second sight

Your weird longing (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

2012-01-25T14:11:00.001+13:00

There is no dourness quite like Cold War dourness: in Tomas Alfredson's new, grainy remake of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, early 70s London is more crepuscular – dim interiors, dust and cigarette smoke, shots so murky the camera lens could have been the bottom of a fish tank – than even Eastern Bloc Budapest, which seems exotic and glamorous (as does Istanbul in a flashback, pictured, which constitutes the liveliest, brightest, most sensuous part of the film). This evocation of a gloomy, claustrophobic, constrained mood and period is one of the triumphs of Alfredson and his team (DOP Hoyte Van Hoytema, production designer Maria Djurkovic), as the spy business here is less about globetrotting excitement and technology-assisted breakthroughs (every Mission:Impossible film, the new Homeland series) than bureaucratic, hyper-paranoid insularity, making a trip to retrieve a file from upstairs as terrifying as a stop at Checkpoint Charlie in any other Cold War drama. This control of mood impresses and so does the elegant compression of the book and/or 1970s TV mini-series into short, important exchanges and quick glances (example: the bee moment in the car, shot from the back, says much about Smiley’s poise, his character), yet this is essentially a work of atmosphere first and story second, with its atmosphere so pungent that you might even wonder if your weird longing for the lost world it conjures up is a version of what post-1989 Germans call Ostalgie.

There are so few masters left (Theo Angelopoulos, 1936-2012)

2012-01-25T12:26:00.000+13:00

David Thomson on Theo Angelopoulos in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2010 edition): "By now, it has become clear that his style is deeply personal and poetic -- and, of course, it has to be experienced, for the work is not just plastic but temporal. When Angelopoulos moves, he is sailing in time as well as space, and the shifts, the progress, the traveling make a metaphor for history and understanding." Angelopoulous was killed yesterday in a road accident while shooting The Other Sea, which partly deals with the Greek economic crisis. The last lines of Thomson's 2010 assessment: "It is the case that many people who take the medium seriously have scarcely heard of, let alone encountered, the work of a master. And there are so few masters left now."

Taste

2012-01-22T13:11:00.000+13:00

"The only proof of taste is that one knows how to occasionally appreciate things which do not meet the criteria of good taste -- those who follow good taste too strictly only display their total lack of taste." Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times.

Cronenberg stills from here.

Imprisoned memories prowl through the dark …

2012-01-07T11:29:00.000+13:00

The spectral Denis Thatcher (Jim Broadbent) surprises the still-living but senile Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) from behind the sofa: “Gotcha!” Did I imagine that moment? Is it purely coincidental that the most notorious one-word newspaper headline in recent history should now be thrown back at the monster it indirectly celebrated or is it actually a form of criticism? Hard to say: as the example shows, Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady is a film that forces you to project your own thoughts about Thatcher and Thatcherism onto that which appears on screen, or dig around for meaning, one reason why her enemies think it’s too soft and her supporters – are there any? – think it’s too harsh. On balance, it’s a Thatcher film minus Thatcherism and the only reason her remaining supporters have disapproved is because of the deteriorating Thatcher it gives us. But forget who that is and what she did, and you have an old-age-as-misery story we seldom get to see in the movies, almost play-like, set in the gloomy, afterlife-like rooms of the London apartment where she lives under virtual house arrest: the fading and unstable former leader unrecognised by the public, the cheerful ghost of her husband, the patronising help, the annoying daughter. Streep as Thatcher-in-old-age is better, and stranger, than any computer-generated effect, and her memories are slippery and unreliable: the film even allows you to think of Thatcherism itself as a dream or delusion that never happened, or enjoy the world-historical figure’s nightmare about what history may ultimately say about her (you think of other figures in twilight: Murdoch, Pinochet), or imagine a guilty conscience, which the film never openly suggests – other than in the “gotcha!” moment. It is also easy – and correct – to say that the script is not critical enough: the 1980s flash past, abbreviated and sometimes out of sequence (here, the miners’ strike comes before the Falklands War – or is that her unreliable memory?), and while there is acknowledgement of disagreement and protest, that protest seems indistinguishable from the sexism of the old-school Tories, and is therefore rendered meaningless. But there are thousands of ways to talk about who she was and what she did. Here is one that arrived in the post just yesterday …

"26 October. In bed with a cold I’m rung by a television company putting together an obituary of Mrs Thatcher. I’ve not much to offer though mention the trip I made c1990 along the M62 from Hull to Liverpool, a trail of devastation, decay and manufacturing slump that stretched from coast to coast, much of it the doing of the Iron Lady. It struck me then that no one had done so much systematic damage to the North since William the Conqueror …" from Alan Bennett’s Diary, London Review of Books, January 5 2012.

“Imprisoned memories prowl through the dark” – the first line of the narration on Derek Jarman’s The Last of England (1987).

Mobile phone pictures, September 2010-December 2011

2011-12-24T22:08:00.001+13:00

September 6, 2010: the Moorhouse Avenue clocktower has stopped at the time of the first earthquake.

September 6, 2010: Alice in Videoland, High St.

Newcastle, New South Wales. October, 12, 14 and 15, 2010.

The courtyard of the now ruined Peterborough building, Christchurch. December 5, 2010.

Spectral poster, Christchurch. January 26, 2011.

Campbell Kneale as Our Love Will Destroy the World, Chicks Hotel, Port Chalmers. March 25, 2011.

Log Lady. June 13, 2011.

Christchurch. July 2, 2011.

November 8, 2011. Signs in the Heathcote river.

Unintended Planet of the Apes reference in post-quake sandwich bar wreckage, New Regent St, Christchurch. November 25, 2011.

Band names. December 17, 2011.

It's like Second Annual Report never happened (Total Girl magazine badge). December 18, 2011.

Nearly a still from Robinson in Ruins. Harewood, Christchurch, December 22, 2011.

Updated advice, St Martins, Christchurch, December 24, 2011. (formerly this).

"The afternoon that stretched into evening": films of 2011 (and books, music)

2011-12-15T15:10:00.000+13:00

FILMS

1 The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick). More to come on this in the new year, but here’s one thing: rewatch Godard’s mid-80s Hail Mary and you see a similar evoking of “spiritual” mysteries through searching voice-over and wind-in-grass shots – nature and holiness – only it’s that much more emotive and even sensual from Malick despite Hail Mary’s nudes. Also, wasn’t it a little inspirational to see an experimental film get such a profile and start so much discussion?
2 The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr). The opening scene is "a remarkable five minutes in which we see the horse driven by a grim, bearded man like a ship through a storm; this is all caught in one long, smooth take by cinematographer Fred Kelemen as mournful music rises and falls on the soundtrack and horse and driver battle a head-on, howling wind. Both look as though they are gripped or driven by guilt, or shame." More here.
3 Melancholia (Lars von Trier). "A potentially destructive planet hidden behind the sun – such a great metaphor for depression." More here.

4 Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller). The long-awaited third part of Keiller’s Robinson series – after London and Robinson in Space – is sparser and more contemplative than the preceding two, and less bitter. But his fictional Robinson, reported on now by Vanessa Redgrave as the narrator, replacing the late Paul Scofield, is still obsessed with the genealogy of capitalism in Britain, tracking back to the enclosure of the Commons, and observing some contested, haunted landscapes – Greenham Common and Harrowdown Hill among them. As in 1994’s London, much of what passes for British heritage seems parasitic to Robinson, as fake or invented tradition that serves someone else’s purpose – here, he observes 19th century neo-Gothic architecture and says, “It seemed strange that so much effort should be devoted to its preservation”.
5 Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn). The action movie and its attendant clichés rendered as romantic yearning, lit by sodium lights in city streets. As a whole, it sits just this side of parody.
6 Inside Job (Charles Ferguson). In this thorough catalogue of crimes and moral failings, who comes out looking the worst? Hard to say, but the complicit academics are definitely up there.
7 Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek). "The wistfulness of an epilogue." More here.
8 When a City Falls (Gerard Smyth). "Smyth’s version of the afternoon that stretched into evening, with the fires that kept burning in the CTV building, the armies of rescue workers, the silent crowds waiting in Latimer Square, is startling, pieced together from his own urgent footage and other sources, and playing out unmediated by reporters or news readers." More here.
9 The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne). The Dardennes have reached such a level of consistency that they risk being taken for granted. This effortless neo-realism owes more – title aside – to Bresson (films like Mouchette are in the background) than De Sica, and also offers something much closer to hope than usual.
10 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog). Most nature documentaries peddle an optimistic vision – the natural world is knowable, all motivations can be uncovered and understood, progress is not illusory – but Werner “the jungle is obscene” Herzog, an arch-pessimist, has a different vision, which gives his nature documentaries (this, Grizzly Man) an unusual tension: there is discovery, sure, but there is also a vast gulf between us and them, now and then. Even in 3D, the cave-art footage didn’t move me as I thought it should and I liked the albino crocodile coda that everyone else seemed to hate – that probably makes me one of the pessimists.

11 Monsters (Gareth Edwards). Ultra-low budget and very obviously allegorical (the misunderstood monsters are kept behind a wall on the other side of the Mexican border), this widely overlooked sci-fi debut was also imaginative and eerie.
12 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan). The early scenes, hazy as a dream, as they drive through the empty landscapes at night, looking for where the body was buried.
13 Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky). “I confess that I meant to grow wings and lose my mind. I confess that I’ve forgotten what for. Why wings and a lost mind?” (Leonard Cohen, from “A Cross Didn’t Fall on Me”). Or, "Not quite horror and not quite camp; more an oppressive, phantasmagorical melodrama that blends both." More here.
14 The Orator (Tusi Tamasese). How often does this happen – a film showing you lives you’re sure you’ve never seen before? Tamasese’s mature debut was said to be the first feature shot entirely in Samoa and in the Samoan language – meaning it also got to be the first ever New Zealand entry for the foreign language Oscar.
15 Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Sophie Fiennes). "The muddy grey and brown fields, and equally dismal skies, in some Kiefer paintings could double as Tarr’s landscapes, just as both share a kind of Gnostic sensibility. 'I can’t reach the core,' Kiefer says in his interview, in words reminiscent of Tarr’s darkness-habituated characters. 'I can’t reach the law that holds the world together.'" More here. Since this doco wrapped, the subject – artist Anselm Kiefer – has expressed interest in buying a shut-down nuclear power plant. Sequel?

Honourable mentions: Meek’s Cutoff. Operation 8. Kung Fu Panda 2. The Kids Are All Right (almost entirely because of Mark Ruffalo). Sleeping Beauty.

DVD only: Carlos (Olivier Assayas) – the full, five and a half hour/three disc version. In its rise and fall, glamour turning into cynicism, youthful promise into bloat, this Ilich Ramirez Sanchez biopic runs like Euroterrorism’s Raging Bull.
Acting: Claire Danes in Temple Grandin, Fa’afiaula Sagote in The Orator, Christian Bale and Amy Adams in The Fighter, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go, Ryan Gosling in Drive, Gwyneth Paltrow as a good-looking corpse in Contagion.
Duds: Crazy, Stupid, Love. No Strings Attached. The Devil’s Rock (giving Nazioccultsploitation a bad name). The King’s Speech.

MUSIC

Live: The Clean at CPSA, Christchurch, November 26 – yes, that night (for about two hours, you forgot). Our Love Will Destroy the World at Lines of Flight 2011, Chicks, Port Chalmers, March 25 (plus Wellington’s Sign of the Hag and Dunedin’s Eye – same festival, previous night). Swans at Powerstation, Auckland, March 6. Both Swans and OLWDTW were mind emptyingly-loud (a good thing). Shayne P Carter at Kings Arms, Auckland, May 14, and at CPSA, Christchurch, November 18. Yeah, twice – the second time as thanks for the first, but more that I needed to see this back catalogue show twice to really process it. The first time – in Auckland -- you’re caught up in the celebratory nature of it all (we’re celebrating him, ourselves, these songs – and what these songs have said to us, about us), the second time – in a quieter Christchurch, following an erratic Ghost Club set – you actually get to hear “Dawn’s Coming In” and “Randolph’s Going Home” and you really take in the shape of the set, his curated nostalgia trip and your own (perceptions vary -- the likes of “Needles and Plastic” and “Joe 90” were already old songs when I first heard them; for others, the Straitjacket Fits songs will always have been old – and so, maybe, all of the post-1996 songs, like the 14-minute Krautrock sex song and set closer “Seed”, will always be new. These nostalgia shows can get emotionally and temporally complicated).

Some recordings: Cyclobe, Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window (CD edition). Earth, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1. Radiohead, The King of Limbs. The Caretaker, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Six Organs of Admittance, Asleep on the Floodplain. Torlesse Super Group, s/t. White Saucer / Currer Bells – split cassette. Wooden Wand, Death Seat. The Fall, Ersatz GB (hated on first listen, liked on the second – that seems to happen a lot with the Fall). Rediscovering the 3Ds’ “Meluzina Man” (“The song I still believe to be their best” – Bruce Russell in the liner notes) through various takes on We Bury the Living: Early Recordings 1989-90. You can never have too many versions of “Meluzina Man”.

BOOKS

Pip Adam, Everything We Hoped For. Paul Auster, Sunset Park. Jane Bowron, Old Bucky and Me. Hamish Clayton, Wulf. Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age is in Us. Guy Debord, Panegyric. Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street and Running Dog. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One. Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life and Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Martin Edmond, Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. Laurence Fearnley, The Hut Builder. Peter Graham, So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World. Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and Militant Modernism. Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless. Christopher Hitchens, Arguably. Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker. J Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies. Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian. Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010. Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table. Charles Portis, True Grit. Chad Taylor, Electric. David Vann, Caribou Island and Legend of a Suicide. Ian Wedde, The Catastrophe. Tim Wilson, The Desolation Angel. Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Slavoj Zizek, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce.

I'm down on bended knee

2011-12-14T13:04:00.000+13:00

When a City Falls

2011-11-30T15:25:00.000+13:00

What kind of film would Gerard Smyth have made had the February 22, 2011, earthquake never happened? That question might come to you a few times as you watch Smyth’s feature-length (106 minutes long) Christchurch quake doco, When a City Falls. Smyth, a Christchurch cameraman and documentary-maker (he did the Alun Bollinger film, Barefoot Cinema), got started on this straight after the September 4, 2010 quake – the surprise 7.1 quake that did plenty of damage but killed no one – and the narrative of the following five months is preserved in When a City Falls. That period is now prelude, mined for poignancy in hindsight: the Catholic Bishop of Christchurch, Barry Jones, shows off the intact interior of the Basilica, so wisely quake-strengthened some years earlier; a Christchurch resident remarks that the city must be blessed, that someone is watching over us. Then the really bad one hits: no one feels blessed anymore; the Basilica is seriously damaged and must be dismantled. Other architectural treasures that were marvelled over in the previous section are equally ruined.

So Smyth might once have made a shorter, happier film, full of stories of good fortune and miraculous escapes, keep-calm-and-carry-on responses to the city’s mountains of silt and the flooded streets, Kiwi humour in adversity, and so on. And then the bad one came – which means that Smyth has already communicated the most important truth about the February quake, which is that it seemed unthinkable because we thought it had already happened. More than 100 people died in the CTV building alone; 182 people died in total. This was all exhaustively covered at the time, but Smyth’s version of the afternoon that stretched into evening, with the fires that kept burning in the CTV building, the armies of rescue workers, the silent crowds waiting in Latimer Square, is still startling, pieced together from his own urgent footage and other sources, and playing out unmediated by reporters or news readers. Did you ever see the blocks of stone come off the Anglican Cathedral, like a rockfall? That was new to me.

Covering the aftermath was always going to be harder for Smyth (or anyone). How to balance the complex tasks, the sensitivities involved in interviewing surviving family members about their losses, while also surveying the ways that the disaster affected different parts of town and documenting both the progress over weeks and months – in the post-quake timeline, demolitions are a form of progress – and the shifts in the general mood? It would require you to have several different perspectives at once, to work on several different scales at the same time.

Smyth doesn’t try to get all that in. His film is largely an individual response not a comprehensive one. Like columnist Jane Bowron – and there is some overlap with her book of columns, Old Bucky and Me – Smyth starts from his inner-east Christchurch neighbourhood and works out. His – and Bowron’s – Christchurch is one where Piko and its surrounding shops were central and Merivale and Riccarton go unmentioned. Smyth weeps off-camera at the sight of the ruined Basilica, where he had once been an altar boy, and we note that his Christchurch is more Catholic than Anglican, generally bohemian and working class, or at least egalitarian. From a Press feature on the film (by Bowron):

The Film Commission flew down a few days after February to look at Smyth's footage and quickly saw it was something that wasn't being shown on mainstream TV. From the rushes, initially the Film Commission thought it a political film because the people seemed to be working class with the middle to upper classes of Christchurch absent from the footage.

"They didn't take into account that people were looking grubby and unshaven till I said, 'That person there's the wife of the Crown prosecutor, that man employs 43 people, that guy's a doctor'. We all got levelled to the same person," Smyth says, at pains to describe the film as grassroots and very much "of the people".

Smyth is not reporting the official lines or following the official timeframe. His is an earthquake story largely free of CERA, Bob Parker and Gerry Brownlee, one that focuses instead on community responses and individual ways of coping. Beyond Smyth’s inner-east neighbourhood, the emphasis is on Avonside, Bexley, Aranui, Linwood and Lyttelton, with trips to Sumner and Kaiapoi. It is the Christchurch of Lianne Dalziel and Garry Moore, rather than Peter Beck – although Beck does appear briefly with his Anglican Cathedral – and Christ’s College. The bigger picture, as reported in most media – events like the "share an idea" expo, or the red-zone land offers and insurance wrangles – has been deliberately overlooked in favour of smaller stories. And there is a good chance that in the years to come, personal accounts like these – Bowron’s book, too, and Fiona Farrell’s The Broken Book – may ultimately matter more than the stories composed in the clean and neutral language of most journalism.

The film is personal in both choices and style: Smyth stays off-camera but we get to know him from his quiet responses and his gentle questions. He appears to be a sensitive interviewer, and some of these stories are – no surprise – very tough indeed. There is the young woman whose father was killed by rocks above Lyttelton (she found his body). There is the widow of architect Don Cowey, who was killed in his garden. There is – and this might be the strangest and most affecting of all – the story of how elderly people comforted rest home workers.

The structure is loose, the events of September 4, December 26, February 22 and June 13 are the natural chapter breaks, and the ending was always going to be problematic (at what point will we say that the event has ended?). Not all critics have been convinced (see Peter Calder) by a trip to the US with urban designer James Lunday to see how San Francisco, New Orleans and Portland recovered – Portland from a post-manufacturing slump not a natural disaster – but these scenes seem to both summarise and extend the endless conversations that Christchurch has had about its rebuild since February. People outside need to realise that the utopian daydreaming of such conversations – will we be the green city, the safe city, the creative city, the new model city? – can often seem like a way of coping.

