Onward

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2016

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Films 13 through 31
Chiefly splendid

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My stamina is fraying, my body is aching (sitting is the cruelest pose), but the view, why, the view is still glorious. Eight days in and favourites have already been found.

Found in the lyricism of Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta) as I wandered about the ruins of a Bourbon palace of the kings of Naples with a buffalo calf named Sarchiapone. In every grass roll as Scarlatti and Donizetti played. In the Land of Fires reflected in those large black eyes. Found, when wearing Pulcinella’s mask, Sarchiapone's voice was heard. Found, in possession of a soul; never doubted it. All “are equal, determined and stubborn,” (Marcello) but for some of us, our destiny is not in our control. Some of us, like the 'useless' male calf and Pulcinella, must put our faith in a world “too busy to stop and explain itself.”
 

“Despite everything, I’m proud of being a buffalo. In a world that denies we have a soul, being a buffalo is an art.” —Sarchiapone

Found in Ceyda Torun's fine felines of Istanbul — Rat Catcher, Deniz, Duman, Gamsiz et al. — and the people who are happy to brush along beside them in Kedi. In both films, how I view my own relationship with animals. It is not one of dominance. It is not one that expects a ‘return for investment.’

From the way every little thing can be viewed in the inspiring Don’t Blink: Robert Frank, and the real-time feel of Cristi Puiu’s humorous, pained family gathering Sieranevada to the utterly beautiful, black and white love tale of Juho Kuosmanen’s The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (replete with a closing promenade of the real Olli and Raija), at this stage and always, any kind of top ten is going to be a list I will not be able to make.

Yes, this featherweight (dreamer) may be fatigued, but it has been (and continues to be) glorious.

Bathe me, soft-edged melancholia. Film 13 NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH (D Akira Kurosawa). A postwar film shot in 1946 during the workers’ strikes at Toho under the guiding principle: “there is sacrifice in the struggle for freedom. Devastated by the human and material losses of the war and facing widespread homelessness and economic collapse, the now Allied-occupied Japan became the canvas on which this trained painter would make his mark as a filmmaker.” (Michael Koresky, Postwar Kurosawa, The Criterion Collection)

From the devastation of Kurosawa’s rice paddies to war-ravaged, spare parts Afghanistan, film 14 THE LAND OF THE ENLIGHTENED (D/S Pieter-Jan De Pue), we’re as ready as we can be.

(Postscript: Today’s small, bright act, renewing our Donkey Sanctuary adoption renewal for Zena (in light of The Land of the Enlightened’s lapis lazuli mine donkeys).

At the foot-operated bellows for the human drama of film 15, HARMONIUM (D/S Kôji Fukada).

“The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds” for film 16, THE SALESMAN (D/S Asghar Farhadi). “He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong,” but I think this film is going to be all, all right. Onward, to the Comedy Theatre.

No chance encounter here. This one's all planned. Ready for film 17, JULIETA (D/S Pedro Almódovar). Here’s to #56filmsin17days. To storytelling. “Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.” —Pedro Almódovar

Meow. Meow. Purring my way into film 18, KEDI (D/S Ceyda Torun). Lead on, Kamil and Gamsiz. “Kedi is not a documentary about house cats or the strays you occasionally see in your back yard. Kedi is a film about the hundreds of thousands of cats who have roamed the metropolis of Istanbul freely for thousands of years, wandering in and out of people’s lives, impacting them in ways only an animal who lives between the worlds of the wild and the tamed can. Cats and their kittens bring joy and purpose to those they choose, giving people an opportunity to reflect on life and their place in it. In Istanbul, cats are the mirrors to ourselves.” (Kedi)

Though sad to leave Istanbul’s fine, fine felines, now in a Romanian apartment, pulling up my chair to the table for film 19, SIERANEVADA (D/S Cristi Puiu). Adevărul se spune glumind. (A joke’s a very serious thing.)

