The end

For Encounters at the end of the world, Werner Herzog and a cameraman were sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation to make a documentary. He tells us he told them he wouldn’t be making yet another documentary about penguins. Instead, he has different questions of nature: why do men wear masks and feathers, and feel compelled to always chase the bad guy; why do ants keep slaves; and why don’t chaimpanzess ride gazelles off into the sunset?

The resulting film was obviously made with tight time pressures. A lot of the interviewees seem very unrehearsed. Herzog seems to have filmed them straight away, just after meeting them. You can see his direction: ‘say such and such, and then slowly look over there’. If they go on for too long, he cuts them off and summarises what they’re saying (or meant to say) in a voiceover. A travel story bore gets interrupted with ‘Her story goes on forever.’

The usual artist in Antarctica thing is to play up its pristine beauty, but Herzog doesn’t. Anyone who’s read a lot of science fiction will recognise McMurdo Base. It is what bases on the Moon and Mars will look like: drab prefabs, large earthmoving equipment, piles of stuff just dumped somewhere convenient, the occasional figure heavily wrapped in protective clothing, and dirt everywhere. It’s not pretty.

The science fiction theme runs throughout. One researcher describes the neutrinos he’s looking for as ‘belonging to a different universe’. One scientist describes underwater life in terms of science fiction monsters. Herzog asks in response if mammals colonised the land to escape the horror. The same scientist shows 50s science fiction doomsday films to the researchers, and when he gets suited up to go diving its very much like an astronaut putting on the many layers of a space suit. Herzog’s narration of a great sequence in tunnels under the South Pole turns it into a tale of alien archaeologists from the future discovering the last relics of humanity – a frozen sturgeon and some plastic flowers.

There are lots of other treats as well.

I was meant to go to the Patti Smith doco on Sunday as well, but it clashed with Doctor Who. Still, Herzog was the perfect finish. It was easily the best film I saw.

More films

Klaus more than lived up to expectations. His delivery of the line 'Do unto others...' needs to be seen to be believed.

Yesterday, we went to Funny games, which was really good. Full on, but well worth it. The preppy game-playing psychos were perfectly cast. The opening credits said it all. You have the nice perfect middle-class couple playing a game trying to guess the nice classical music the other's put on, and then when the credits start full on metal Naked City erupt in over the top of it.

Today was We can not exist in this world alone [sic]. There were two directors, with five films each. I liked one of them, and very much disliked the other.

I'd forgotten about these two when listing the films I was going to earlier. Unfortunately, it puts me over ten in all. I'm really trying to cut down on the amount I go to. In previous years, I've gone to as many as 30, which is a ridiculous amount in two weeks. It means you can't properly appreciate them. There's no space around them in which to reflect. It's like going to a really good restaurant, ordering lots of really nice food, and then having a speed eating contest.

Film Fest

Yeah, so it’s Film Fest time again. I’m not going to much this year. So far I’ve seen two, and I have another five to go.

The gala opening night film was Man on wire, which is about a French tightrope walker who broke into the Twin Towers, spent all night stringing a wire between them (which sagged quite a lot), and then spent 45 minutes walking along it the next morning. He did eight crossings and would skip just out of reach of the cops trying to grab him.

The film was mostly interviews, some reconstructions of the break-in, archival footage of the preparations, and still photos of the main event. I really liked that there was no actual footage of it. You had to reconstruct it in your head, based on the photos and descriptions. The aftermath (in terms of destroyed personal relations) was subtly alluded to by a seemingly incongruous reconstructed sex scene.

The other, To each his own cinema, 36 three-minute films about going to the flicks, was a big disappointment, a parade of clichés. The only good ones were the jokes.

Coming up, I have docos about Patti Smith and the 50s LA art scene, the latest Herzog (a late confirmation), Klaus Kinski going off, and The Man from London.

All gone for another year

The Film Fest's over for another year. There was nothing else to match INLAND EMPIRE, though I did like the way the doco on Kurt Cobain was put together. Apparently I got some hostile looks when I was raving to a friend in the loo afterwards what a dick he was.

Masterpiece

INLAND EMPIRE is David Lynch's masterpiece, a three-hour tour de force. As someone who is well known for his lush images, his decision to shoot it entirely on digital video was a bold one. It works.