During the filming of Eraserhead

2011-11-24T09:20:00.001+13:00

From this photo set.

Parker and Hulme go to the pictures

2011-11-12T15:36:00.001+13:00

So Brilliantly Clever, Peter Graham's book about the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder, its build-up and its aftermath, is published this week -- my newspaper feature on it is here -- and the book is pretty much essential reading for anyone interested in this unendingly fascinating murder case. Graham got hold of a copy of Pauline Parker's diary and scattered within it were the titles of some of the films she and Juliet Hulme saw. Central Christchurch at that time was packed with cinemas, and the girls were obsessed with Hollywood in general and some male movie stars in particular, so you can imagine that there were quite a few titles. At some point I started taking down page numbers every time one turned up in the text ...

All the Brothers Were Valiant (Richard Thorpe, 1953). They saw it at the Majestic on Manchester St when it was still a cinema (in the 70s, it became a nightclub called Moby Dick's and then a church).
Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953). Possible source of Pauline's "Gina" nickname -- Gina Lollobrigida is in it.
Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M Newman, 1953). They saw it on April 29, 1954.
The Desert Fox (Henry Hathaway, 1951) and The Desert Rats (Robert Wise, 1953). Juliet liked James Mason as dashing Nazi Erwin von Rommel.
The Great Caruso (Richard Thorpe, 1951). With Mario Lanza as Caruso.
Hans Christian Andersen (Charles Vidor, 1952).
The Highwayman (Lesley Selander, 1951). A swashbuckler that Peter Graham suspects influenced Pauline's short story, which featured "bedroom scenes ... highway robberies" and "more than one violent death a day".
Ivanhoe (Richard Thorpe, 1952). Because of actor Guy Rolfe.
Julius Caesar (Richard L Mankiewicz, 1953). With James Mason as Brutus. Mason was "almost too wonderful to be true ... I was much pleased to see how young [he] looks ... superb physique", Pauline wrote.
King of the Khyber Rifles (Henry King, 1953). Guy Rolfe and Michael Rennie were "utterly divine", thought Pauline.
Mogambo (John Ford, 1953). Apparently they hated Clark Gable but loved Ava Gardner.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951). Pauline saw it with her mother about six months before she killed her. "It is the most perfect story I have ever known," Pauline wrote afterwards, and James Mason was "far too wonderful to attempt to describe".
Prince Valiant (Henry Hathaway, 1954). With James Mason sporting a beard (they approved). Pauline thought the picture was dreadful but Mason "was wonderful".
The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952). Opened at the Majestic in April, 1953. Said to be the beginning of the girls' James Mason obsession and influential on their imaginative world.
A Queen is Crowned (Christopher Fry, 1953). A QEII coronation doco that was shown at school. "Rather boring as a picture," Pauline thought but she liked the pageantry.
The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). Pauline saw it at the Savoy on the Square in January 1954; in this Biblical epic, she observed that "Caligula was exactly like the Devil".
Scaramouche (George Sidney, 1952). Because of actor Mel Ferrer. Pauline: "Absolutely superb ... thoroughly divine." It's unclear whether she means the film or Ferrer. Or both.
Secret Mission (Harold French, 1942). More James Mason.
The Spider and the Fly (Robert Hamer, 1949). More Guy Rolfe.
Trent's Last Case (Herbert Wilcox, 1954). The beginning of a short-lived obsession with Orson Welles. "He is dreadful ... but I adore him." -- Pauline.
The Wicked Lady (Leslie Arliss, 1945) More James Mason.

Inevitable caption to the above picture -- Twentieth Century Fox: James Mason as Rommel.

They do the whole sacrifice thing to get this rotten world back on track

2011-10-31T18:15:00.001+13:00

Time of the Wolf, 2003. Photography by Jurgen Jurges.

Foreign city

2011-10-28T16:30:00.000+13:00

"... and even if he is home again, this New York is not his New York, not the New York of his memory. For all the distance he has travelled, he might just as well have come to a foreign city, a city anywhere else in America." -- Paul Auster, Sunset Park, 2010.

From the top: the Victoria, Devonport, Auckland (1912- ); the Capitol, Balmoral, Auckland (1922- ); the Majestic, Christchurch (1930-1970, then converted); the State, Christchurch (1935-1977, then converted); the Regent, Christchurch (1930-2011).

Life as a death sentence

2011-10-20T15:21:00.003+13:00

My piece on Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go is in the new Werewolf (link). Above, the film's poster in Polish.

Waking Life was ten years ago (2001-50AD-2011)

2011-10-19T16:22:00.000+13:00

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over 30 novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

...

I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. But how has this come about? If the real time is circa AD 50, then why do we see AD 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?

Philip K Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978.

Waking Life was ten years ago (2001-2002-2011)

2011-10-19T09:21:00.001+13:00

The US reviews of Waking Life started appearing in October 2001 -- Jonathan Rosenbaum's in the Chicago Reader was published on October 26, 2001, and was later collected in Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004). In both cases, it was headlined "Good vibrations". I don't know when my review ran in the Listener, although it's likely to have been sometime in 2002 -- the Listener's online archives don't go back that far and I've never kept scrapbooks. Nor do I know what it was headlined. But when Waking Life turned up on Sky TV I re-ran a chunk of the original review on the TV films pages:

How do you like your dream logic? Among other far-out events in Richard Linklater’s superb animated feature Waking Life, a chimpanzee projects a movie that appears to be footage of righteous punk rock action. “Doubt became our narrative,” the chimp says. It was all about, the chimp adds before eating the script, “the quest for true communication”. Later, we meet the lonesome cartoon ghost of Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. Besides absurdism, then, Waking Life has the heartfelt utopianism and nostalgia that has run through Linklater’s best work: “No matter how degraded the world seemed, we knew that anything was possible.”

It may seem that this is a film unlike any other, which is certainly true, even if it also flows naturally from Linklater’s stunning early-mid 90s trilogy Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. It’s inhabited by the same thoughts and the same people. A passive narrator moves through a series of random encounters in Linklater’s college town of Austin, Texas, which was mapped in a similar way in Slacker. That actor is Wiley Wiggins, who appeared in Dazed and Confused. Before Sunrise’s romantic team of Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke are seen talking about reincarnation, the collective unconscious and a theory that the brain dreams an entire life in the six to 12 minutes between the body dying and the brain dying. Waking Life takes place within that kind of time.

Loosely structured, with themes that emerge clearly only on repeated viewings, the film follows Wiggins as he dreams, wakes from dreams into other dreams and listens to professors, ranters and theorists talk about life, God, free will, films and, of course, dreams. Besides the pop philosophy and pop science, there is also a thread of anti-capitalist rhetoric that feels both sad and urgent. And it’s funnier than it sounds, partly because the animation (from original video that Linklater shot with actors) allows for a shaky, woozy acid-trip quality, but also because Linklater sometimes sends up his own meaningfulness. In one scene, four anarchists walk down a street reciting slogans. They happen upon an old man stuck up a lamp post. Why is there? He can’t say. The anarchists look doleful. “He’s all action and no theory,” one says. “But we’re all theory and no action.”

When I was thinking yesterday about Waking Life ten years on, I was wondering about whether the film's attitudes to activism and action -- as vital but somehow thwarted or subdued in that era -- somehow anticipated the moment we are now in. Also, amazed and pleased that the Listener's TV pages could ever have talked about the lonesome ghost of Guy Debord ...

Waking Life was ten years ago (October 2001-October 2011)

2011-10-18T17:36:00.000+13:00

"Our critique began as all critiques begin: with doubt. Doubt became our narrative. Ours was a quest for a new story, our own. And we grasped toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn't tell it. Our past appeared frozen in the distance, and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive microsociety, in the heart of a society which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication. The adventure of finding it and losing it. We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one."

Expelled from the academies for crazy (Howl/A Man Within)

2011-10-15T20:24:00.000+13:00

Illuminated tenement roofs
Novels become films every day, but poems -- how many poems have become films? There have been some biographical films about poets – TS Eliot (Tom and Viv), Verlaine and Rimbaud (Total Eclipse), Keats (Bright Star), Sylvia Plath (Sylvia), Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries), Dylan Thomas (The Edge of Love), Miguel Pinero (Pinero), Stevie Smith (Stevie), Pablo Neruda (Il Postino), William Blake, very loosely (Dead Man) – but poems? A film is coming of Paradise Lost (with, reportedly, Crow auteur Alex Proyas directing Hangover star Bradley Cooper as Satan). Films have been based on The Raven and Beowulf – and The Iliad. But Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film Howl must be unique in the way it which it simultaneously illustrates a poem, sets out the context of the poem’s creation and also outlines its reception – unique partly because few poems have had the kind of reception that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl did.
Epstein and Freidman’s backgrounds are in documentary. Epstein made The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and the pair made Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), The Celluloid Closet (1995) and Paragraph 175 (2000). These were stories of gay history and, in the case of Harvey Milk, a gay hero. The Howl project began in the same way: in 2002, the Allen Ginsberg estate approached the pair about making a documentary to mark 50 years of Howl. Ginsberg’s poem was written and first performed in 1955. Howl and Other Poems was published by City Lights Books in 1956. The book was put on trial – or, more precisely, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was put on trial –for obscenity in San Francisco in 1957.
The resulting film – which missed all three possible anniversaries – evolved from a routine documentary idea into something else. The 1955 debut reading of the poem – in the Six Gallery, San Francisco – was reconstructed, with James Franco as Ginsberg reading his new text aloud and actors playing Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky et al hoisting their flagons aloft at key moments. A Life magazine interview was restaged, with Franco delivering the now bearded Ginsberg’s words – autobiographical background, the poem’s genesis – at the camera or some unknown journalist in New York in 1957, while over in San Francisco, a judge, lawyers and expert witnesses discuss the literary merits and/or obscenity of Howl within a deliberately dry and borderline absurd courtroom drama (the straight-faced, white-bread prosecutor: “What are angelheaded hipsters?”). Then, a fourth strand, which may be the most controversial, arguably even superfluous: the poem is illustrated via animation by Eric Drooker, who worked with Ginsberg on a book called Illuminated Poems. In the animated Howl, you see plenty of angels, hipsters, jazz, sex, the skyscrapers standing in the long streets (“Moloch!”), the highway across America, the western night …

James Franco came to the project via Gus Van Sant, who was onboard as executive producer. Van Sant had cast Franco in Milk, which partly drew on Epstein’s Harvey Milk doco. With Franco attached, the thing was becoming bankable. Franco set about teaching himself to reproduce Ginsberg’s fast, slightly anxious speech patterns and his physical mannerisms in both the nervous first reading and the more relaxed interview setting – and he does a pretty good job.
So, it can feel a little like an interactive educational resource – here’s some text, now some context, now some history, all fact-checked and as close as possible to how the actual moments looked – but another comparison might be a British TV drama called The Chatterley Affair (2006), which dramatised the 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and – how to put this delicately? – explored the book’s themes within a (fictional) relationship between two jurors. There is an earnestness to Howl, too – not a bad thing – in claiming the victory of the book over the censors and squares as historically important because the poetry itself, as the film tells us, was the result of Ginsberg overcoming his internal and external obstacles and censors (“The beginning of the fear for me is, what would my father think of something I would write?”). He resisted the asylum and enforced heterosexuality and the soul-deadening world of work. Now he’s another cultural hero – one whose story panned out more happily than that of Harvey Milk.
The film is relatively short at 1 hour, 20 minutes. Ginsberg singing “Father Death Blues” in his old age appears on both the DVD menu and over the closing credits. The first scene is that San Francisco venue on October 7, 1955. Imagine being in the crowd that heard this for the first time: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness …” When Ginsberg gets to the angelheaded hipsters contemplating jazz, Epstein and Friedman cut – a little obvious, this – to some jazz, and then the opening credits and some scene-setting: “In 1955, an unpublished 29-year-old poet presented his vision of the world as a poem in four parts.”
Things get more complex. As well as the four strands, there are flashbacks within the restaged interview: Ginsberg writing, Ginsberg in trouble with the law and being sent to the madhouse, where he meets Carl Solomon (“He was thinking about the void also”). The solemn David Straithairn as the prosecutor is light relief – “All these books are published in heaven. I don’t quite understand that but anyway … ” – while Mad Men’s Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is counsel for the defence, perhaps just for added period resonance when we get to that bit in the story when Ginsberg put on a suit and went to work in an advertising agency. In the animation, there are crowds of workers in formation on Madison Avenue, like Eliot’s “I had not thought death had undone so many …” while Moloch – modelled on the same in Metropolis – chews them up and spits them out.
In the courtroom scenes, there are expert witnesses for and experts against. Luther Nicholls (Alessandro Nivola), literary critic at the San Francisco Examiner is for: “I think it is a howl of pain.” Another expert, played loftily by Jeff Daniels, argues that Howl fails on form, as a weak imitation of the form of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Yes, such matters really were discussed in court. You could almost screen this to your high school English class except that the lines about being “fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and scream[ing] with joy” have not only stayed in but lead to Franco as Ginsberg telling us why it was important that he said joy and not pain.
You know what happened next: the book got off. Along the way, Howl becomes an unconventional Ginsberg biopic – which is a vast improvement over the conventional biopic. In its reworking or resetting of the text to say something bigger about the author, it actually resembles David Cronenberg’s imaginative, clammy Naked Lunch – although that was a relative downer where this is about, in the end, joy. Or at least self-acceptance. Once, he was in love with Jack Kerouac, as the gay man in love with the straight man – Kerouac helped him to break out of his body and confess “the secret tenderness of his soul”. That’s life experience as the shaping of the writer. By the time he has written and performed Howl, he has met Peter Orlovsky, and the film tells us they were together until the end. Along the way, the figure of Carl Solomon is made central again too (“I’m with you in Rockland”). Most forget that the poem’s full title is Howl for Carl Solomon. Of all the whatever-happened-to freeze frames at the end of Howl, the one telling us that Solomon lived to 64 might be among the happiest. But I was always fond of the bit about the guy “who jumped off Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer” – that was Tuli Kupferberg, later with the Fugs, and he only died last year, aged 86.

Last words, anyworld
In Slate this month, Bill Wyman – the critic not the Rolling Stone – coined the word “schlockumentary”, specifically to have a long-winded go at Martin Scorsese’s new George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World (plus, glacingly, Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam film PJ20): “They aren't real documentaries: There's never anything in them that any of the interested parties (stars, director, the producers, the studio) don't want in them — and in the end, they're being used to sell product.”
It’s that air of being authorised and approved, of accentuating the positive, of presenting the official version, of acting as the publicity arm of the artist and his or her estate. The Howl film mostly avoids this by becoming a different kind of movie, even though there is nothing in it that might potentially embarrass Ginsberg fans – like, say, his later association with Nambla.
Such schlockumentaries tend to take artists at their word and present a redemptive view of the relationship between art and life (making the likes of Walk the Line a dramatic cshlockumentary, and the proposed Elton John one possibly the same). The new William Burroughs doco A Man Within has aspects of this. It began as a project by art student Yony Leyser, but once Burroughs’ former secretary and literary executor, James Grauerholz, got wind of it, it became closer to an official project. Leyser got access to unseen home movies and celebrity friends and followers who were happy to say a few words about Burroughs and what he meant to them – Patti Smith, John Waters, Laurie Anderson, John Giorno, Iggy Pop, Victor Bockris, Genesis P-Orridge, Gus Van Sant, Peter Weller. Some of these voices do complicate the picture – P-Orridge saw Burroughs as inspirational but also registered the deep sadness and loneliness in him. But Waters retails the usual story that the 1950s were horribly conformist until the likes of Burroughs – and Ginsberg, and the rest – blew everything wide open (or was that the plot of Hairspray?). That’s to reduce Burroughs to just a player in social history. His personality and his writing – sarcastic, pessimistic, anarchic, occult, even extraterrestrial – was that much weirder and further out than the other anti-suburban, anti-conformist Beats. When Victor Bockris says that Burroughs “stood up for what he believed in”, it makes him sound like a politician. Burroughs doesn’t exactly fit the standard biopic model.
Punk rock pioneer? They try to pin that one on Burroughs too. But it doesn’t really stick. Iggy Pop: “I think he thought rock’n’roll was bullshit. Which it mostly is. But so are most novels.” Speaking of rock’n’roll bullshit, Sting is in one still photo and U2’s The Edge is in footage but Bono is absent (one of the most reliable schlockumentary tests is whether Bono makes an appearance talking about how much whoever-it-is meant to him).
Maybe Leyser is just focusing on the wrong Burroughs. I never liked the gun-love stuff – it has the air of Hunter S Thompson survivalism about it. I didn’t rate the painting – and if you look at the DVD extras, you get Wayne Propst deflating the art era in a sequence not included in the main film. Another extra gives you a 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch party in Chicago. It’s a little cringeworthy. Peter Weller reads and performs part of the novel; Bill Ayers – formerly of the Weather Underground and friend of Barack Obama – says that Naked Lunch “invites us to wake up, pay attention and do something”.
John Waters sees Burroughs lasting as a saint for outcasts and rebels – but there is no equivalent literary assessment. Mostly, A Man Within treats the writing as just an artefact of the more famous life. At least Howl gives us the text. A Man Within is one for the completists, but there are better places to start.
It has been reported that Grauerholz was keen on A Man Within partly because he felt he was unfairly treated in an earlier doco, Howard Brookner’s Burroughs (1983), in which it appeared he was competing with the author’s troubled and doomed son, Billy Burroughs, for the affections of the old man (watching the footage, I thought more of Mr Burns and Smithers).
You can find the Brookner doco on You Tube, split into eight parts. If you watch it via Dangerous Minds, you get it with the intro that the BBC put on in 1997 after Burroughs died – “a revolutionary both in his life and in his writing”. Ah, yes, the writing: Burroughs reading from the then-new The Place of Dead Roads and exploring the streets of St Louis, where he grew up, showing how the nostalgia and fantasy of the amazing late trilogy – Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands – connected with his memories. Of course, you get Burroughs alive and surprisingly open in interviews. You get his brother, Mortimer (not a big fan of Naked Lunch, it turns out). You get the close and comic relationship with Allen Ginsberg. You get versions of Patti Smith and John Giorno, 25 years younger than in A Man Within. You get the sad son Billy Burroughs and even some Brion Gysin. You get Grauerholz as an example of influence in that John Waters sense – a 14-year-old kid whose life was changed by William Burroughs. The writing and the life are well-integrated, and Burroughs features the A-team of those who knew him not the B-team.

