manolache’s day, with her clambering out of bed naked (that’s all we have of that) and getting into her glitter scale dress to go off auditioning injured workers for her company’s industrial safety video, to be tailored to the tele-conference requirements of the Austrian Head office. At least they aren’t Americans or Chinese.

Director Jude (he of the lengthy titles - I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians )  revives more French nouvelle vague in the use of available light and shooting inside moving cars. He is relentless in his name-dropping – Goddard, Stanislaw Lec, Goethe, along with Uwe Boll who does a characteristic personal appearance as a bombastic visiting movie director using the film studio’s effects stage for a Giant Ant trash movie. There’s a murky TV running Casablanca with Romanian sub-titles.  

 The film’s unspoken subject is the dispiriting Romanian scene. Our heroine drives for ridiculous hours with a brief break for sex in the back seat. Early on there's a glimpse of Ceaucescu’s Bucharest palace distant and we think that at least they are not going to hammer the obvious. No such luck. We shift there to hear about clearing the suburb of Uranus to build the monster.

They  also evoke the sixties, opening with drawn-on-cards credits like Don’t Look Back. As with Putney Swope, the body of the piece comes in black & white with the material the on-screen filmmakers create shown in colour. This includes Manolache’s cell ‘phone created avatar Bobita, a bald and bearded trash-talking male with her voice deepened, along with a glimpse of green screen production and ending with a sustained, fixed-camera wide shot where crippled Ovidiu Pîrsan’s family get left out in the rain, while the unit demand repeats of his supposed to be spontaneous statement, as they assure him that they are looking after his interests.

 A film that legitimately uses the Festival Platform surfaced with the late entry of Mohammad Rasoulof's Seed of the Sacred Fig (I can't even find an original language title for this one). The director had been received as a hero at Cannes after his perilous seven-hour escape walk from a country where it had been decreed that he should be flogged and jailed for three years over the film. I suspect it sold out here more on news of Rasoulof's martyr status than from admiration of his exceptional Manuscripts Don't Burn, the last of his work to reach us and arguably the best of the Iranian films we've had the chance to see. Rasoulof's taped introduction preceded showings.

The opening gives the clues we need to this one's seriousness, with a description of the Ficus religiosa, its seeds spread by bird droppings settling on trees which they overrun and choke, The film centers on Judge Missagh Zareh who has just been appointed to the Revolutionary Court - the workings of which we could have seen more. The corridor with the life-size cutout figures in silhouette is already striking and sinister. Zareh is conflicted. His promotion means a more comfortable lifestyle for his family but he finds himself ordered by the prosecutor to sign death warrants without the  days required to consider their files

Cannes - Golestani & Rasoulof

 

He's been given a handgun to defend himself and his family. Wife Soheila Golestani (a real-life film director and protestor) warns their student daughters Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki that they must now be more careful but they still bring home university dorm mate Niousha Akhshi, when her accommodation is not ready.  The streets are full of demonstrators protesting the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, jailed for a hijab-wearing violation and the girls identify with the reforms they demand, though Zareh at diner thunders "God does not change." 

The colour has the limited palette of some of the Iranian film we've seen but performance and handling are assured. It all gains conviction from extensive use of alarmingly authentic-looking cell phone clips showing police brutality on mobs chanting "Down with Theocracy".

Things come to a head when Akshi is injured by the police - a genuinely disturbing scene of Golestani, with the streets not safe to call for help, having to treat the girl's buck shot riddled face. "They took her youth. They took her beauty." Tension is ratcheted up when opponents put the names and home addresses of officials, including Zareh's family, on social media. Suspicious characters are seen on the street outside the house.

Unfortunately they abandon that model and switch to James Jones' novel "The Pistol", source of the two Thin Red Line films. Zareh's character loses all sympathy and becomes an unshaded heavy father and unconvincing melodramatic developments pile onto one another. This didn't stop the jury giving the piece their competition's first prize. 

Up to this point, the film has built tension from the atmosphere of violence and Zareh's ambivalence. It bears a resemblance to Mauro Bolognini's 1972 Years of Lead drama Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente / Chronicle of a Homicide - Martic Balsam as a judge also faced with opposition from his own family and forced to question law enforcement. It would be interesting to know if Rasoulof was working from this prototype.

Documentaries about film directors made by film directors are a study in themselves – John Boorman on Griffith, a couple on John Ford by Terry Sanders and Peter Bogdanovich, George Stevens jr.’s exceptional account of his dad, Quentin Tarantino on Sergio Corbucci and now Martin Scorsese’s fronting Made in England dealing with The Archers Company, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

On the model of Scorsese’s earlier films on Hollywood and Italy, his Made in England (directed by David Hinton) is as much front man Scorsese's autobiographical account of being drawn into the movie experience but Scorsese actually went through the looking glass and involved himself with Michael Powell, who he had on staff developing projects, giving advice – and marrying Scorsese’s life long editor Thelma Schoonmaker. She worked uncredited on this production. Peter Bogdanovich tried hosting Orson Welles and Coppola got a movie out of Akira Kurosawa, so the concept is not new.