This film brings together all of the themes and images he's been working with throughout his entire career. Don't go looking for some key that unlocks the plot and makes sense of it all. That misses the point entirely. Strap yourself in and enjoy the ride. If you want a plot, it's about someone suffering from temporal dysfunction disorder (yes, I just made that up). That someone is you.

I'm hanging out for it to come out on general release. It requires several viewings. There are lots of internal connections, as well many connections to his other works. The internal connections include certain lines that get delivered in different ways by different people throughout the film.

I loved the video quality: its graininess, what it did in different lights. He shot a lot of it himself over a number of years and wrote (and performed) several of the songs. There are lots of great extreme close-ups of people bugging out. There are some amazing compositions. I was lucky enough to be sitting in the middle of the front row, so the screen was my entire field of view. Absolutely brilliant. What a ride. I want to go again.

Update:

The criticisms of this film seem to revolve around it being incoherent. I am not impressed by this argument. It's like hassling punk rock for not having concept albums and 20-minute virtuoso guitar solos. I reckon this film is very coherent. It hangs together very well, but does so on its own terms.

I am convinced that the main character is you, the viewer. You need to play your part and put it together in your head. My main evidence for this is the woman at the start and end who is watching tv in a hotel room. She is a surrogate version of you, just as Nikki is a surrogate version of her and Sue is a surrogate version of Nikki.

If you go looking for conventional narrative and conventional characters to relate to, you will be disappointed. It's like those Russian dolls or fractal geometry – a reiteration of the same shape on different scales. It also helps to be familiar with Lynch's other work, the significance of red curtains and strobe lights etc. And, of course, he's using classic avant-garde techniques, so it probably helps to be familiar with them too.

Round-up

You, the living was fantastic. There were a couple of bright colours (the gold of the tuba and the pink of a woman's boots)! There was some camera movement (once forwards, once backwards)! There were songs! I wish I could remember some of the lyrics. Here's a good summary.

That winner was followed by another on Saturday night: Control. The actors made a pretty good Joy Division covers band. It was all in black and white, but with subtle tones. The two bits I remember in particular are the warm reddish tone introduced when things started coming together and the cold blue after Curtis'd topped himself. The best line was, after he'd had a fit on stage and things were looking bleak, his manager saying 'It could be worse ... you could be the lead singer of The Fall.' For a classic example of a review that tells you more about the reviewer than the film, see here. Plonker.

I didn't make it to the Swiss crazies at Happy. I'd forgotten I'd arranged to go sailing early the next morning. However, the weather gods were against us: too much wind on Saturday morning and not enough on Sunday.

On Sunday arvo, there was A walk into the sea, which was an extremely nice counterpoint to the Warhol doco and an investigation into the vagaries of memory (especially when you're as self-serving as Paul Morrissey).

That evening was Destricted. I had low expectations, but even they were disappointed. I was really surprised by how literal and cliched they all were. No-one came out of it well, except perhaps Marina Abramovic and Larry Clark. Clark's film was a good social history of pornography, showing how much the ubiquity of porn in our society affects young men's behaviour.

Tonight is David Lynch's latest, which I'm looking forward to (despite having heard some bad things from a couple of people).

Drella etc

I went to a four-hour doco on Andy Warhol last night. There was lots of archival footage, which was really good to see, but I particularly enjoyed all the commentators competing to see who could make the silliest claims. When I went out for a cigarette during the intermission (the only person in the entire theatre to do so, I might add), I found I had several texts from various people telling me to check out this story on Campbell Live.

I'm off to the new film by Roy Andersson tonight. His Songs from the second floor is one of my favourite films ever. It was so painterly – no camera movement, each shot a composition – and that's without mentioning the cheery subject matter. After that, I'll be off to Happy to check these guys out.

Dada siegt!

Glorious

I'm in the middle of a glorious two-week holiday. I haven't gone anywhere. I'm just enjoying not going to work. I haven't been doing much painting, but I have been making a book for a friend of mine's kids, in which they get abducted by aliens and have various adventures in outer space.

I've also just been enjoying things: smoking, hot black coffee, the colours at twilight, the sound of the rain. And now the film fest's started. I'm not going to very much this year, only about 14 or 15. I went to some hand-painted animations this morning, which as you'd expect were patchy. Two in particular were very good, especially the Russian one, which very appropriately used impressionism to portray a reactionary story set in a romanticised Tsarist Russia. Tonight's the latest by Werner Herzog. I'm very much looking forward to it.