Curse go back
For me, the most fascinating part of the Burroughs mythos was the early 60s era, working with Brion Gysin and Antony Balch on the dream machines, cut-ups and experimental films. Things like Towers Open Fire from 1963.

The cut-up and looped film, the grey 60s London streets, the notion of their curses affecting the world, their anarchism – sonic warfare, hieroglyphs, dream machines – presented as though it was serious and secret research into unknown or magickal forces. This was the condensed vision, expanded in the disorientating, 18-minute-long The Cut Ups and the even longer Ghost at No 9, which have the same sense of Gysin and Burroughs engaged in something secretive and revolutionary (“guerrilla conditions”, terror plans, espionage language and phone booths). The colour Bill and Tony, from the early 1970s, is weirder and creepier, its identity switches and repeated phrases running like an excerpt from a cult indoctrination video, working on breaking down the subject’s defences. It gives you a strong sense of what he was up to in his fiction.
That was seen by few at the time, but more now than it’s all moved out of the underground video-swapping era and gone online (this ubu web page has a full selection; this piece at Bright Lights is a good overview of the experimental films). But in terms of the mainstream, I still remember the shock of sitting in a Washington DC movie theatre in about 1990 and seeing William S Burroughs turn up here (Drugstore Cowboy) …

Multiplying Ginsbergs
Howl might be the closest thing so far to an Allen Ginsberg biopic but Ginsberg has been a character in other people’s stories. David Cross plays him – bearded, beatific – in Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan film I’m Not There. Tim Hickey played him, same era, in the Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl (where Hayden Christensen was – unbelievably – a version of Bob Dylan). In films about political action in late 60s Chicago, he has been played by Hank Azaria and others, and in a recent movie about Neal Cassady – “secret hero” of Howl (poem and film) – by Yehuda Duenyas. There was also an appearance as Martin (played by Michael Zelniker) in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, where Kerouac was called Hank and the pair were just a couple of New York goofballs before Peter Weller’s Bill Lee headed into Interzone – actually, that movie had me wondering about a Paul and Jane Bowles biopic; in Naked Lunch, they were Tom and Joan Frost, played memorably by Ian Holm and Judy Davis.
There will be new versions of most of these guys next year when Walter Salles’ film of On the Road appears. If Naked Lunch, Howl and On the Road were the three Beat texts, who would have predicted that the least accessible – Naked Lunch – would be a movie first and the most accessible and best-known, On the Road, would go last? For whatever reason, there have been delays – Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights back in 1979, although as far back as 1957, Kerouac wrote to Marlon Brando, suggesting that the pair star in their own version, “with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak”. Brando never answered.
Where Cronenberg’s hallucinatory and heavily metaphorical treatment of Naked Lunch was less about fidelity than interpretation, and only partly for artistic reasons (Cronenberg famously said that if he had filmed the book faithfully, it would have cost $400-$500 million and been banned everywhere), Salles seems to be about fidelity – remember, he made the not dissimilar Motorcycle Diaries, where it was the journey of discovery, self-awareness, politicisation. Also, it appears that the pseudonyms are staying, so to your movie Kerouacs you can add Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, to your movie Ginsbergs you can add Tom Sturridge as Carlo Marx, and to your movie Burroughs you can soon add Viggo Mortensen – now there’s good casting -- as Old Bull Lee.
By the way, I’m pretty sure it’s this version of “Father Death Blues”.

Earthquake humour

2011-10-14T09:12:00.000+13:00

A stencil in Sumner, yesterday afternoon. I was out there -- and doesn't the drive from anywhere else in Christchurch seem longer than ever? -- to see The Orator (more on that later). This was on a nearby wall, facing an empty lot. Just out of shot: a National Party billboard, "Building a brighter future".

Soundtrack

2011-10-07T09:39:00.000+13:00

Unexplained disappearances

2011-10-06T18:43:00.000+13:00

1. THE VANISHING PRISONER
This first account is an excellent case in point because it defies any rational explanation for one simple reason: it occurred in full view of witnesses. The year was 1815 and the location a Prussian prison at Weichselmunde. The prisoner's name was Diderici, a valet who was serving a sentence for assuming his employer's identity after he died from a stroke. It was an ordinary afternoon and Diderici was just one in a line of prisoners, all chained together, walking in the prison yard for the day's exercise.
As Diderici walked with his prison inmates to the clanking of their shackles, he slowly began to fade - literally. His body became more and more transparent until Diderici disappeared altogether, and his manacles and leg irons fell empty to the ground. He disappeared into thin air and was never seen again. -- from Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present, by Jay Robert Nash.

2. MIRRORS
We discovered (very late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiachs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. -- from "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges.

3. BUT REFLECTED IN THE MIRROR WAS SOMEONE ELSE'S FACE
[Brion Gysin] next decided to experiment with mirror-gazing. He had in his room two high armoires with heavy plate-glass mirrors on the doors. He told Burroughs that he would gaze for 24 hours if he had help in being handed food and No-Doz pills and cigarettes and joints. The idea was that you could see your former incarnations and be in better touch with yourself. You had to keep staring without closing your eyes, paying no attention to the tears streaming down your cheeks.
Brion at first saw 19th century scientists in their laboratories. Obviously something momentous was happening in their experiments. Then the scene shifted, and he saw much more ancient figures, like a horde coming off the Asian steppes, great chieftains wearing amazing headdresses, with deeply scarred and tattooed faces, fierce warriors, hundreds of them, perhaps from Siberia. Finally they disappeared completely, and Brion found himself looking into a space that was at the same time limiting and limitless -- was it an enormous room, or was it a landscape? There was a layer of blue-gray cloud about waist-high, breathing, moving, pulsing, and that was the end -- it was like looking at the void. -- from Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S Burroughs, by Ted Morgan.

4. SUDDENLY OMINOUS
All but die-hard fans had checked out by this point – a pity, because David Lynch’s Twin Peaks prequel contained some moments of blood-curdling horror and ineffable strangeness that marked it as a much darker, spookier enterprise than the often whimsical TV series. The strangest bit of all is the largely irrelevant prologue: FBI agents invisible to the closed-circuit cameras, Lynch’s odd cameo, David Bowie’s slightly less odd cameo, the suddenly ominous words “Let’s Rock” across the windscreen of an abandoned car … -- from my capsule review of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, sometime in the late 1990s.

5. "MR LYNCH CAN'T GET OFF THE HOOK THAT EASILY"
Characters are introduced and disappear for no special reason, not even mystical. It seems more likely that actors of the caliber of Kiefer Sutherland and David Bowie could spend only a limited amount of time on the picture, and that Mr Lynch accommodated them and himself by introducing into the script intimations of the occult. He can't get off the hook that easily. -- from Vincent Canby's review of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, New York Times, August 29, 1992.

6. HALFWAY TO THE WELL
Most disappearances do not have witnesses, yet there is sometimes circumstantial evidence that is no less puzzling. This is the case for the vanishing of Charles Ashmore. It was a cold November winter night in 1878 when 16 year old Charles went out into the dark with a bucket to fetch water from the well for his family on their Quincy, Illinois property. He did not return.
After many minutes, his father and sister became concerned. They feared that Charles perhaps had slipped in the snow that blanketed the ground and was injured, or worse, had fallen into the well. They set out to look for him, but he was just gone. There was no sign of a struggle or fall ... only the clear tracks of Charles' footprints in the fresh snow that led halfway to the well, then abruptly stopped. Charles Ashmore had suddenly disappeared into the void. -- from Into Thin Air, by Paul Begg.

This should have happened

2011-10-03T15:30:00.000+13:00

When Bunuel and I were working on The Milky Way -- which explores the heresies of the Christian religion -- I dreamed up a scene we both loved, but that would have been too expensive to shoot and so doesn't feature in the film. A flying saucer lands with great fanfare. The cover or cockpit opens and an antennaed green creature emerges, brandishing a cross upon which another antennaed green nature is nailed.
-- Jean-Claude Carriere, 2009. From Jean-Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco, This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, translated from the French by Polly McLean. Harvill Secker, 2011.

Titanic/Metropolis

2011-10-02T16:50:00.000+13:00

One is from the Eternal Gardens and the other is from the lower depths. The future city is lit like an ocean liner and then the lights go out. " ... the inter-titles tell us that the mob rushes toward the Moloch Machine, the powerhouse of Metropolis, leading to flooding, crashing, and great flashes of light ... " In the flooding, water seeps upwards and children are rescued in the panic. Moral: the mediator between the head and the hands/the heart must go on.

He won't be coming back, and he knows it

2011-10-01T09:47:00.000+13:00

For 25 or 30 years, my generation thought Italian cinema was the best in the world ... And what from those 30 years of laughter and excitement has stood the test of time? I still find Fellini enchanting. It seems that Antonioni still has a great reputation. Have you seen his final short, Michelangelo Eye-to-Eye? It's one of the most beautiful films in the world. Antonioni shot it in 2000. Not a single word is spoken for the whole 15 minutes. Antonioni directed himself, which he'd never done before. We see him enter Rome's Church of St-Peter-in-Chains, alone. He slowly approaches the tomb of Pope Julius II. The whole film is a wordless dialogue, an exchange of glances between Antonioni and Michelangelo's Moses. Everything we have been talking about, our era's obsession with appearances and words, its senseless agitation, is put into question by the fact of this silence, by the film-maker's gaze. He has come to say goodbye. He won't be coming back, and he knows it. The departing man has come to pay a final visit to the impenetrable masterpiece that will remain. As if trying one last time to understand. As if trying to solve a mystery that is beyond words. Antonioni's final glance at Moses is moving in the extreme.
-- Jean-Claude Carriere, 2009. From Jean-Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco, This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, translated from the French by Polly McLean. Harvill Secker, 2011.

Viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything

2011-09-30T16:20:00.000+13:00

Recently I sat in on a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne. He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves. We should not feel assured or certain about their motives, or look down on them. I believe this. I recognise this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.
-- Michael, the narrator, in The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje. Jonathan Cape, 2011.

By not having sex, he saves the world

2011-09-28T14:53:00.001+13:00

David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (1983) is better than I remember -- or better than its reputation (I first saw it maybe 20 years ago, on US television or video -- somewhere sub-obtimal). In the Cronenberg take, it's forever winter, there are unexpected similarities to A History of Violence two decades later (a threatened small town/rural setting, a gentle everyman protagonist driven to violence), the psychic aspect is taken as real from the moment it appears, there are two Cronenbergian suicides (a gun, a pair of scissors) following similar in Videodrome, an unexpected relationship with Christianity and a related discussion about assassination ethics (if you could go back in time and kill Hitler ...) and of course a charismatic, young and mostly pre-weird Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith, who senses murder. For Robin Wood, in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan in 1986, only here and in The Deer Hunter could Walken fully display "those properly human qualities which our culture chooses to label feminine: sensitivity, vulnerability, the overt display of emotions, gentleness, grace, a physical beauty divorced from any macho traits". The shock of that moment when he cries behind the door; the equally great shock -- a scene so rare in a Hollywood movie -- when he turns down the opportunity to have sex with his girlfriend. This sexual denial leads to his accident; his accident saves the world.

"Sexuality doesn't surface in The Dead Zone in the same way as it does in my other films, but it's certainly there. It's a very repressed, restrained and frustrated thing. Personally the movie's just like me, but filmically I suppose not ...

"The folks in The Dead Zone tend to be God-fearing characters, whereas in my other films they are not. Because many of the scientists in my early films are absent from the films themselves, although their influence remains, I think you could make a good case for saying that in The Dead Zone, God is the scientist whose experiments are not always working and that the Johnny Smith character is one of his failed experiments." -- David Cronenberg in Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley, Faber, 1992.

Ruins of a Masonic Temple (1923-2011)

2011-09-23T12:28:00.001+12:00

Back in March, I wrote about the post-quake state of the Crown Masonic Centre in Sydenham (link). This is what remains of it this morning.

Richard Hamilton 1922-2011

2011-09-14T15:56:00.000+12:00

The Citizen, 1981-83: "Inspired by a 1980 documentary on the ‘dirty protest’ by republican prisoners at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. Demanding recognition as political prisoners, inmates refused to wash or wear regulation clothing and smeared their cells with excrement. The protest lasted for five years, involving more than 400 prisoners. It later developed into a mass hunger strike. The painting is a composite image based on stills from different parts of the documentary. For Hamilton this was ‘a strange image of human dignity in the midst of self-created squalor’." (picture and text source).

It could easily have been another illustration within this.

Instead of making a world out of nothing, making a nothing out of the world

2011-09-13T13:09:00.000+12:00

My Melancholia piece is online, at Werewolf 26.

You said all of my life would be in vain if I gave up on anything I knew to be true

2011-09-11T09:28:00.000+12:00

St Francis meets the leper. The Flowers of St Francis. Roberto Rossellini, 1950.

All Free

2011-09-08T13:27:00.000+12:00

August

2011-08-30T09:15:00.000+12:00

Before I forget: quick sentences on the film festival

2011-08-29T18:31:00.001+12:00

The 35^th Chch International Film Festival ended last night and it felt more like an event than usual – at least more than it did in the three years (2008-2010) that I caught some of it at the Regent. The sense being, partly, that the NZFF has gone to some trouble to find an available venue – the Regent quake-deconstructed, the Rialto out of action, etc – so we ought to make an effort as well. James Croot reckons numbers have been good (I saw a few sell-out signs: the Steve Coogan vehicle The Trip, the usual group bookings of architects at the Norman Foster doc among them). It helped that the opening night film and closing night film were both astonishing, as well as natural book-ends: The Tree of Life and Melancholia – both cosmic visions, in which human scale is set against that which dwarfs us, but one (the Malick) Christian, hopeful and optimistic, where the other (the Von Trier) was secular, doomed and pessimistic. I’ll probably write something about the latter, with a touch of the former and the not dissimilar Another Earth, in the next Werewolf (early Sept). Snow kept me from Incendies and Le Havre. Work kept me from A Separation and life kept me from Metropolis. I liked Meek’s Cutoff’s real-time minimalism, thought Herzog was straitjacketing himself too much in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (his pessimism, mostly restrained here – just the phone book/dreams question, the dead-eyed albino alligators as versions of us – was always going to be at odds with the conventional sense of “discovery”), appreciated the strange, quiet and never quite sad calm of Sleeping Beauty and saw the obvious traces of Salo and Bunuel that Julia Leigh wanted us to find (best critical summary: the least Australian film in Australian film history). The Trip was crowdpleasing but weirdly forgettable (Coogan on the road, Rob Brydon outdoing his impressions, all framed by not-entirely-convincing ruminations on failure and aging), The Kid With a Bike showed that the Dardennes always make it look effortless – a kind of effortlessness that risks being taken for granted, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia was beautiful, deep and slow. Wanted to see Submarine and Page One, and Project Nim and maybe Mysteries of Lisbon. Noticed Christchurch didn’t get The Turin Horse and Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow – but I guess we’re not short of bleak, blasted landscapes at the moment. The Tree of Life and Melancholia were alpha and omega.

Bunuel on Dreyer

2011-08-20T18:07:00.000+12:00

This evening there is a rare screening of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), within the Christchurch Arts Festival. In June, I bought two books about Luis Bunuel from a secondhand store in Edgeware; in one -- Luis Bunuel: A Critical Biography, by Francisco Aranda (Da Capo, 1976) -- there is a collection of Bunuel's work as a critic. He reviewed Dreyer's Joan of Arc, calling it "certainly the most original and interesting film of the new cinema season". An excerpt:

The humanity of the Maid in Dreyer's work transcends that of any other interpretation we know. We all feel the urge to prescribe her a whipping so that we can give her a sweet afterwards. To take away her dessert from her, to punish her childlike integrity, her transparent obstinacy, yes; but, why burn her? Lit by tears, purified by flames, head shaved, grubby as a little girl, yet for a moment she stops crying to watch some pigeons settle on the spire of the church. Then, she dies.

The world ended a long time ago

2011-08-07T08:18:00.000+12:00

Richard Kelly's The Box (2009). Paralysing dread in its first hour, then Kelly loosens his grip on the story, letting everything else in: metaphysical speculation, death experiences, Close Encounters cultists, government-Nasa conspiracies. A Twilight Zone plotline -- the idea, initially, is from Richard Matheson's story "Button, Button" -- is inflated with Kelly's own memories of growing up in 70s Nasa-worker suburbia, perhaps with his actual terror from that far back. Apocalypticism without the camp of Kelly's Southland Tales but also without the humour of Donnie Darko.

We would just drive

2011-08-04T13:35:00.000+12:00

"It was basically between [cinematographer] John Campbell, Pat Baum, who was the sound person -- between the three of us we were sort of 'The Crew' and then there were, say, two or three actors. And we could all fit in a station wagon. Which is sort of how we made a lot of the movie. We would all get in one vehicle and drive to where we were supposed to go. If it was an apple orchard, we would just drive until we saw an apple orchard and ask the person in the house if we could shoot."
-- Gus Van Sant, talking about Mala Noche (1986) on the DVD interview, No Cutting, No Stars, No Script (2007).

Something like a manifesto, if we were going to have one

2011-07-30T20:17:00.000+12:00

"I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person's experience -- and only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: 'stars', storylines and entertainment have nothing to do with it."
-- Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting in Time.

The day after the coldest day in 93 years

2011-07-26T13:08:00.000+12:00

Inevitable sled, depleted snowman.

Into the white

2011-07-25T15:32:00.000+12:00

Noi Albinoi (Dagur Kari, 2003); My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007).

And there ain't no day / And there ain't no night

2011-07-24T10:38:00.002+12:00

Rule/exception

2011-07-23T21:34:00.003+12:00

I never knew America could be so beautiful

2011-07-18T17:27:00.004+12:00

The Man Who Fell to Earth. 1976. Photography by Anthony Richmond.

They begin again. The man doesn't die, nor does he go mad.

2011-07-17T11:01:00.003+12:00

Orly airport.

Indicator buildings

2011-07-06T13:19:00.012+12:00

In the hours and days after a significant aftershock in Christchurch, we often hear about "indicator buildings" -- the phrase refers to those quake-damaged buildings that might act as ways of measuring damage more generally (four are pictured here and one is on its side -- by mistake, I hope). In the three and a half years since I moved to Christchurch I have had my own indicator buildings, and originally they had nothing to do with the quakes -- they were old, sometimes empty, sometimes near-derelict buildings that said something about the city's history, its often contradictory attitudes to heritage and my feelings, even pre-quake, about the city's future. If you came from Auckland or Wellington, you were amazed at how many empty sites the city contained -- again, even pre-quake -- and how many older buildings in prime spots stood vacant. And so it always seemed to be good news when an older building was restored and -- terrible word, this -- "repurposed", rather than just flattened for another temporary carpark that eventually becomes permanent.