Interestingly Scorsese’s first encounter with Michael Powell was through the degraded TV copies, usually in black and white sixteen millimeter, which played on U.S. TV in his youth. The new film actually airs a few of those. British film had a large share of screen time in the early years there because Hollywood was holding out. Curiously, in Australia I did better because TV was delayed – it was said by industry objections – and original Technicolor theatrical prints continued to circulate. Scorsese talks about being surprised to see the Archers' target trade mark in colour and I remember a similar reaction to seeing it in monochrome. The restoration team have obviously tried to do justice in the duping for Made in England but the impression those original copies made remains vivid enough for me to recognise the shortcomings.

We see Scorsese sitting in a screening room and he gives a quick run-through of Powell’s early years. Can’t help feeling this is loaded, as in including the extended and unrepresentative footage from Rex Ingram’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but we get nicely reproduced Black and White clips from Powell’s The Phantom Light & Edge of the World - unremarked Soviet montage influence very evident (as in Powell’s more shonky The Fire Raisers from that period) The documentary hits its stride with Alexander Korda putting the duo together, providing Emerric Pressbuger as writer for The Spy in Black. Clips and descriptions of their straight man & side kick collaboration provide many of the piece’s high points. Success with The 49th Parallel ushered in their characteristic work. Winston Churchill disapproved sternly of their The Life of Colonel Blimp.

Even before Scorsese prompted the comparison I was struck by the resemblance of the Age of Innocence shot they air and Col. Blimp's stairway entrance. However I’d forgotten the way Blimp draws away from the highlight duel scene before its ending and Scorsese asserts that his halting the Raging Bull fight sequence mid-way was a derivation, to throw similar attention to the ritual preparation.

The film’s most compelling section, not surprisingly, is the coverage of the peak achievement trilogy of I Know Where I’m Going, Black Narcissus and The Small Black Room, which Powell confirmed was made after the home ground failure of Red Shoes and before it became the then most successful British film in the U.S. The first Royal Command showing followed.

Red Shoes largely did the duo in. It was a success they struggled to repeat – Tales of Hoffman, Oh Rozalinda! Powell decided Presburger sided with Korda in their disputes. The Elusive Pimpernel and Gone to Earth, a couple of Hollywood collaborations, bombed on them and they did the successful Battle of the River Plate to order. I told Powell I admired the shell cutting a glowing path through the bulkhead and he observed that it came from the only part of the project he found involving, the naval machinery. It turns up in Made in England  twice.

The partners never had an argument. A Presburger alone directed one of the many remakes of Erich Kästner’s “Das dolppelte Lottchen” for Korda, later writing Powell’s Children’s Film Foundation The Boy Who Turned Yellow and (under an alias) his Australian They’re a Weird Mob.

Made in England comes off the rails at this point, repeating that Powell’s appalling Peeping Tom (shown in the festival) was a major film which thick witted British critics didn’t appreciate. The brief clip included is a reminder of the film’s deep perversity. The story that his industry abandoned Michael Powell ignores his unmemorable The Queen’s Guards, which tanked after two years in the cutting room, along with his kiddie pic and an opera movie set up by designer Hein Heckroth.

Just as the end of the War had taken away the Archers' empowering incentive, Peeping Tom proved a cathartic experience for Powell. The stories of his aggressive behavior stopped and he arrived in Australia a charming, relaxed master of ceremonies. Everybody loved him and he accidentally kick started local production by demonstrating that it was possible to make money with a film that was shot here. 

Scorsese’s production endorses the familiar notion that English film begins with Michael Powell, with Alex Korda as a sort of warm-up act. It’s easy to emphasise Powell in the stodge that surrounded him. They offer a brief split screen – David Lean and Carol Reed Third Man prominent. British TV, critics and the BFI push the idea. Tough luck Maurice Elvey, who gets a couple of contradictory references in Powell’s autobiographies. Why do we hear about Alfred Junge (transcribed as “Younger” in Oz interviews) but not Heckroth, Moira Shearer but not Raymond Massey who we keep on seeing in clips and who set up Canadian Government co-operation, Alan Gray? Jack Cardiff? Chris Challis? 

If there is a truth in all this, it is that a cosmopolitan sophisticate, with issues and an allegiance to the riches of European cinema, was never going to be at home in disintegrating Empire Britain. His struggles to come to terms with that produced extraordinary, vivid work, which stood apart from the complacency that was expected. Powell resented that and it’s easy to empathise. Like him, we should be grateful that he got as far as he did.

Made in England is one of a number of attempts to canonise its subject. For both adherents and the unfamiliar, it is full of rewards. If it means that Michael Powell now occupies the space that John Ford had in the fifties – all you need to know about his industry – we’re stuck with that.

Barie Pattison 2024