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
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| Cannes - Golestani & Rasoulof |
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.