Often my indicator buildings were those I walked, bussed or -- very rarely -- drove past to or from work, so my interest was between the centre of town and the southern suburbs: areas like Sydenham, Waltham and the post-industrial sites around Moorhouse Avenue.

Like most 19th century antipodean cities, Christchurch once had grand pubs on many corners. These box-like, imposing buildings had started to vanish even before the quakes, but the post-quake period has accelerated their disappearance. Most famously, the Carlton on Bealey Avenue came down in April, as have two on Colombo Street in Sydenham, several in Lyttelton, the Provincial on Cashel Street and others. The Crown Hotel at 192 Moorhouse Avenue, built c.1906 and heritage 2 listed by the council, is also a sad story.

Moorhouse Avenue is one of the four avenues that historically enclosed the Christchurch CBD. The railway line runs parallel, just to the south, meaning that Moorhouse Avenue was a transportation and distribution hub before rail fell out of favour and the main station was shifted to Riccarton. Some of the brick grain warehouses are still standing, renovated into retail spaces and cinemas. In the past couple of years the Crown was itself renovated -- a pub that had either closed its doors for good or was no longer patronised was painted and refurbished and its tenants included Jacobsen Creative Surfaces (they sell "quality flooring solutions" -- also known as "tiles").

The picture above and the two below are how the Crown looked at about 9.30 this morning. An earthquake damaged it and a digger is finishing it off. The picture immediately below is the view from across Montreal Street, with half of the front wall still up.

Another indicator building, one I have mentioned before, is at 110 Waltham Road. No pub, this -- indeed, its former life is slightly mysterious. Before the September quake, it was the clubrooms of the Canterbury Mineral and Lapidary Club. A week after the February quake, a man scraping mortar from bricks -- he was out there in the sun, day after day -- told me it was once a library, and old newspapers have references to a library on Waltham Road as far back as 1877. In the months since the February quake, the building has been painstakingly dismantled, with the kind of care you expect for an architectural treasure like the Catholic Cathedral. The bricks were removed and put in piles. Now beams are being removed. This is no sudden demolition; this is long and slow. The four pictures below were also taken this morning -- they reveal that a small wooden structure has stood behind the brick structure we saw from the street. Is it older? Is it the original building on this site? There is nothing for this address in either the council's heritage listings or the Historic Places Trust's list. The blue shipping containers are a relatively recent addition.

Further east along Moorhouse Avenue from the Crown, another pub stood empty for several years -- the Grosvenor. It was built in 1876, according to the city plan. If you looked through its windows from Moorhouse Avenue or Madras Street, you saw the lurid 70s carpet, the empty glasses and bottles, as though the pub had suddenly emptied out just the day before. The hosts' names were still above the door. It was painted peach and brown, and it was fading. It was owned by the polytech (CPIT), which owns all the buildings and land around it, and it was becoming an eyesore. Before the first quake, it was sold to a developer who tidied it up and -- since February -- has had that rare thing on his hands: a Christchurch heritage building that can still be used and occupied. According to this story, seven potential tenants were interested -- but the owner wanted a "creative" partner, a design and advertising business. If you can put aside your cynicism about a pub that was probably once patronised by men from the gasworks and railways now remade and remodelled for the post-industrial leisure sector, you would probably agree that the end result is better than another carpark or caryard, Subway outlet or new ruin. Even if it no longer has its former use, we can remember and picture its previous life.

Miracles no longer happen

2011-07-04T14:03:00.003+12:00

Ordet. 1955. Photography by Henning Bendtsen.

To think yourself responsible for everything is not humility

2011-07-01T21:15:00.001+12:00

Lancelot du Lac. 1974. Photography by Pasqualino De Santis.

Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday

2011-06-28T16:35:00.002+12:00

A Taxi Driver piece by me is in the new Werewolf. The first in a series on films to run there.

Impostor syndrome

2011-06-26T10:32:00.003+12:00

I’m Not There footnote: Hayden Christensen’s unnamed – for legal reasons – Bob Dylan in the dreary and strangely truncated Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl runs like a failed audition for the Dylan variation played by Heath Ledger in the Todd Haynes film. Ledger’s Dylan – Robbie Clark, the Dylan of the divorce years - was distinguished by his machismo (key prop: motorcycle), as is Christensen’s “folk singer”. In Factory Girl, that machismo, as authenticity, is set clumsily against the feyness and artificiality of the Warhol scene, but Cate Blanchett’s speed-freak Dylan in I’m Not There – where Edie appears (suitably) briefly as “CoCo Rivington” -- would have fit right in. Which only goes to show that Haynes mastered the Dylan contradictions that have defeated others. (I talked about I'm Not There here -- and I liked it more on a second viewing.)

Days after

2011-06-24T16:02:00.009+12:00

My uncle died yesterday in circumstances that reminded us of my father's death three years ago. So I took the day off work and went for a walk. Today was also a day after for many others in Christchurch: the long-anticipated release of the government's assessment of quake-damaged land came yesterday. Home owners learnt if their houses are in the green zone (fine), orange zone (more investigation needed) or red (considered no longer viable). Our house is in the green zone, but there are splashes of orange near us in St Martins and Opawa. Above: the St Martins Community Library, looking worse than it did after the big shake in February (see this entry for a comparison), and liquefaction on St Martins Road. That section above is within the orange zone.

There is a familiar feeling to days after a quake in Christchurch, a subdued mood. People are quieter, cars drive a little slower. Streets seem emptier. Today, the day after bad news for many, felt like one of those days.

The St Martins New World has been demolished, along with a cluster of neighbourhood shops (chemist, hairdresser, cafe, bookseller) that stood near it.

The furniture shop Mr Mod is being emptied out. The army is here digging new silt out of backyards, again within the orange zone. On Wilsons Road, I talk to an elderly couple who do not know which zone they are in. No computer, the woman mimes. And they must go out to read the newspaper. The house is barely liveable, she says, and will be demolished and a new house built. "But we're not as badly off as those poor people in Bexley." And while the damaged house is cold, "summer's coming" (yes, in six months).

There used to be streams all through here before European settlement, she adds, streams submerged by building and roading, that have erupted since February. That big pile of liquefaction? There was a creek there once. Someone showed her an old map. The post-quake city's secret knowledge.

What are all these mysterious markings? Future generations will wonder. Above, in Hansen Park, Opawa.

Again, those rivers: so far, the red zone seems to be entirely around the estuary end of the Avon river. The lovely riverside suburb of Avonside will be largely abandoned, part of the city's history vanishing. Opawa is reminiscent of Avonside, a similar age, similar style of houses, built around a river. But there are only patches of orange here, again by the river. There are 5000 houses in the red zone in total. Another 9000 in the orange zone.

Above: marking one of Opawa's creeks (Opawaho being the Maori name for the Heathcote river). Above that: a historical home and attached land (Fifield homestead) is for sale. It was last on the market in 1890. Below: damaged roads and bridge on Fifield Terrace, Opawa. Again, this is the orange zone.

Risingholme on Cholmondeley Avenue is another grand Opawa home, built in 1864. The council bought it in 1943; its lands are now a park, the house is a community centre. But there are no cars in the carpark, no lights on in the home. All of its activities have been shifted elsewhere -- see the notices on the red door. A shy cat hides under the house as I approach. One of Opawa's streams runs quietly next to the home. The city's rivers reassert themselves.

August, maybe

2011-06-22T11:56:00.001+12:00

After after

2011-06-15T09:33:00.006+12:00

Seven mobile phone pictures taken on the five-minute walk back from Beckenham School to home this morning, registering only the things that were not there on Monday, before the 5.5 and 6.3 aftershocks (or are they new quake events?). New cracking and fresh mud on curbs and roads. New safety fencing and a spraypainted "keep clear" sign on the wall of the already ruined school pool. Roads that were repaired just weeks ago now have fresh holes, and there is a newly collapsed river bank. New signs warn of contaminated water in the river; a homemade "slow down" sign appears, warning of slightly more damaged houses and nerves.

The illusion of normality is partly for the sake of children. School returns as normal but there has never been a morning so quiet, on the school grounds, in the park, on the roads. The morning is beautifully clear and cold and I think of some comments from Christchurch poet Joanna Preston, made at the Auckland Writers Festival in May, remembering the morning of the first, September quake: "Afterwards, you didn't know what to do. The sun came up and it was the most incredibly beautiful Canterbury day. Early September, I think there had been a frost. It was blue and it was perfect. Because they had closed the airport, there were no planes going overhead and it was quiet. No cars, no noise. Just quiet, like a day in paradise. The thing is, you have to die to get to paradise. It really did feel a little bit like we were walking in the afterworld.”

The Garden of Eden lay in ruins

2011-06-10T19:10:00.004+12:00

Even modern historians are condescending in their accounts of the peoples who wandered through luxuriant nature without the need to violate or exploit it. Instead of looking for traces of a distinct Aurignacian or Magdalenian culture they usually try to find in these civilisations only the faltering beginnings of our era. It does not occur to them that the unity from which the diverse mineral, vegetable, animal and human elements originated may have undergone a radically different development from the social orientation imposed on it since Neolithic times. One day we must analyse the cave paintings and artifacts -- with their frequent feminine symbols, their fusion of male and female principles, and their graceful depiction of humans and animals. We may expect to discover traces of a milieu that actually favoured life. Perhaps we shall discover a society careful not to disavow its connection with nature, a civilisation that, through its analogical mode of understanding, was moving toward a living science that could take whatever the natural forces blindly offered, whether harmless or beneficial, and turn it to the advantage of the living.
-- Raoul Vaneigem, from The Movement of the Free Spirit, Zone Books, 1994. Image from Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, 2010.

Something I didn't know about Taxi Driver

2011-05-24T19:43:00.002+12:00

I'm reading Greil Marcus' new book on Bob Dylan, Writings 1968-2010 -- oh yeah, happy birthday, Bob -- and there's a reprint of a Marcus feature on The Last Waltz, first published in New West. The year is 1978; Marcus is at Scorsese's house in the Hollywood Hills, a house that "instantly announces itself as the home of a film-maker" (a ton of movie posters, a small Catholic triptych). Anyway ...

Scorsese has put on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and we're simply listening. It's an album of transcendence: transcendence of childhood fears, adult sins. "Madame George" comes on -- "That's the song," Scorsese murmurs. I can't help telling him he's picked my favourite record of all time, but he's way ahead of me. "I based the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver on Astral Weeks," Scorsese says, "and that's a movie about a man who hates music." I mentally scurry to recover images of the film so I can figure out what Scorsese means; he must be talking about the sense of doom, or anyway fate, that Morrison insists on.

"The willows become agitated": Angela Carter and The Christchurch Murder

2011-05-22T10:45:00.008+12:00

“Take a point in time where Pauline and Juliet meet each other and another at the point of the murder, which is about two years, and trace the key events that happened between them, and there’s a three-act structure already there.”
-- Peter Jackson in “NZFX: The Films of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh”, by Jim and Mary Barr, Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa (VUP, 1996).

“The story of Heavenly Creatures is a magnificent one. It required no additional fictionalising in terms of the drama, its inherent tragedy or the extraordinariness of the friendship between those two young women. It was all there.”
-- Fran Walsh in “NZFX: The Films of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh”, by Jim and Mary Barr.

Film history is littered with those what-ifs, the great unmade films. Perhaps the greatest film never made was Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, or maybe Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness, although a fanbase makes a case for Vincent Ward’s version of Alien3, which is really in a different category – the alternate version of an existing film. That’s what Angela Carter’s unmade The Christchurch Murder screenplay is – an alternate Heavenly Creatures.

And it wasn’t the only one. In his unauthorised Jackson biography, Peter Jackson: From Prince of Splatter to Lord of the Rings (Random House, 2003), former Evening Post film critic Ian Pryor describes a kind of screenplay arms race in the late 1980s and early 90s as competing Parker-Hulme projects were shopped around. The best-known alternate version is Michelanne Forster’s stage play Daughters of Heaven, which premiered in Christchurch in 1991, before shooting even started on Heavenly Creatures, was published in 1992 and still gets performed occasionally.

But before that, Australian writer Louis Nowra wrote a version called Fallen Angels, completing it in 1987 – research took him to Christchurch and those with access to the National Library of Australia could seek it there. Nowra called the girls Juliet and Lisa and his script ended, so Pryor reports, with the girls in different jail cells, communicating via their imaginary/perhaps schizophrenic “fourth world”. Nice touch.

In the same year, British writer Angela Carter was commissioned to write a Parker-Hulme script. It was completed in 1988 and titled The Christchurch Murder. A little later, in the US, screenplay writer Wayne McDaniel wrote a version called Sugar and Spice that was said to have attracted the interest of Dustin Hoffman’s production company, with Hoffman even rumoured to have considered playing the chief prosecutor.

In 1992, Michelanne Forster submitted a TV script based on Daughters of Heaven to TVNZ. Between 1989 and 1992, Fiona Samuel also wrote a Parker-Hulme script, this time called The Pursuit of Happiness, with producer Bridget Ikin (Crush, An Angel at My Table) and then unknown director Niki Caro attached, but Jackson and Walsh’s Heavenly Creatures trumped them all and was the one anointed with Film Commission backing. And the rest is history.

But the unmade versions? While Nowra’s version is stashed in an Australian archive, Angela Carter’s The Christchurch Murder is more easily accessed; it was published in the posthumous collection of radio plays and scripts, The Curious Room (Chatto & Windus, 1996). Production notes in the book tell us that Andrew Brown of Euston Films commissioned the screenplay, but was unable to find a production company to make it. In his account, Pryor suggests that Auckland’s South Pacific Pictures had a hand in developing it with Euston but that Carter’s script “failed to satisfy all parties”.

So much for the business side, what about the art? Part of the reason this fascinates us is the possibilities of what a writer as brilliant as Carter would bring to it, knowing that she had both an original approach to fairy tales and mythologised stories – especially as metaphors for female experience – and knowing too that she had some appreciation of Hollywood’s dream factory, the lure of its saints, sirens and sinners. Both have some bearing on this story of teen-girl delusion and matricide (this Canterbury University thesis makes interesting connections between this Carter assignment and her famous book The Sadeian Woman). Of course, some things have to be present in any version of the Parker-Hulme story: the pair meeting at a Christchurch girls’ school; the intense and obsessive friendship with its fantasies of escaping to Hollywood and – emphasised by Jackson and Walsh in particular – a medieval kingdom of their own devising; finally, the murder of a mother in a park in the hills. But other elements of the story will appear and disappear depending on the version.

Carter called her girls Nerissa Locke (Juliet Hulme) and Lena Ball (Pauline Parker). At one point, Nerissa explains that her name comes from Shakespeare – but The Merchant of Venice not Romeo and Juliet. The descriptions still match: Nerissa is blonde and conventionally pretty; Lena is small and dark and walks with a limp (as in Heavenly Creatures, the girls bond over their histories of illness). But Lena is not unattractive: Carter describes her at one point as looking like “a desperately sexy witch”.

In its early pages, The Christchurch Murder even gives us the thrill of a Heavenly Creatures sequel, picking up where Jackson and Walsh left off. Their version ended on the moment of the murder, with the bloody shock of it jolting both the girls and the audience out of an increasingly feverish shared fantasy. They’re screaming, they’re covered in blood. Yet, one of the fascinating and awful things about the real story is that the girls were reported to have been in high spirits after the murder, when they were back at the Hulmes’ Ilam Homestead. In taking us into the immediate aftermath of the murder, Carter gives us some of that.

This is how it goes. In Victoria Park, there is birdsong and the constant sound of an axeman chopping wood. The girls rush into the tearoom, claiming that Lena’s mother has had a fall (“She cracked her head wide open”). Nerissa asks the proprietor of the tearoom to ring her father; importantly, it is actually her mother’s too-smooth boyfriend, Douggie Quinn (played by Peter Elliott as Bill Perry in Heavenly Creatures) who picks them up and drives them back through a recognisably 1950s Christchurch: “the long, straight road that leads from the Cashmere Hills into Christchurch”, past the Kiwi Bacon factory and onto Ilam Homestead, which “looms out of its lush garden like the witch’s house in ‘Hansel and Gretel’”. And if you’re counting witch references, it is only a page earlier that Quinn says to the girls, “Two hundred years ago, they would have burned you both for witches”. There is also a sense of complicity in this version: after the murder, Quinn helps the girls to burn their bloody clothes and neither Quinn nor Nerissa’s mother Mary seem too surprised at what happened.

On the night of the murder, the girls go back to Ilam Homestead, sleep in the same bed and wake in the morning when a police car arrives (“We must stick to the script whatever happens!”). Then, we flash back to Nerissa’s first day at school in Christchurch and move forward, chronologically, through the friendship towards the murder.

What else differs about the Carter version? For some characters at least, there is an idea of Christchurch as a provincial imitation, with desperate aspirations towards Englishness – “all the respectable citizens of Toy Town,” as Nerissa’s mother says. But at the same time, she finds it hard to believe that her daughter could be at the same school as the daughter of a fishmonger (“Christ. What an egalitarian place New Zealand is”).

There is also more family background – context, if you like. There is more about the affair between Walter/Bill/Dougie and Hilda/Mary and its effect on Juliet/Nerissa. More about the then-shocking fact that Pauline/Lena’s parents weren’t married. And there is the inclusion of Pauline/Lena’s institutionalised Downs Syndrome sibling (a younger brother in Carter’s screenplay, a younger sister in reality). Jackson has said that he steered clear of including this character as it seemed too “invasive”, but you can also argue that it compounds the tragedy of Honora and the Parker family to include him/her in the story. Lena sees her brother as something to be ashamed of, and part of the reason she was keen to join another family (“He’s the Monster of Glamis. He’s the dark secret of the Ball family. Mum must have done something dreadful to be saddled with him.”) All in all, family dynamics – or, more precisely, strained relations between mothers and daughters -- are more rounded and less cartoonish in the Carter version.

There are other powerful moments in the Carter screenplay. To raise money for their trip to Hollywood, Lena works as a prostitute on the banks of the Avon (“The willows become agitated. There is the sound of the man's harsh breathing, a whimper from Lena, the gurgle of the river”), based on an idea in Pauline’s diary. Their interest in Harry Lime – Orson Welles in The Third Man – is used more effectively here, to comment on their own amorality and nihilism (Nerissa: “I really liked Harry Lime. I liked his sense of innate superiority”) and Harry Lime’s big speech about the Borgias is even referred to when the girls plot to take their mother up to Cashmere (“So high up that the people look like ants”).