Through the woods to… film 20, COSMOS (D/S Andrzej Żuławski). Omen, what omen?

awkward |ˈôkwərd|
adjective
1 causing difficulty; hard to do or deal with
2 causing or feeling embarrassment or inconvenience
3 not smooth or graceful; ungainly
Stumbling into film 21, TONI ERDMAN (D/S Maren Ade). Awkward. Yes, “I like the word. There’s no real German word for ‘awkward.’ We only have the word ‘embarrassing,’ but that’s something different.” —Maren Ade

“An elegy for the dying ways of living and seeing, .... where being a buffalo is an art” suits me just fine, post trip to the dentist. With two pearly crowns (with white highlights to replicate calcification and striations for realism) cemented in place before today's film 22, LOST AND BEAUTIFUL (D Pietro Marcello). Stamina, found, though wings, still absent. “The main essence of editing is not about connecting frames, but separating them; therefore not in joining them but in their distances... The most important thing is that the key elements interact at a distance like charged particles and create an emotional field for the entire film.” —Pietro Marcello

Hobbling, shuffling, shambling to film 23 THINGS TO COME (D/S Mia Hansen-Løve), as we prepare to tickle the halfway point (#56filmsin17days). “I never told Isabelle Huppert to walk in a certain way, but I always give a lot of attention to the shoes the actors wear, because it changes the way of walking, and talking, too. It is true that in my films, you’ll see people walking a lot. I was often told I keep filming promenades, people strolling, and while I wasn’t aware of it, it made me realise that portraying people, capturing their presence has to do with thinking, talking, but also with how they look, not just the face, but also how they walk, their gait, how they appear physically, with their entire body. There is a landscape being formed by their presence.” —Mia Hansen-Løve

Film 24’s geography: Brazil, world’s apart. DON’T CALL ME SON (Mãe só há Uma) (D/S Anna Muyleart).

Film 25 belongs to the anticipated THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MÄKI (D Juho Kuosmanen) shot on monochrome 16mm stock. “We’ll make sure that when all this is over, you can say that August 17, 1962 is the happiest day of your life.” (Elis Ask, Mäki’s manager)

Creating my own “off moment” film 26 DON’T BLINK: ROBERT FRANK (D Laura Israel). “So you go out on a more different road. There is a risk involved in that. And I think if an artist doesn’t take risks, then it’s not worth it…. I just wanted to change my way of working. It didn’t matter to me whether it was art work or it is called collage or graphic. I just wanted to change my way of creating images.” —Robert Frank

Returning to the Forum, sou’wester on, ready for the typhoon of film 27, AFTER THE STORM (Umi Yorimo Mada Fukaku) (D/S Hirokazu Kore-eda).

Film 28, SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN (D Mikio Naruse), 1954. “Naruse’s method consists of building one very brief shot on top of the other, but when you look at them all spliced together in the final film, they give the impression of a single long take. The flow is so magnificent that the splices are invisible. This flow of short shots looks calm and ordinary at first glance then reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath. The sureness of his hand in this was without comparison.” —Akira Kurosawa

We've travelled from Italy in the 1700s with a water buffalo by way of Finland in the ’60s to present-day Afghanistan, Romania, and Tibet, but we’ve yet to head to the found footage of the Soviet Union in the month of August, 1991. Film29’s geography belongs to the verge of collapsing; it belongs to THE EVENT (D/S Sergei Loznitsa).

Film 30 belongs to STARLESS DREAMS (D/P/S Mehrdad Oskouei). “Having already produced and directed documentaries about male juvenile delinquency, I decided to continue with one about the female variety. It took seven years to finally get permission to start filming and the result is the very first movie about girls in the correctional and rehabilitation centres of Iran. The film tries to act as the voice of voiceless innocent girls whose mistreatment and difficult upbringing led them to a life of delinquency. I personally think that we as a society are guiltier than the girls in question and hope that my film will help change our attitude towards them …. someone once asked Frederick Wiseman what the secret to the brilliance of his filmmaking was, and he said, “I limit the geography of my stories.” The biggest concepts in the universe can be found in the smallest of spaces. One needs only to look deep enough…. I have to make films and be the voice of the people who don’t have their own.” —Mehrdad Oskouei

(Stamina willing) final animation for #MIFF2016 belongs to love unfulfilled and the family of the Sea King. Down, down, to where the fish orchestra play, film 31 is the subterranean fusion of magic and reality with LITTLE FROM THE FISH SHOP (D Jan Balej).

Until next time, letting it all seep in, like Yoshiko advises (Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm), while longing for a sunflower brain-rinse (Mikio Naruse’s Sound of the Mountain).

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Image credit: Still from Laura Israel’s film, Don't Blink: Robert Frank (2016)