Hilariously, Christchurch’s A and P Show makes an appearance (Lena: “Hicktown in carnival mood”) with a very Carter-esque touch thrown in – a freak show tent, complete with alligator boy -- and a Third Man-ish Ferris Wheel. Overall, the Hollywood infatuation is stronger in the Carter version – references to the movie theatres and posters in Cathedral Square in the 1950s – but, crucially, there are no references at all to the part of the story that so fascinated Jackson: the girls’ imaginary medieval world of kings, queens and monsters. Not one reference. With that relatively childish element absent from the Carter screenplay, and obsession with movie star glamour emphasised, the girls seem colder, more calculating and less sympathetic – although, that might have become more complicated if actresses as good as Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet had been cast.

Finally, descriptions of Christchurch in the published Angela Carter screenplay suggest that she came here at some point. I would be grateful if any reader knows anything about this – I have a feeling that she came to New Zealand during the 1980s for Wellington’s Writers and Readers Week. Sadly, Carter didn’t live to see the Jackson/Walsh version of the story on screen – she died of lung cancer in 1992, aged 51. If you have never read her, start with The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus.

PICTURE: Doublet (after Heavenly Creatures), by Ann Shelton (2001). More here, via the Christchurch Art Gallery.

ADDED, May 23 and May 28: Both Fergus Barrowman and the International Institute of Modern Letters remember Angela Carter as a visitor to Writers and Readers Week in Wellington in 1990, so any research trip to Christchurch -- if there was one -- must have been separate and earlier.
Novelist Rachael King remembers Carter giving a talk to a small group in the English Dept staff room at Auckland University, in 1990. "Was so sad when she died."

Another Year

2011-05-10T13:48:00.003+12:00

In the overall scheme of things, Another Year is probably minor Mike Leigh – in its evocations of, for some, the threat or reality of adult loneliness (not a widely told story in cinema), it reminded me of Leigh’s relatively unsung Career Girls more than anything else -- but I appreciated its minimalism and its symmetry. We know that the Leigh process is about workshopping both characters and scenario -- this time, clearly around a four-season structure and meal-time conversation settings – and the process can have its risks (characters that get to the edge of caricature) but Another Year seems to be a film made with real human sympathy and expecting no less from us. While it may seem slight and undemanding as you watch it, you should reflect on it for a long time afterwards: what is Leigh’s position on happiness, especially as this comes straight after the pathologically positive Happy-Go-Lucky? It can run like a test on the audience, as it does on some of the characters: will you feel contempt or will you feel pity? And despite all the misconceptions about “realism”, there is artistry here: I really wanted to illustrate this with a still of cinematographer Dick Pope’s lovely set-up of the cold front room in Derby before the funeral, early in part four – which is of course winter. But none seem to exist.

Other Titans

2011-05-09T09:35:00.002+12:00

The old Christchurch Girls High School/Heavenly Creatures setting and location, as of Friday, May 6. Photo by Adrienne Rewi.

Lost city: Christchurch on film

2011-05-01T08:15:00.009+12:00

Driving north on Good Friday, finally able to go the full length of Montreal Street, you notice the first of the earthquake absences (more will follow). The Elmo’s Court apartments, whose form and colour had helped soften the concrete brutalism of the Christchurch City Council building, have gone. There is the sudden and surprising disappearance of the Strategy building. Between those two, the slowly disappearing form of the old, red-brick gothic Christchurch Girls High School building facing Cranmer Square.

A fence had gone and a side of the building usually hidden from the street was exposed. As we drove past, my wife said, “That used to be my classroom”. How will we remember these places that have gone or are going? Photos and museum records, memories, references in literature (Kate De Goldi on Radio NZ some weeks back, in an emotional discussion of her city in fiction and poetry) and maybe in film too. What can cinema show us of the lost city?

You have to start with Girls’ High, both setting and location for the best film ever shot in this city – actually, in strong contention for the best film ever shot in this country. Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994), written with Fran Walsh, is a nearly-two-decades-on classic now, but it was probably more unlikely at the time than many realise – not least because there were some other Pauline Parker/Juliet Hulme film projects at different stages in the late 1980s/early 90s (in a future post, I’ll talk about one of the other, unmade screenplays – by British writer Angela Carter, no less) and neither Jackson nor Walsh had any prior associations with the city or with the story. Perhaps that helped. And Walsh hinted that she knew something about, or was at least sympathetic to, the intensity of the girls’ friendship. But there was another thing that made this unlikely: a full dramatic feature had never been shot in Christchurch before.

Jackson gives us the familiar story: 1950s Christchurch as frightfully stuffy (not so stuffy that a working-class girl like Pauline Parker and upper-middle class British import Juliet Hulme couldn’t meet and get along, but stuffy enough that everyone registered the class difference). “Christchurch, New Zealand’s City of the Plains,” declares a polished voice speaking over an old Pictorial Parade newsreel that opens the film, with footage of the near-mythical city: daffodils in Hagley Park, the Avon, trams, Cathedral Square, Manchester Courts, crowds of cyclists, the college site (now the Arts Centre). The city appears as “a genteel and orderly outpost of the British Empire,” in critic Helen Martin’s words. The polished voice is then overpowered by screams (“It’s Mummy! She’s terribly hurt!”), in an obvious summary of the key idea that the brutal murder of Honora Parker by her daughter and her daughter’s friend was somehow an irruption of something evil or repressed through the genteel surface of the Garden City.

How class-conscious is this Christchurch? Juliet’s stature is such that a teacher (Liz Moody) licks her lips, virtually drooling as the well-bred girl is brought into her classroom. Later, another teacher says to Juliet: “A girl like you should be setting an example.” Later still, when her father, Henry Hulme, is gently let go by the college board that had hired him as Rector, he is told, “Surely a man of your calibre is needed back in England.” Class-consciousness and Anglophilia are inseparable. The very Englishness of the Girls High building and its Cranmer Square setting, lamp posts and all, is emphasised; at assembly, the girls sing “Just a Closer Walk With Thee”, a gospel song now recast as an Anglican school hymn (it rhymes neatly with the closing song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, the Mario Lanza version – Heavenly Creatures surely has Jackson’s smartest use of music). The garden at Ilam Homestead, the palatial Hulme home, is like a Home Counties paradise and, as imperious Juliet Hulme, Kate Winslet’s accent could cut glass.

Heavenly Creatures was filmed entirely on location in Canterbury over 11 weeks. In almost every case, the locations are the real ones, which is more unusual than you might think (see this fan pilgrimage website). Jackson’s timing was good: Girls High had shifted to a new location across Hagley Park by the time he came south to shoot, so he was able to talk the new tenants of the old building – the Women’s Embroidery Guild, possibly -- into letting him use it; the Victoria Tearooms in Cashmere, where the full gravity of the imminent murder suddenly dawns on the girls and us (Pauline urging her mother to “treat yourself” during the last tea stop), was pulled down soon after the film wrapped. The Theatre Royal on Gloucester Street appears in a couple of scenes, as a cinema where the girls see The Third Man and are then pursued by a phantom of Orson Welles (their fantasy world has turned on them). The jetty at Port Levy is still the jetty at Port Levy. Another New Zealand true-crime story, Out of the Blue (2006), didn’t have these advantages -- almost all of its Aramoana scenes were shot in a different settlement.

Besides Girls High, Ilam Homestead, now owned by Canterbury University, was the other key location. After the earthquakes, the homestead is still standing. I went to have a look three weeks after the February 22 quake. Access was restricted and there was obvious cracking on one brick wall but it’s clear that the building will survive. No such luck, of course, for the old Girls High building memorialised by Jackson, who might, in the long run, have done the school that publicly opposed his decision to film this story a favour. If it is a record of a place and an age, both have vanished now.

The port scenes in Heavenly Creatures – the daydreams of the girls leaving New Zealand on a ship with Henry and Hilda Hulme – were shot over the hill in Lyttelton. Jackson returned there for The Frighteners (1996). Much of the film’s US anytown of Fairwater was represented by Lyttelton in outdoor shots, for no more than about 10 onscreen minutes (the crew was in Lyttelton for three weeks). In some shots, Lyttelton looks like it could be a town on the Pacific coast of the US, perhaps northern California; in others, it looks too gothic (maybe because the first long Lyttelton scene is a funeral). Other outdoor scenes were shot in Wellington, around Miramar or at the decommissioned Air Force base at Shelly Bay. “Make it look like Middle America,” producer Robert Zemeckis reportedly told Jackson.

A second, long Lyttelton scene gives us more of the town. Michael J Fox’s psychic investigator/conman Frank Bannister has left the fictional newspaper office, on the corner of Canterbury and London Streets and is crossing the road into London Street's retail area. Some buildings and signs were disguised by the production and some were not: there is the Volcano Café, only recently lost, and there is a plainly visible sign for Lyttelton Liquor. But two other, slightly sneakier things make The Frighteners a Christchurch film, in part at least. A black-and-white photo of the real Parker and Hulme appears on the cover of a fictional video called Psychopaths, consulted by one of the characters; and there are poltergeist scenes in which beds rattle suddenly and crockery shatters. Fifteen years later, that looks just like an earthquake.

Another Christchurch. Like Heavenly Creatures, the Geoff Murphy film Goodbye Pork Pie (1980) used real locations. It also relied heavily on the generosity of New Zealand Railways. “Without [its] cooperation, the script would [have been] impossible to film,” Murphy says in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand (Victoria University Press, 1996). Murphy asked Railways for access to wagons, railway yards and so on in Wellington, Picton, Kaikoura, Christchurch and Greymouth, on 9 separate days, at no cost to the production; in return, Railways would get publicity when the film was released. To Murphy’s “astonishment”, Railways said yes. In the film’s closing credits “the people and cities of New Zealand” are thanked, but maybe it should really be New Zealand Railways (then owned by the people of New Zealand, though, so the difference might have been academic).

The film’s emblematic yellow mini doesn’t feature in the Christchurch scenes. Tony Barry, Kelly Johnson and Claire Oberman are riding in a freight container south from Picton, boxcar style. It pulls into Christchurch in the morning. The longer of the two cuts of the film gives us five minutes of downtime in the city before the train leaves again that night. From Sydenham’s old railway yards they cross an overbridge that is no longer there, from which the old Grosvenor pub on Moorhouse Ave is visible – now, coincidentally, to be the new home of Strategy Design since it lost the Montreal Street building. The now seriously damaged dome of Francis Petre’s glorious Catholic Basilica is still intact in the background. The three come through the old railway station, converted in the three decades since into a kids’ science centre and a multiplex (indeed, I was watching a movie there when the February 22 quake struck), and then there is a pan along Moorhouse Ave as a police car passes. They realise that they need disguises: the next scene is in an Arts Centre quadrant, the actors clowning around in costumes as a string quartet plays. Presumably, they have raided the costume department of a theatre. Then there is the tourist colour of the Wizard in Cathedral Square, and a scene inside a pub, with a punter reading a mocked-up edition of The Press (front page: “Police searching for mystery car thieves”). Then we’re back to the railyards and on a goods train at night, Christchurch idyll over.

Like Heavenly Creatures, Jonathan Cullinane’s We’re Here to Help (2007) is a Christchurch story – or a Christchurch myth. Property developer David Henderson’s account of battling the Inland Revenue for years, over its claims he owed tax, is retold as the story of an everyman against the sinister bureaucracy. The interiors – variations on tax department meeting rooms and suburban spaces – were shot in Auckland with a crew sent south to film Erik Thomson (who plays Henderson) interacting with recognisably Christchurch locations. Meaning that these inserts, the easy Christchurch shorthand, now adds up to a poignant map of the tourist city: a punt on the Avon river, the Arts Centre, the old council building (Our City Otautahi), the Provincial Chambers, the Robert Falcon Scott statue, and the decidedly untouristy – but very important to the Henderson story -- High Court. Exactly the parts of town that were most affected by the quake, rather than the suburban malls and residential streets of daily life.

There are facts and fictions. Gerald Black is clearly a version of Christchurch MP Gerry Brownlee, who was apparently no help to Henderson. The screen Henderson is blokier and more down to earth than the real thing (Thomson’s Henderson is forever being handed a beer while describing someone as “not a bad bloke”; by contrast, the real Henderson, according to the DVD commentary track he contributes to, likes to use words like “propitiative”). The number 17 to Bryndwr, on screen for seconds, turns out to be the same bus route Henderson took as a boy. And while Michael Hurst’s much-ballyhooed Rodney Hide act might be ridiculous (shaved head, fat suit and so on), actor Cameron Rhodes nails journalist Simon Carr, another of the right-wing forces that helped Henderson in his campaign.

Maybe one of the reasons Hurst’s Hide seems so ridiculous now is that, like Henderson, Hide has been humiliated since. Set in the mid-90s, the film has Hide as a new MP looking for a crusade that will make his name; 15 years and plenty of contradictions later, the political career appears to be finished. The film’s postscript says that “Dave Henderson is now back on his feet”. That was true when the film was released in late 2007, slightly less true when it was released on DVD in March 2008, and not true at all as of November 2008 – when the Christchurch City Council made the controversial decision to bail him out. And since then, he has been placed in bankruptcy a second time.

Even further down the credits there is this peculiar disclaimer: “This film does not purport to be an accurate account of the events involving Mr Henderson and the IRD.” Perhaps that’s a way of getting around the fact that some characters are composites and some are invented but it points you to something else, an entire dimension that this lightweight film misses. We are told that Henderson knew Hide some years earlier, before he called on the MP for help, but we are not told that they share a far-right, Randian, anti-tax philosophy. It’s one thing to take on the tax department because one of them insulted your girlfriend (as in the movie, and perhaps real life), but was there another reason Henderson fought so doggedly against the taxman? Journalist Bruce Ansley asked the question and Henderson replied: “The philosophic issue – I need to be careful here because the IRD will probably misquote whatever I say – is that I believe taxation is theft.” Yet nothing of Henderson’s far-right libertarianism made it into the film of his life. I wonder why?

Henderson’s form of property development was possibly a fleeting historical moment, too – one that, his second bankruptcy aside, the post-earthquake city might find hard to sustain. It was about urban gentrification, turning the abandoned brick warehouses of the post-industrial city into high-end living and leisure spaces (see the Manchester chapter in Owen Hatherley’s The New Ruins of Great Britain for a better description of this fashion than I could manage). As Henderson says on the DVD commentary track: “I look for opportunities and add value. I’m particularly passionate about old buildings … We’ve got the largest collection of heritage buildings in the South Island of New Zealand.” All that’s past tense now, for several reasons. Indeed, his cornerstore development – South of Lichfield – was already failing before the September quake.

Other strands: in his chapter on experimental film in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, Roger Horrocks writes that an Alternative Cinema co-op was established in Christchurch in 1973. And Vincent Ward was an art student at Canterbury University when he made early films The Cave (1976), “based on Plato’s famous image of human beings as cave-dwellers who mistake shadows for reality”, the 20-minute video work Void (1977) and the Janet Frame adaptation, A State of Siege (1978), the latter produced by another Canterbury arts student, Tim White (who, years later, would return to New Zealand to produce Out of the Blue).

Documentaries, too: some scenes in Patu! (1983) were shot in Christchurch, where the railyards meets the rugby grounds; all of Russell Campbell’s low-budget video doco Rebels in Retrospect (1991) was shot in Christchurch, during a reunion of the New Left-style 1960s/70s protest group Progressive Youth Movement, at the home of activist Murray Horton.

There are other films about the lost city. The city’s hosting of the 1974 Commonwealth Games was the subject of the National Film Unit documentary Games ’74 (1974), credited to John King, Sam Pillsbury, Paul Maunder and Arthur Everard. In his account in New Zealand Film: 1912-1996 (Oxford University Press, 1997), Sam Edwards writes that the documentary skips the usual cultural-nationalist preamble of “sparkling mountains and pristine valleys” and takes us straight to QE2 stadium and the “military planning and precision” of the opening ceremony. Russell Campbell puts it more strongly in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, saying that the “deglamourised” film “violated conventional publicity-film expectations” and “provoked howls of outrage from the public”. And in the New Zealand Film Archive, there is – unseen by me – film pioneer Rudall Hayward’s 20-minute-long A Daughter of Christchurch (1928), one of a series of at least 23 such location-specific films Hayward made between 1928 and 1930, with titles like Natalie of Napier, Tilly of Te Aroha and Winifred of Wanganui. From the looks of thing s, Cathedral Square and the Botanic Gardens were key locations. And some lines from the intertitles give you the view of the city from outside: “Christchurch - fairest of the four Queen Cities of the Dominion"; "When a man is run over by a bicycle in Christchurch they call it ‘death from natural causes’”; and – this is good -- "A Really Progressive Little Town - Always Forward in Going Backwards". In December, the grassroots Gap Filler initiative ran that film in an empty lot on Colombo Street. The "progressive little town", more than 80 years on.

PICTURES: Scenes from Heavenly Creatures, shot in Victoria Park and Ilam. My own photos of the Ilam Homestead in March 2011 (note some minor cracking in the red brick wall), and the bridge over the river. The real Dave Henderson poses with the poster of the film of (a version of) his life. The real Rodney Hide meets his unconvincing impostor.

Bill Pearson goes to the pictures

2011-04-18T08:31:00.004+12:00

Things I didn’t know: New Zealand writer Bill Pearson (1922-2002) was a first cousin of New Zealand International Film Festival director Bill Gosden; in fact, as Paul Millar’s excellent Pearson biography No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson (Auckland University Press, 2010) tells us, the younger Bill was named after the older one. “He would also become a close friend of his older namesake,” Millar writes. “They were both film buffs, and other shared interests quickly rendered any difference in age inconsequential.” Millar comes back to this point later: “In his final years, Bill’s closest relationship amongst the younger members of his family was with his cousin Nancy’s son, Bill Gosden, a lover of film whose passion had become his profession when he assumed the role of directing New Zealand’s International Film Festivals. Bill Pearson followed the festivals closely, taking Gosden’s advice on what to see, and attending screenings with Donald [Stenhouse] or on his own.”

And here is Bill Pearson as film buff, earlier in Millar’s narrative. The year is 1942 and Pearson is 20, teaching at Blackball School on the West Coast – and gathering impressions that would eventually become part of the novel Coal Flat (1963). In Coal Flat, the headmaster, Truman Heath, is a pompous traditionalist; the model for Heath seems to have been Blackball School’s headmaster, Morris Lyng. Millar writes that Pearson’s contempt for Lyng made it easy for him to skive off school “in order to see Orson Welles’ controversial new film Citizen Kane” when it screened at the Regent Theatre in Greymouth, a trip that required him to stay the night in Greymouth and miss the first half hour of school the next morning. Lyng would never have agreed to give Pearson the time off, but “he was to be away the following morning and the other teachers agreed to cover for me”, Pearson said.

Before seeing Citizen Kane, all Pearson knew was that it had upset William Randolph Hearst, and while most of the Regent's small midweek audience seemed “cheated of the sensations and comforts expected of the dream factory”, he took it as a profound experience that spoke directly to his ambitions as a writer:

For me the film was like John Dos Passos translated to the screen, like an experience of one of those brief expressive biographies that punctuate USA. It was a revelation of an alert and clear-sighted view of modern life that I would aim for in my fiction. Getting away from sentimentality and melodrama, from any kind of self-deception.

I sometimes walked up the hill to visit the house I had lived in as a child

2011-04-17T12:27:00.004+12:00

"I've been thinking about all of that, too. It seems to me that one life is actually many lives, and that they add up to something surprisingly long. My life then was nothing like my life now. I was someone else."

STILLS: The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971); Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995); Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001); Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007); The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928).
The title and the quote are from the stories "Ketchikan" and "Sukkwan Island", in Legend of a Suicide by David Vann (Penguin Books, 2009).

Subliminal helicopters

2011-04-16T09:28:00.005+12:00

Helicopters in movies: also the C roll of Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969). Assembled from scraps of Haight-Ashbury-era occultism originally intended for Lucifer Rising, mixed in with footage of the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park (plus their grim accomplices: Pallenberg, Faithfull, Hells Angels) and set to an abrasive Moog soundtrack by Mick Jagger -- seemingly replaced by Italian post-rock band Larsen on current internet versions (Anger's own doing? He has been known to alter the soundtracks -- when he toured Magick Lantern Cycle in New Zealand in 1993, the Janacek soundtrack to Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome had been replaced by ELO's album Eldorado), Invocation seemed in hindsight to condense all the chaotic energy of the late 60s into 11 minutes, with its associations somehow anticipating both the Manson story and Altamont. The first time I saw it, about 20 years ago now at a Wellington Film Society screening, I was convinced I saw helicopters all through it; specifically, an image of a US helicopter discharging marines into a field in Vietnam, with the movement of the marines synched with the stuttering forward-motion of Jagger's Moog soundtrack. The next time I saw the film, the image of helicopters was barely there. This is why:

New techniques for undermining conscious control are introduced [in Invocation of My Demon Brother]. The most striking of these is Vietnam footage of a helicopter setting down a troop of marines. Here, Anger printed one continuous loop of film on a C roll played simultaneously to the other two rolls. He has suggested that this image, which we only consciously register twice, is visible throughout the film with the help of infra-red glasses. The footage is intended to heighten the viewer's anxiety. Anger believes that audiences will sense the flow of men through the film, even when they are unable to see them.
-- Anna Powell, from "A Torch for Lucifer" in Moonchild: The Films of Kenneth Anger, edited by Jack Hunter. Creation Books, 2002.

Blades of glory

2011-04-13T19:31:00.011+12:00

Watching La Dolce Vita again the other morning, and thinking about the fantastic helicopter scene over Rome that opens it, with one helicopter shifting a statue of Christ and the other a news helicopter tracking it -- which has been interpreted as either a parody of the Second Coming or Fellini telling us that everything that follows this prologue is taking place in a post-Christian world (the second interpretation, personally) -- I wondered: is this one of the great helicopter scenes? Surely it is.

Call this a social media experiment. The best helicopter moments in films, I said on Twitter. Apocalypse Now. La Dolce Vita. Blue Thunder. Black Hawk Down. Those are the inevitable choices; the last two films are even named for their helicopters, films where machinery matters as much as humans.

Twitter responses: Emily Perkins nominated Thelma and Louise. Steve Braunias nominated Unstoppable. (We now have two Ridley Scotts and one Tony Scott). Charlie Gates nominated the helicopter moment in The Godfather Part III as the only good bit in that film -- a fantastic helicopter attack scene I'd totally forgotten about (two Coppolas now). Cheryl Bernstein liked "Goodfellas, in the last days before the FBI move in". Matt Nippert said "You'd also have to include Jarhead -- but admittedly that's the scene where the marines are cheering on Apocalypse Now ..." Is there a fresh way of doing helicopters after Apocalypse Now/Vietnam? Even Avatar's helicopter-in-jungle scenes were Vietnam derivatives. The other way is apocalyptic: spectacular helicopter business in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, with helicopter as both escape device and killing machine.

Music for deconsecration

2011-04-09T19:19:00.003+12:00

The footage is of Roy Montgomery performing in a sound art/experimental music event at St Luke's church, Kilmore Street, Christchurch, in March 2009. Roy performs rarely and this is one of those times when I've kicked myself for not going -- it is absolutely unrepeatable. The historic gothic revival church was so badly hit in the February 22 earthquake that it must be demolished. Tomorrow morning (Sunday April 10) it is to be deconsecrated by the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch, ahead of its demolition.

The famous movie dead

2011-03-26T18:54:00.004+13:00

"I'm troubled by movie dreams. Glamorous faces appear and disappear. All the great names. I find it troubling for some reason. I wake up fearful and unsettled. The faces are sad. Maybe that's it. The sadness of great fame. The famous movie dead. Dead but not dead. That's why I'm unsettled maybe. Because they're unsettled. Dead but not really dead. Never really dead. The whole concept of movies is so fundamentally Egyptian. Movies are dreams. Pyramids. Great rivers of sleep. The great and the glamorous with their legendary sphinxlike profiles. I wake up trembling."
-- from Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo, 1973.

Earthquake graffiti

2011-03-23T13:25:00.003+13:00

The corner of Gamblins Road and St Martins Road

Mirror on the Mirror

2011-03-18T09:42:00.001+13:00

"Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror is a film I’ve seen several times, and I can state without hesitation that it is the most profoundly meaningful film I’ve experienced thus far. Having said that, it’s the absolute last movie I ever want to watch. I will put on anything over The Mirror, usually a comedy I’ve worn threadbare. It’s a miracle that I’ve seen the film at all." From here.

Deconstruction time again

2011-03-16T12:37:00.003+13:00

One of the listed heritage buildings that appeared on the to-be-demolished (or "deconstructed") list released yesterday. This is around the corner from us, at 112 Centaurus Road, Huntsbury. According to the Christchurch City Plan, the house has been here since the 1880s.

The Crown Masonic Centre

2011-03-15T17:23:00.004+13:00

It's been nearly a month since the February 22 earthquake and it is still almost impossible to process the event -- still almost impossible to move beyond the sense that it has only just happened, that we are in the immediate aftermath. This is partly because so much of the central city, the best known part of Christchurch, remains behind a closely-guarded cordon, and we see images, in newspapers, on television and on the internet, of streets we struggle to recognise. The event is still beyond our comprehension.

I have been inside the cordon just once, from the north side, as far as Peterborough Street, to retrieve a few belongings from the former teachers' college building, where my father in law has an apartment. My sister in law made the same trip on a different day and reached for a movie metaphor: it's like the opening of Vanilla Sky. She meant that she was more overwhelmed by the quiet and emptiness than the physical destruction.

You can only understand it in small pieces, by registering what it has done to your immediate surroundings or to familiar landmarks. But these are small changes and against the tragedy of events at such sites as the CTV building and the Pyne Gould building, and the much greater tragedy in Japan, our snapshots of cracked footpaths and fallen bricks must seem trivial.

The building pictured here is the Crown Masonic Centre, a lodge on Wordsworth Street, Sydenham. For a time, this building was for sale. Indeed, a pre-February 22 Masonic newsletter (link), tells us that it was sold to the New Zealand Sikh Society in August, just under a month before the first earthquake. The damage from that quake caused it to close "and its long term future remains in doubt". That comment was made in December. It didn't look like this then.

There is something unexpectedly moving about the way events have overtaken these plans. The newsletter gives the history.

The Crown Lodge 138 celebrated its last night in The Crown Masonic Centre in Wordsworth St, Sydenham on Thursday 5 August 2010 with a small gathering of Brethren who marked the passing from one part of history and into its future. While The Crown Lodge Masonic Centre has existed since its foundation stone was laid on Saturday 9 December 1922 and it opened its doors to its first meeting on Thursday 2 August 1923, the Masonic Centre has been home to many different Lodges, side orders and long term tenants.

In the newsletter, Brethren of the Crown Lodge are pictured in a blue room with white columns. In the picture above, taken seven months later, the same room is ruined and open to the elements.

Eight years later

2011-03-10T08:27:00.005+13:00

"I remember seeing Zabriskie Point about then and that scene at the end when the house blows up and all those brightly coloured products go exploding through the air in slow motion. God, that made my whole year. That was the high point of whatever year that was."
-- Moll Robbins in Running Dog by Don DeLillo, 1978.

Twenty four years later

2011-03-08T08:32:00.006+13:00

What goes through your head when you're playing music this intense live?

At the best moments, nothing.

-- Michael Gira, interviewed last month.

Swans? Yes it was epic. All that stuff Michael Gira has said for years about rock music’s potential for transcendence, the white-light annihilation of the ego as both pleasurable and terrifying – they got all that out of the way in the first ten minutes and went on from there. You were pulverised, hollowed-out, elated; time among other things was destroyed (Jonathan Lethem). It lasts forever and you don’t want it to stop. When it does stop, you come to in the same room you walked into three hours earlier, but it feels like three days. If the mystical rhetoric sounds pretentious, there’s no other way to talk about what they’re up to: once you’re empty of thought, emotion, even a history, and you are ready to be filled up with something new (“the new mind”), Gira does his mock-preacher routine in “Sex God Sex”, calling loudly for a miraculous intervention – “Jesus Christ, come down now … ” – but nothing ever appears, night after night. What if you could simulate transcendent experiences but they were devoid of their traditional meanings? Would it be a good or a bad thing? Maybe that’s what it’s about. Transcendent nihilism, or something like that.

They also played "I Crawled". They were slow, loud, deep. They had two drummers. One of them was called Thor, a fact I'll forgive in this case.

Some people with better phones than mine have already put some clips on YouTube.

Pictured above: a lousy mobile phone shot of Gira in cowboy hat, drinking a beer in the Power Station’s signing area (like a fanboy, I bought a T-shirt and a ltd ed tour CD -- #133 of however many copies). Moments earlier, there had been an illuminating exchange. After 24 years, I finally had my chance to speak to the great man. In full, it went:

Me: Is there going to be a live album of this material?

Gira: Yes, and a DVD.

Me: Great!

Below, Auckland Airport, yesterday: always something there to remind me.

Swans

2011-03-05T12:35:00.004+13:00

Yes, this takes me back: 1987, Chris Knox's review of Holy Money in the Listener, reminding him of "War Pigs" and the Stooges' "We Will Fall", his illustration a painstaking copy of the six mugshots of the band on the inside sleeve, overlapping with just two of them (Gira, Westberg: older, less angry, perhaps more morose) above. Strikes me now that it would not have been the kind of thing Knox usually likes -- perhaps he didn't like it but just described it so well that I knew I would. Which is what a critic should be doing anyway. When I worked at the Listener ten years later I dug the review out and was amazed at how much of it I remembered verbatim. Should have taken a copy of it.

Free

2011-03-03T12:02:00.003+13:00

Riverlaw Terrace, St Martins

Opawa Community Church, Aynsley Terrace, Opawa

Opawa Cycles, Opawa Road, Opawa

Waltham Road, Waltham

Eastern Terrace, Beckenham

Time capsules

2011-03-02T09:22:00.008+13:00

For a long time, more than a century, Waltham was a suburb in the shadow of the gasworks. In fact, Waltham Road -- pictured above -- was once known as Gasworks Road; it appears in Christchurch newspapers under that name as early as the 1870s. The gasworks and the railways were big employers here; the streets were lined with modest, wooden workers' cottages. Even after the earthquakes, many of those cottages are still standing. Like Sydenham, a suburb of the same age which sits just to the west, Waltham has suffered from creeping light industry that has swallowed up residential streets and the widening of Brougham Street in the early 1980s which bisected the suburb and created cul-de-sacs where there were once through-roads. Of course, the gasworks and the railway yards closed down years ago.

Waltham School is one of the oldest in Christchurch but like many of Christchurch's old primary schools, it has relatively new buildings. According to my memory of John Wilson's history Lost Christchurch there was a programme of demolishing the old, brick, two-story school buildings as potential earthquake risks (Beckenham's went in 1979). Such foresight. Had those brick school buildings survived until last Tuesday, and then collapsed, the consequences would have been unthinkable.

John Wilson's Lost Christchurch -- a diligent record of demolished buildings, published in the 1980s -- will need updating. I would like to consult it but the only copy I am aware of is in the reference room of the central library, far behind the police cordon.

Brougham Village on Brougham Street, Waltham. Architect Don Cowey designed this "ambitious attempt at low-cost living" -- in the words of the Christchurch Modern website -- as a Christchurch City Council commission in 1978. It fits squarely within the post-war Christchurch modernism practiced by the better-known architects Miles Warren and Peter Beaven. Thirty years after construction, it won a New Zealand Institute of Architects award for enduring architecture. The NZIA said: This 1978 development presents an inventive and humanistic approach to the architectural endeavour of community housing. A fine-grained assembly of forms is generated from a thoughtful study of the relationships of living units and the urban issues of a long narrow site along a busy road. The fact that this housing is still used is a testament to the quality of the design and a gesture towards sustainability.

Architect Don Cowey was killed during the Christchurch earthquake on February 22. The Christchurch Modern tribute is here. More words on Brougham Village here.

Buried time capsules were discovered in Cathedral Square yesterday. But in a sense, nearly all of the post-earthquake work reveals traces of lost or buried history. I had wondered about this brick building at 110 Waltham Road. Before the September quake, a sign had identified it as the clubrooms of the Canterbury Mineral and Lapidary Club. But that must be relatively recent. Yesterday, a man was scraping mortar from fallen bricks outside. What was this building, I asked. A library, he said. And there are references to a Waltham Library in Christchurch newspapers as far back as the 1870s. A nice example: in the Star of September 6, 1877, the Sydenham Literary and Debating Club was to meet at the Waltham Library, to discuss "the Sunday Schools of the Future". Source: the National Library's Papers Past website.

The lost sights and the lost smells. Have you ever lived within sniffing distance of a maltworks? There is a cluster of old maltworks buildings on Waltham Road, which survived the quakes, looking only slightly scruffier than before. There was talk, in 2008, of a property developer putting townhouses on these sites; in the meantime, there has been car parts and firewood storage and post-industrial leisure time usage. Once a factory, now a paintball range and kickboxing gym.

Cracks on Vienna Street, Waltham.

This brick bungalow on Buffon Street, Waltham, has been red-stickered and is behind a Fire Service cordon, suggesting that it's unsafe to enter. The inscription -- IOOF no 30 -- tells you that it was once a lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, present in New Zealand since 1843. Below, the partially collapsed World War I memorial gate at Waltham Park.

Nearly a week

2011-03-01T08:35:00.005+13:00

"That’s it. I’m running away."

"Can I come too?"

"Okay."

"I’m going to go to China. It doesn’t have a fault line under it."

"Actually, China has a lot of earthquakes."

"Are they having one right now?"

"Take a photo of this fence. It’s broken."

"Come on, pumpkin. I want to go home and watch the news."

"I want to go home and have a bath."

St Martins Road, Gamblins Road, Wilsons Road. The carpark of St Martins New World. The St Martins community library. February 28, 2011.

Familiar and unfamiliar

2011-02-28T10:43:00.011+13:00

1. I photographed the sign above on my phone in December. It's on Ryan Street, Linwood. A friend of Rebecca lives here and I've been over a few times in the past year, to collect Rebecca, collect the car or both. The four interlocking NZs are a version, I guess, of the 1974 Commonwealth Games logo -- that year, the games were held in Christchurch -- and I wondered if the sign went up then, as part of a 70s beautification or civic pride project. It seemed like a trace of history in an ordinary suburban street.

To get to Ryan Street, you go along St Martins Road, through Opawa, over the railway tracks, along Ensors Road with that old railway land to your left and AMI Stadium in the distance, left into Ferry Road, past the Edmonds Factory Garden that marks the site of the long demolished Edmonds Factory, then take another left.

On Ryan Street last night, this pile of silt, three metres high:

They say that 30,000 tonnes of silt have been collected so far. There are estimates that 150,000 tonnes of it came up out of the ground last Tuesday. Some of it is muddy grey sludge. Some of it is turning into dust.

The drive back along Ferry Road:

Into Ensors Road:

Improvised signage on St Martins Road:

2. The story in Beckenham this morning is that two historic churches were pulled down overnight. I had never set foot in either, and indeed both were closed to the public since September and cordoned off, but they were landmarks for generations.

Beckenham was traditionally a lower middle-class suburb in south Christchurch that has gentrified over the past couple of decades. Gentrification is evident in the kinds of shops you see in the recently-opened Beckenham Central shopping centre on the corner of Tennyson Street and Colombo Street: a Pilates workshop, an organic grocer, a children's bookstore. Middle-class pursuits and tastes. The shops survived but the carpark needs work:

Across Colombo Street, a historic stretch of two-story brick shops was badly damaged in the September quake and pulled down more than a month ago. One of the historic stores that still stood took a bigger hit on Tuesday: that orange shape in the picture used to be a verandah on that shop, which has been unoccupied since September.

The first of the two churches to go was the Beckenham Baptist church. It was built in 1930 and had a heritage two listing with the Christchurch City Council (one being the most protected, four the least). It started coming down late yesterday afternoon.

This supermarket on Colombo Street was on fire on Tuesday night and remains closed:

There are makeshift water and supplies depots in carparks along Colombo Street:

The other church to go overnight was older, even more venerable. This intersection of Colombo Street and Brougham Street marks the southern edge of the central city cordon. That pile of rubble in the centre of the picture below used to be the Sydenham Methodist church, a stone gothic church built in 1878 and the heart of the community for close to 100 years (a school and a post office -- long since closed -- stood opposite). In September I wrote a story about how Sydenham, one of the oldest suburbs in Christchurch and long identified with railway workers and left-wing politics, was one of the neglected areas in the post-quake coverage. The Sydenham Heritage Trust was close to fully restoring this church which they had hoped to use as a community centre.

Five days later

2011-02-27T16:29:00.004+13:00

1. I was talking yesterday about the ordinary business of daily life that goes on through and around disasters, taking my cue from Tim Wilson's Their Faces Were Shining. Few things are more ordinary than dropping your six-year-old off at a friend's house for a playdate. Few things are less ordinary than using the short trip to scan, half unconsciously, for signs of earthquake damage. Pictured: orderly piles of silt shovelled from backyards and driveways await collection on Croydon Street, Sydenham.

2. Another shot of the Ballardian swimming pool at Beckenham School, from Friday's outing.
3. The news this morning says that the old Girls High building on Cranmer Square has been cordoned off and there are fears it will collapse. Three days after the September 4 quake (the warm up for this one, the rehearsal), I walked around that part of town with a colleague and this is what Girls High looked like then. The damage looks ridiculously minor from this perspective. Ensuing aftershocks worsened it, and for a time there was scaffolding or wooden supports against this back wall of the building.

Some will know the building from Heavenly Creatures. Girls High had already shifted to a new site when Peter Jackson shot the film and he was able to use the old building as a location. Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were at school here; Parker's mother ran a boarding house almost next door and Parker climbed the fence to get to school in the morning (a scene recreated for the film). Photos of the front of the Girls High building, seen from Cranmer Square, are in this impressively thorough online photo album of Heavenly Creatures locations. My wife also went to Girls High in this location, in the 1980s, before the school shifted to Fendalton.

There is a curious thing about buildings that are expected to fall: they stubbornly hold on. There was Manchester Courts after the last quake and we have spent how many days in a state of suspense, thinking that the Grand Chancellor hotel is going to drop at any moment.

4. Words of Comfort: Cantabrians of a certain age might remember Ray Comfort, a Christian evangelist who preached in Christchurch's Cathedral Square in the 1970s and 80s. He was an anti-drugs campaigner and a prolific publisher of small books about the evils of the hedonistic, post-counter cultural 70s (My Friends Were Dying was his first one, and apparently he did have ex-surfer friends who ODed). I suspect Ray Comfort was his real name. Alex Comfort was probably no relation.

When I interviewed him, a little over a year ago, he had been in California for more than 20 years, had done well out of a close association with sitcom star turned born again Christian Kirk Cameron and was devoting his energies to attacking atheist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins. His quixotic scheme was to republish Darwin's On the Origin of Species but with a Christian foreword and distribute it at American universities; he expected the Christian foreword, which he wrote himself, would disprove Darwin's original text. A few months later, I happened to interview Dawkins who found Comfort, and his plan, to be utterly ridiculous.

This morning, an email:

Philip,

I hope you are okay.

The people of Christchurch have been in our thoughts and prayers.

Would you like me to write you an article on the U.S. perspective of the earthquake?

Best wishes,

Ray

I am yet to hear from Richard Dawkins.

Disaster fiction

2011-02-26T15:00:00.008+13:00

About a month ago, I read Tim Wilson's novel, Their Faces Were Shining (VUP, 2010). Like a lot of other people, I was impressed -- but then I was expecting to be, thanks to Tim's great journalism in Metro and his television work as TVNZ's New York guy (in that capacity, he once interviewed my grandmother -- the clip was played at her funeral last year). Their Faces Were Shining is about the Rapture; specifically, one woman's experience of it. A Christian, Hope Paterson expects to be lifted up or carried away, but she isn't. So it's about her reconciliation with the ways in which she hasn't measured up to her belief system and it's about her marriage and it's about living through a catastrophic event and finding that it doesn't take too long before the abnormal becomes a new normal: how quickly you get used to your circumstances. "The world ends; the world carries on."

I read that Tim had drawn some of this from his experiences of covering disasters like Hurricane Katrina. How the world ends and the world carries on, disaster's ordinary, daily business: the power cuts and police cordons, the soldiers on the street, the addiction to news coverage, the conversations with strangers about the one event (where were you when?), the impatient crowds at supermarkets and gas stations, the concerns over water quality and expiration dates. Today, I pulled the novel out from one of the stacks of books that fell to the floor during the earthquake on Tuesday:

As we neared downtown, the streets betrayed the day's confusion. Tumbleweeds of discarded wrappers stumbled in the wind. Smashed soda and beer bottles littered the gutters, and the sidewalks too. An abandoned station wagon blocked the intersection of Sullivan and Anchor, hazard lights flashing, the doors jug-eared. A wheat truck had plowed into a liquor store, hemorrhaging its yellow cargo. The air smelled sugary, tipsy somehow. We passed a ShopRite, then a hardware store; every window in both was smashed. The glass fragments our tires crunched over resembled diamonds.

That was the disaster scene, moments after the Rapture. But this kind of thing, a page later, was closer to our Tuesday:

The house faucets released another gallon and a half into various containers. We schlepped them downstairs, and Rachel returned to her room. I sat at the kitchen table and, using as little water as possible, washed the soles of my feet. The quiet poured over me then, a corrosive, searching stillness. Zero cars on the street. No ringing phones. No television. A pure, agitating silence deprived even of the companionable hum that switched-off appliances make when plugged into live sockets.

This is Tim Wilson talking about the ordinariness of disaster in Stephen Jewell's story about the novel in the NZ Herald last year:

Taking his cue from the late JG Ballard, the dystopian future that Wilson envisions is distinctly humdrum. "He wrote sci-fi that was recognisable," he [Wilson] says. "It's the end of the world as seen from the kitchen sink. I wanted it to be low key, I didn't want it to be Hollywood sci-fi. It's a manageable apocalypse. The end of the world comes and the world keeps going. That's what I've seen when I've gone to these disaster zones. There's an earth-shattering event and then people get on with their lives. How do they do that? It's often very mundane things that concern you like how are my loved ones doing? Have I got some water and should I throw all the food out of the fridge?"
Rather than battling zombies or some other fantastical creature, Hope has more trivial concerns, including her rapidly diminishing bank balance, something that rings true in Wilson's experience.

"Money is important," he says. "When I was driving around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I was fortunate because I had a credit card that worked, so I was able to buy gas. There was one point where all these people were fighting for petrol at a petrol station and because I had a funny accent, the attendants said that I could have some. That's the kind of stuff that matters, the struggle for electricity, for water, all the things that we take for granted. I was able to do that through my job and I was able to write about it."

Three days later

2011-02-25T20:46:00.011+13:00

To walk to Beckenham School from our place, you have to cross the Heathcote River, using either a busy vehicle bridge running between Tennyson Street and Burnbrae Street or a footbridge. On their scooters in the mornings, the school-age girls -- Isla (6) and Vita (7) -- prefer the footbridge, which only gets used by other kids on scooters and bikes, but three days after the February 22 earthquake, I don't entirely trust it. Not that the vehicle bridge is looking so good either. Those cracks are new, entirely attributable to the quake three days ago; we had none after the larger, but more distant September 4 quake or its aftershocks. Within an hour, or maybe less, of the quake -- which struck at 12.51pm -- makeshift signs urging people to slow down on this bridge were put up. Roads were closed.

Isla is doing the school walk with me, on a day without school, as an exercise in seeing the local quake damage. When the quake struck, I was off work -- for which I'm thankful, reading these accounts from people I work with -- and watching a movie (True Grit), in a post-war railway station converted into a multiplex. The structure is solid but it has a unstable clocktower. The room shook, the screen went black, the lights came up, people shrieked, no one seemed to move. Was this different to other aftershocks? I tried to walk and the floor seemed to tilt; I had to hold myself up against the walls. The corridor was dark. Had audiences from the other seven cinemas already got out? People walked slowly and someone behind shouted, "For F---'s sake, run!"

The glass doors to the car park had smashed so we had to go the other way to the car park, onto Moorhouse Avenue. I saw buckled concrete on the footpath; no other aftershock had done that, or even the original quake. I looked north, up Manchester Street, and saw -- or thought I saw -- a white cloud rising up from the city. I wasn't sure whether I was imagining it; the day was overcast; the cloud looked like a special effect. When I came across this now famous photo two days later, I knew I had really seen it.

In the car, on the radio, a RNZ reporter talked about seeing the church opposite her office collapse. That would be the Durham Street Methodist Church and that would make this aftershock -- if it was that -- a very, very big one. Traffic lights were out and roads were congested. Short drives were taking a long time. At home, Rebecca was under the dining room table with Matilda (4) and her friend, Te Toa (3). The damage was much worse than on September 4. A heavy bookcase and a flat-screen TV were on the floor; either could have knocked out a small child. The kitchen cupboards were empty and bottles and cans were across the kitchen floor, covered in vinegar and soy sauce. Broken glass on the carpet. Books everywhere. Bookcases down in other rooms. Pictures down.

I left them there and got back in the car to get the girls from school. There was deep brown water across Eastern Terrace. Someone said that the far end of the street was closed, so I reversed back; then the other end was closed. The far end was open. You had to avoid the holes. The road had become narrow. Someone else said all the school children were on the field.

I ran through the school. Water was coming up out of the ground in places. On the big field at Beckenham Park, used by the school and by local cricket and football clubs, all the red-uniformed kids were sitting in orderly groups. Springs of muddy grey water were coming up out of the field at random -- liquefaction. Mothers were more distressed than children. One I know was as white as a sheet and shaking; another was sobbing. Teachers had clipboards of children's names, ticking off those who had been collected. We left a friend of Isla's crying. We tried to walk back through the school to get schoolbags and umbrellas but we couldn't, as the water had already become much deeper. We went home and spent three more hours under the dining room table. At 9pm the power came back on. Two days later, we had running water. As we listened to the radio on the first day, as the death toll grew, we knew we were lucky. The house rattles more than it used to, and the roof leaks, but we still know we're lucky. Last time, all of Christchurch was lucky, really -- but not this time.

Eastern Terrace, Beckenham. On February 22, the river -- which is clear when it hasn't rained for days or is brown if it has rained -- was an unusual metallic grey, the colour of the sandy or silty water that comes up out of the ground. There are piles of grey silt on the sides of roads, dug out of lawns and driveways. The colour of the Christchurch earthquake in the suburbs, the substance of it. Grey silt and dust.

Eastern Terrace takes you between the river and the park, with the duck ponds to your right. When it floods, the river and the ponds try to meet on the road. This is swampy land, drained for farms more than a century ago, but not entirely tamed. Once the rivers were full of eels and fish and the swamps were full of birds. Maori called the river Opawaho; the fish, eels and birds' eggs were a food source, on a route between Banks Peninsula and Kaiapoi.

At Beckenham School, the swimming pool. It was full of water before the quake. The drained swimming pool was one of JG Ballard's favourite post-apocalyptic images; drawn from his childhood in Shanghai after the Japanese invaded, it became a wider symbol of societal breakdown. But abandoned schools in general have a post-apocalyptic ambience. Remember that lovely moment in the film Children of Men? The deer walking through the empty school, reminiscent of photos of Chernobyl, where nature has reclaimed the ruins ("As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices."). This eerie, empty school three days after the quake had some of that: bags still on pegs, coats on chairs, pens and books on tables; everything left just as it was.

Two days after the quake, you heard stories of long queues at the six schools used as water distribution sites. Three days after, more sites were added -- including Beckenham School -- but where were the queues? I told the driver that a lot of people in this area had got out of town. There are no lights on in the houses, few cars on the roads.

Hello Janis, hello Dennis, Elvis, and all my brand new friends

2011-02-19T15:07:00.003+13:00

"They were now keepers of the music-art-literature flame even as, in the culture at large, that flame seemed to grow dimmer with each passing year." -- David Browne, from Goodbye 20th Century: Sonic Youth and the Rise of the Alternative Nation (Piatkus/Da Capo, 2008).

Because I notice this kind of thing, a list of the movie titles that appear in David Browne's Sonic Youth book:

Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002), Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), Backbeat (Iain Softley, 1994), Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), The Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol, 1966), A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002), Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (David Markey, 1984), End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999), EVOL (Tony Oursler, 1984), Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002), The Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990), Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997), A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007), Judgment Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993), Junebug (Phil Morrison, 2005), Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007), Kids (Larry Clark, 1995), Lick the Star (Sofia Coppola, 1998), Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), Lou Believers (David Markey, 1989), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller, 1985), Made in USA (Ken Friedman, 1987), Madonna: Truth or Dare (Alek Keshishian, 1991), Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006), Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964), Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981), My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), 1991: The Year Punk Broke (David Markey, 1992), One Plus One (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968), The Parent Trap (David Swift, 1961), Rap Damage (David Markey, 1991), Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994), The Right Side of My Brain (Richard Kern, 1985), Rock My Religion (Dan Graham, 1984), Rust Never Sleeps (Neil Young, 1979), Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995), Sir Drone (Raymond Pettibon, 1989), Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), The Song Remains the Same (Peter Clifton and Joe Massot, 1976), Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951), The Strawberry Statement (Stuart Hagmann, 1970), Submit to Me (Richard Kern, 1985), SubUrbia (Richard Linklater, 1996), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1988), Things Behind the Sun (Allison Anders, 2001), True Believer (Joseph Ruben, 1989), Video Days (Spike Jonze, 1991), The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999).

And that would be by no means exhaustive: there were tons of soundtrack appearances in the 90s, everything from Pump Up the Volume to Gun Crazy to -- hard to believe -- The Frighteners. And then you get Kim Gordon in Gus Van Sant's Kurt Cobain daydream Last Days (pictured above), flashing back to ten years prior when Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana and, in Browne's words, "Gordon had become a maternal figure to indie rock boys, always interested in hearing what troubled them and listening as they opened up about their music and lives". But this out-of-nowhere appearance of "Kool Thing" in Hal Hartley's Simple Men is hard to beat:

As the future bleeds into the present

2011-02-11T15:09:00.004+13:00

Title from the Independent's obituary for Daphne du Maurier, April 1989.

When the poster is as good as the movie: an occasional series

2011-02-09T15:01:00.003+13:00

A poster for the Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul). The poster is by Chris Ware, author of the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth which I'm pretty sure -- and I really should look this up -- was Chris Knox's choice of all-time favourite book on that Emily Perkins book show, The Good Word. As usual, Knox wasn't wrong ...

The secret lives of dancers: Black Swan

2011-02-06T21:31:00.009+13:00

“I was always turned on by the idea of reinventing the werewolf movie with a were-swan film, turning Natalie Portman into some sort of creature.”
– Darren Aronofsky interviewed by Nick James, Sight and Sound, February 2011.

“The origins of Nina’s war of identities aren’t clear, and this is the movie’s greatest strength: it doesn’t explain what doesn’t need to be. I don’t want to know if she’s actually schizophrenic or in fact a strange magic being that really does grow feathers. Why does Nina scratch? When did it start? Where is her dad? How old is she? Her relationship with her mother is clearly perverse, but one we can’t exactly finger.”
-- Kartina Richardson, "Black Swan and Bathrooms", Mirror, January 3, 2011.

A man probably wouldn’t have picked up on that which Kartina Richardson discusses so thoroughly in the post noted above, or at least this man didn’t – the importance of bathrooms in Black Swan, especially in relation to Nina’s identity/identities. Bathrooms as the site where important switches happen or selves appear. One of the remarkable things about Black Swan – almost the most remarkable thing – is that a male director (Aronofsky) and three male screenplay writers (Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin) have produced a film that, as Sight and Sound critic Lisa Mullen put it, “speaks to the abiding concerns of all ‘women’s pictures’: bodily imperfection, impossible male expectation and the terror of old age.” Yes, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher got into some of these areas too, but that came from a woman’s story -- a novel by Elfriede Jelinek.

Of course, one – possibly even two – of those concerns were also in Aronofsky’s last picture, The Wrestler. The superficial comparison is that both films are a vehicle for a big, faultless performance from a star playing a performer, one on a comeback and one an ingénue, just as the actors (Mickey Rourke, Natalie Portman) themselves are. There are several levels of identification going on: Mickey Rourke is Robin Ramzinski is Randy “The Ram” Robinson; Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers is Odette and Odile. A difference: the wrestling world seems to be one of casual, easy camaraderie, even between guys who have to pummel each other in the ring, while the ballet world of Black Swan seems viciously competitive (at least according to Nina’s subjectivity, which isn’t exactly reliable). A deeper similarity is that in both stories, a choice is made to sacrifice everything else about life to the greater cause of performance – or art, if you can call wrestling art. In The Wrestler, there is the razor blade moment – Rourke’s fighter slicing his own forehead in the ring for dramatic effect; in Black Swan, starvation, obsessive scratching and other forms of self-harming, which take on a delusional quality (are feathers growing out of my back?). Aronofsky has been working in this field since day one: his first film, Pi (1998), is about a place where psychotic individualism meets paranoid genius.

The were-swan theme Aronofsky refers to in the Sight and Sound interview is only literal for seconds but it’s within the film from start to finish: metamorphosis. We know how Odette’s metamorphosis comes about in Swan Lake, the ballet at the centre of the story – there is a sorcerer with a spell – but not Nina’s metamorphosis. I think Kartina Richardson is right to say that this lack of explanation is actually one of Black Swan’s strengths, especially in an entertainment culture that tends to over explain. We are wrong-footed: Nina looks to be in her twenties but lives like a 12-year-old, infantilised and trapped by mother, with the scenario calling up a range of gothic arrested-development stories from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? to Carrie. That said, the film is not quite horror and not quite camp; more an oppressive, phantasmagorical melodrama that blends both (here, props must be given to the great Barbara Hershey as the terrifying/terrified mother). It is oppressive in its almost constant use of hand-held close-ups in underlit rooms – a nocturnal New York of apartment, rehearsal studio and, for light relief, a bar – with a sound design that plays all manner of tricks on us. The Wrestler was ultimately within a realist tradition, which the hand-held style is associated with (the behind-the-shoulder following shots come straight out of the Dardennes) – but in the stranger, riskier, more unpredictable Black Swan, the same style becomes just one more expression of an anxious, unstable, unexplained subjectivity.

Hypnagogic cinema

2011-02-05T11:14:00.003+13:00

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007); Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947); Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977).

Maria Schneider 1952-2011

2011-02-04T09:28:00.003+13:00

In The Passenger, Barcelona.

What I Wouldn't Give for Twenty More Years

2011-01-28T12:00:00.003+13:00

The Godfather Part II. 1974. Photography by Gordon Willis.

The Fighter

2011-01-25T15:44:00.002+13:00

You wouldn't believe it if it wasn't a true story. Or based on one. Usually, real life is more like the fictional The Wrestler than the fact-based The Fighter. That conundrum aside, The Fighter gets you over your reluctance to ever watch another movie about boxing through its immersive realism and the immediate shock of Christian Bale's acting as the charismatic, talented, useless, drug-damaged Dicky Ward. Bale has the crazed and emaciated look you see in addicts and ex-addicts -- the only time Bale's extreme weight loss method acting has seemed like more than a stunt to me. And no, I didn't think David O Russell had a film as good as this in him but then I didn't think Darren Aronofsky could or would make a movie like The Wrestler. Does The Fighter have problems? Only this big one: Mark Wahlberg's Micky Ward seems both underwritten and underperformed, a spectator in his own story, overshadowed by the undeniable skill of Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo. The latter is surely the most horrific movie mother since Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom -- and that's not a bad comparison, or a better one, in the end, than The Wrestler. Both The Fighter and Animal Kingdom are about the intensity of family. The family business -- crime or boxing -- is almost incidental to the way that the stories both criticise and yet reinforce dangerous, clannish loyalty.

Herzogian

2011-01-22T15:08:00.003+13:00

The jungle, existing exclusively in the present, is certainly subject to time, but remains forever ageless. Any concept of justice would be antithetical to all this. But is there justice in the desert, either? Or in the oceans? And in the depths? Life in the sea must be pure hell, an infinite hell of constant and ever-present danger, so unbearable that in the course of evolution some species -- including Homo Sapiens -- crawled, fled, onto some clods of firm land, the future continents.

-- Werner Herzog diary entry, April 12, 1981. Published in Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Ecco, 2009.

Christology, pre-history

2011-01-20T07:49:00.001+13:00

The little birds know by now. They don't fly there anymore

2011-01-12T11:39:00.003+13:00

Il Deserto Rosso. 1964. Photography by Carlo Di Palma

When the poster is better than the movie: an occasional series

2011-01-10T13:48:00.003+13:00

A Polish poster for Godzilla vs the Sea Monster. More bizarre and quite exceptional Polish and Czech monster movie posters here.

Hair

2011-01-09T12:34:00.004+13:00

Bruno Bettelheim remarks in his classic analysis of the fairy tale, The Uses of Enchantment, that “Rapunzel” is “the story of a pubertal girl, and of a jealous mother who tries to prevent her from gaining independence — a typical adolescent problem.” But it can also be seen as a story about the adoption of a poor and beautiful young girl by a prosperous but overpossessive older woman, who later takes drastic but eventually unsuccessful measures to isolate her daughter from the world and especially from men. Sometimes the child is literally imprisoned in a tower; in other cases, the captivity is more symbolic.

More the first than the second in Disney's Rapunzel reboot, Tangled. And in fact, there is a whole other motive that seems like a pretty inspired addition to the story. Sometimes (The Princess and the Frog, Shrek Forever) being a parent at these movies feels like penance; but not here. And we only saw it in 2D.

The Alison Lurie essay on Rapunzel was written before Tangled, but anticipated it:

There will surely be more versions of “Rapunzel.” Already a full-length animated Disney film is in production and scheduled to be released in 2009. The director, Glen Keane, has declared that it will be “a story of the need for each person to become who they are supposed to be and for a parent to set them free so they can become that.” Clearly, there are parallels here to recent young-adult versions. But Keane has also said that the movie’s visual style will be based on the painting The Swing, by the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Since the point of this painting, also known as Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette, is that the young man standing below the swinging girl (though not the viewer) can see up her foaming skirts, Disney’s new “Rapunzel” may turn out to have an unexpectedly erotic undertone.

Not sure any erotic undertone made it in, really. Or none I detected. Here's The Swing:

Given that more or less every one of Disney's fairy tale movies has been about the passage through adolescence and into independence, it's remarkable that it took MouseCorp more than 70 years to do this story. But if it is, as rumoured, the last Disney fairy tale movie, it's a good way to go out.

The whale

2011-01-05T16:06:00.009+13:00

How realistic was the possibility of being swallowed alive by a whale? Assuming that Disney's Monstro was the first whale you ever saw, either real or fictional …

Philip Hoare in Leviathan, or the Whale (Fourth Estate, 2008), his fascinating and maybe even Sebaldian study of whaling culture, its harbours and sites and histories, its novel -- Moby-Dick -- and the huge shift, in much less than a century, in our perception of whales (once terrifying, now almost cuddly):

Such stories would persist, from the whale that gulped down Pinocchio, to George Orwell’s Coming up for Air, in which the narrator recalls his Edwardian father reading of ‘the chap … who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice’, adding that ‘he turns up in the Sunday papers about once in three years’.

The American Museum of Natural History’s “positively horrifying set-piece of a life size sperm whale doing battle with a giant squid” gave Noah Baumbach’s divorce black comedy The Squid and the Whale (2005) its title. The teenage son of divorcing parents finds meaning or comfort or just something sadly relevant in this image of two monsters from the deep locked in eternal combat.

In 1952, Hoare reports, a 70-foot fin whale was caught off Trondheim, Norway, and preserved on a 100-foot lorry, which toured Europe, Africa and Japan “appearing in such unlikely places as Barnsley, Yorkshire, before ending up in exile in Belgium. It was a scenario reminiscent of the Hungarian film, The Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), in which a travelling leviathan creates psychic upset in a Cold War-era town and becomes an allegory for totalitarianism – ‘Some say it has nothing to do with it, some say it is behind everything’ – just as the Czech poet Miroslav Holub imagined,

There is a serious shortage of whales.
And yet, in some towns,
whaling flotillas drive along the streets,
so big that the water is too small for them."

But Bela Tarr would never be so straight-forward as to say that his whale is an allegory for this, that or the other. Eg, in Senses of Cinema:

The object is an enormous stuffed whale, making rounds in villages as part of a small circus. When I asked Bela Tarr what the whale meant for him, he answered, "I don't really like talking about individual things in my films." I was reduced to asking him how he built the whale, "It was a lot of iron, some plastic. We had a scientist girl come in to design it."

In the Senses of Cinema piece, a comparison is made with the “sea monster” washed up on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita, also a blank screen for whatever morbid preoccupation you want to project onto it.

Roped to this ersatz whale, Gregory Peck nearly drowned as Huston insisted on take after take of Ahab’s final moments. But it is only now, watching the movie again, that I see something shockingly real in these scenes. Intercut with sequences acted out in a studio tank – betrayed by the wrong-sized waves and an anatomically lurid, back-projected sky which turns Gregory Peck’s Ahab into a kind of pantomime demon king – Huston inserts footage of sperm whales being hunted off Madeira. Here his film comes closest to the truth, in the mortal spout of dying whales, the gushing crimson fountains. It is an unforgettable, Hemingway-like gesture; only instead of a dying bull, it is the world’s greatest predator that perishes, publicly, as advertised, on screen. -- Philip Hoare on John Huston’s Moby-Dick (1956).

But now that whaling is mostly finished, you get whales in stories revealing the better sides of our natures. Free Willy (1993) is not covered by Hoare but one of its prophets, the 60s celebrity killer whale Namu, is cited as an “emblem of a new age”. The failed Jaws rip-off Orca (1977) merely showed that no one wanted to be scared of whales anymore. By the time you get to Niki Caro’s Whale Rider (2002), whales are – in my own prose from way back then – “elemental and beautifully unknowable”.

Whales got portentous both in movies and in life for Niki Caro. As she did publicity for Whale Rider, she told journalists about seeing whale strandings and wondering what kind of omen they were.

The young woman is Caro herself on the day she accepted Whale Rider as a film project and immediately heard of a whale dead on the sand near her beach house. "We've been haunted by whale strandings throughout this film process," she explains. "On the day we announced the film, two whales came into the bay (at Auckland), circled twice, and left. All the Maori people immediately said, 'Oh, you're blessed.'" Sitting in her Auckland kitchen, I study the photograph and I'm impressed.

After she consulted Maori friends, sure the whale stranding was a bad omen, Caro learned that traditionally "it was great luck to have a whale stranded like that - it meant that people got meat, oil, bone for weapons." Lucky, that, because the whales have kept on coming.

Coinciding with the film's release in New Zealand, a mass of whales were stranded on its remote Stewart Island. When I saw Caro and her producer, Linda Goldstein Knowlton in San Francisco on the day of her San Francisco International Film Festival screening this past spring, she mentioned a story on a big whale stranding in the Florida Keys (where a whale also was stranded at the time of her Sundance showing.) Some have escaped; some have died. By now, Caro is spooked: "Ask them to stop now, please. I know it's a good sign, but ask them to stop."

It’s odd that Philip Hoare doesn’t talk about Whale Rider, the Witi Ihimaera novel it was adapted from, or the Ngati Porou legend of Paikea that inspired both, as the whales definitely got to him too. Inevitably, he goes swimming with whales near the end of his book. The sea's cosmic blackness is womb-like. He has already told us his mother has died, largely to set up this big moment of whale mysticism:

From sheer fear the moment turned into something else. I realised that this was a female. A great mother hanging before me, intensely alive. For all her disinterest, it seemed there was an invisible umbilical between us. Mammal to mammal; her huge greyness, my unmothered paleness. Lost and found. Another orphan.

I could not believe that something so big could be so silent. Surveyed by the electrical charge of her sixth sense, I felt insignificant, and yet not quite. Recreated in her own dimension, in the dimension of the sea, I was taken into her otherness …

The best of 2010

2010-12-17T18:40:00.010+13:00

1. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
See here.
2. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)
See here.
3. The Social Network (David Fincher)
Both plot and theme -- the corporate legal wrangles and the world-changing ambiguities/potential of social media – in this skilfully-written and sleekly-directed film were pushed into the background by the compelling, difficult, sympathetic outsider-character study at the centre, Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. Presenting as more than borderline Asperger’s, always paranoid, too-serious and sour, this Olympian genius struggles with nothing less than the burden of being himself. As for world-changing, it seems pretty clear that David Fincher certainly and writer Aaron Sorkin possibly share their Zuckerberg’s iconoclasm about the Harvard world and inherited money, so that his I-want-to-belong/I-don't-want-to-belong motivations look more complicated than simple revenge. By my diagnosis, then, the film’s closing zinger -- “You’re not an asshole, Mark, you’re just trying hard to be one” – has it all wrong.
4. White Material (Claire Denis)
Shot in Cameroon, but set nowhere in particular, this immersive, abstract, temporally complex film has colonial expulsion/nationalist revolution as a pan-African archetype playing out eternally: the white squattocracy, the messianic rebel leader and child soldiers, violence as historical inevitability. Isabelle Huppert is the coffee plantation owner, facing ruin.

5. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
Less vicious than Margot at the Wedding and less adolescent-awkward than The Squid and the Whale, this not quite crowdpleasing Baumbach comedy has Ben Stiller -- controlled but constantly at risk of explosion, breakdown or both -- as Greenberg, the unemployed housesitting narcissist who fails, Zuckerberg-like, to connect. Except that in his case he’s mostly an asshole and he’s mostly not trying not to be one.
6. Four Lions (Chris Morris)
See here.
7. Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)
You should always worry when someone in a film produces a chainsaw.
8. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
See here.

9. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
Or, the girls looked at Johnny. How many American directors Coppola's age are as consciously constructing a body of work? But while some themes -- some unavoidably autobiographical -- recur, this is the most subtle of her four films, and not a burnt-out, LA-set Lost in Translation. Key close-ups: the "old" face of Johnny in the make-up room, the last shot. And aren't you glad Coppola stopped at two pole-dancing scenes? One last thing: we know that the audience missed what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation, but do we know if Cleo heard what Johnny said over the noise of the helicopter?
10. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
See here.

Runners-up: A Single Man, Boy, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Fish Tank, The American, The Road.

Over-rated: Animal Kingdom, The Secret in Their Eyes.

Dud: The Killer Inside Me.

Twenty-eight years ago: "It's like 1954."

2010-12-13T11:28:00.004+13:00

"I went to see them twice ... They played twice in Christchurch. August 1982. They were frightening, absolutely frightening. It was amazing to see. They had two drummers and you don't often see a band with two drummers. There's something inherently worrying [about it].
"They were incredibly well-drilled. Maryrose Crook, who had a bit to do with the organisation of the tour at the Christchurch end, said that they were like Mark E Smith and a rugby league team. That's how it worked. Basically there was a bunch of boys who just wanted to drink beer and talk about football and Mark E Smith, who was completely running the show. He clicked his fingers and they did stuff. Which didn't last long: he clicked his fingers once too often at Marc Riley. He [Riley] was photographed at Christchurch International Airport arriving and they put his picture in the paper, which I think the Fall found absolutely unbelievable. They had Totally Wired as a single, which went top 20 if not top 10.
"As soon as some friends heard they were coming, they rushed out and on this billboard on the south end of Colombo Street, in Sydenham, they sprayed up in huge letters, "Bang Fucking Bang! The Mighty Fall Are Coming!'' Which indicated the level of excitement. They are one of the greatest things ever in rock music. Who could not be profoundly influenced by the Fall? Only someone with cloth ears.''

-- Bruce Russell, during a Wire Invisible Jukebox with the Dead C, 2007 (suitably murky audio here). I would love to see a photo of that billboard, if one exists. Jonathan Ganley at Point This Thing has two great posts on the 1982 tour as it hit Auckland, here and here.

Test screenings

2010-12-12T10:35:00.002+13:00

Asked in a 1963 interview whether his films were made for any particular audience, he replied: "Oh, goodness, no. They were just made for me ... My excitement in life was to discover something that was exciting to me. Now how the hell can I work it out if it has to be significant to an audience? It's the last thing on earth I'd be interested in."

-- From an appreciation of Len Lye by Ian Francis, Sight & Sound, January 2011.

Picture of the week

2010-12-11T09:17:00.003+13:00

From Penny Red, via Rouge's Foam.

Actually, the newspaper headline could as easily, as cynically, have been "The Dream is Over" (cf this excellent G Tiso blog from March).

Leaving Britain: Classless

2010-12-09T21:16:00.008+13:00

You think you’re so clever and classless and free. The title of Carl Neville’s Classless: Recent Essays on British Film (Zer0 Books) was always going to give you an anniversary-appropriate earworm, not least because the other relevant historical use of “classless” – John Major’s announcement that, as of 1992, Britain was going to become a classless society – is less well-known outside the UK. But also this: Neville’s slim book about recent British film is really about the 90s, the decade that saw the gentrification or adoption of aspects of working-class culture by the middle classes (football, the funny-for-five-minutes ironic lad mag loaded, the very use of the word lad, even the media-managed emotional outpouring around Princess Diana’s death in 1997), all within a similar cultural and commercial boom as was seen in the 60s, when Britain – or some in it – also saw itself as transcending or outgrowing class. The first film that Neville discusses – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – got this 90s-as-the-new-60s gloss and weightlessness: the opening chase sequence (above) with its nod to A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles-like energy of the, er, lads. “A temporal elision of the bitter 70s and combative 80s,” Neville writes, of Trainspotting and the Britpop years.

Reading Trainspotting in class terms, Neville – author of the Impostume blog – sees its middle-class Renton (Ewan McGregor) as slumming it in heroin addiction, which is a choice according to the film's famous early voice-over. Choice became a familiar neoliberal word in the 90s, when talk of "choices" in areas like education and health really meant less public ownership and the urge to privatise. Choose heroin: Renton’s usage might have seemed like a sarcastic reversal of that kind of language but Neville argues that it is in the same -- hard to avoid the pun -- vein. Heroin use, he writes, might have become epidemic in the post-industrial heartland of England and Scotland through the 1980s, but if you choose it, “there are no reasons, no wider forces shape you”. Neoliberalism’s free agents are free to choose. For Renton, heroin addiction is like a gap year, something he can leave at any time, and there are shades, although Neville does not tease them out, of the dilettantish tourist in Boyle’s film of that quintessential late 90s gap year novel, The Beach.

All this talk of neoliberalism reminds you that everything coming from the publisher Zer0 Books sits more or less in the shadow of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, an equally slim but more powerful book that appeared about this time last year. Accessible but intellectually rigorous, it had the energy and immediacy of internet argument – Fisher runs the K-punk blog – transferred to the page. But I think Zer0 have opted for too much immediacy this time. By which I mean that Neville needs to have a word with his editor: the book is riddled with typos – Mamma Mia is often spelt Mama Mia etc – titles are sometimes not in italics but should be and other proofing lapses. And the argument is well-developed in some places – pieces on Trainspotting and The Queen – and less so in others. There are a lot of ideas, sometimes too condensed, meaning it’s a small book that deserved to grow bigger: the 90s Northern feelgood cycle – your Full Montys, your Billy Elliots, your Brassed Offs – is only mentioned in passing while the rigorously class-conscious Ken Loach appears only as a predecessor of the era Neville discusses, meaning that films as valuable as The Navigators and Sweet Sixteen (where heroin is not a fun lifestyle choice) are missed too. I could also have done with some unpacking of the educational snobbery in The History Boys – play and film – which seems pertinent in light of the reinstalment of Oxbridge privilege in British politics and culture. In the introduction, Neville does note that he's writing before the 2010 British election and -- presciently -- that "class as a political issue seems to be returning from exile". (As an aside, this take-down of The History Boys was bang-on.)

But it’s too easy to say what a book isn’t. Writing like this doesn’t happen nearly enough – or it happens online but not often in non-academic publishing (I think of J Hoberman’s interweaving of political history and film criticism in The Dream Life). Another way of talking about Classless is to say that studies of Trainspotting and The Queen could have grown into books of their own. The Queen is a fascinating case: a film about a major 90s event seen ten years on, when it had fully crystalised into mythology and when Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan were able to project back into 1997 the disillusionment about Tony Blair that had developed in the meantime. In The Queen, emotional outpourings and demonstrative funerals are seen as aspects of working-class culture, and Britain's institutions survive, post-1997, by co-opting them and minting a new myth of classlessness: “The Aristocracy needs to be less reserved, aloof, obsessed with decorum. It redeems itself by becoming more proletarian.” And Blair met them in the middle by becoming less Labour. Anyway, the media-assisted myth of classlessness masks the realities, as Neville writes in his introduction: “England is caught in an unresolved tension between its apparent modernity and the reality of its deeply embedded semi-feudal social relations.” But Neville’s opposition to Blair and his media-spun cult of the people’s princess, which he sees as reaching a kind of perverse climax with the death of reality TV star Jade Goody 12 years later, makes him seem unexpectedly nostalgic for the stiff-upper-lip reserve of the pre-Diana Royals. Writing about Frears but, you suspect, really himself, he says: “[As a staunch Republican] he can still be saddened by the sober, stoical, detached, controlled element of Englishness gradually yielding under the pressure of compulsive confessionalism and opinionism.”

Maybe the only way is out. Neville closes with comments on the best two British films of the past decade (I’d agree), Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (above) and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (or “Jonathan Glazier” and “Lynn Ramsay” in Zer0’s spelling). Both films are set in Spain, the site of British working-class holidays rather than Mamma Mia’s middle-class Greece, but Sexy Beast in particular gets Spain not as a degraded tourist zone but as “a warm, emotive, physically expressive, unrestrained zone of rich libidinal and affective outpouring”. Or: it’s sensual, hot, dry, bright -- in every way, not Britain. Morvern Callar’s Spain is more complex, a place of transformation for a mysterious Scottish woman, offering both a relief from her grief and psychological freedom. Her escape from Britain is appropriately ambiguous.