Fuck a 2008 Melbourne International Film Festival program/guide. Unlike that most untrustworthy of glossy-ass salesmen, ”Cut! No, no, no…” has yr real word - the Knowledge God truth. We have the media kit, and so starting today it’s the “Cut! No, no, no…” 2008 MIFF Preview, strand by strand.
It’s heavily researched, it’s heavily opinionated, and it’s yours in time for the program launch on July 11th. Gut hunches like McNulty. Radio chatter. Picking horses by silks like yr sister at the Melbourne Cup.
WE BE FORECASTING:
“FREE RADICALS”
Possibly already my festival highlight and MIFF’s newest strand, Free Radicals is a “showcase [of] the experimental, and the avant-garde without being obscure and unattainable”. Some copped-out sounding copy right there, but the proof is in the esoteric pudding, no?
BIRDSONG — Albert Serra’s debut Honor De Cavalleria (which screened at MIFF ‘07) was that year’s most challenging and rewarding work, and here’s what I thought then (scroll down) and later. Here, his newest is a cryptic B&W re-imagining of the biblical Magi (’the three wise men’) and their journey to Christ’s infamous farmyard entreé. Kasman liked it, and old neutered sabre-rattler l’Humanité (whilst quietly yet repeatedly disenchanted by its austerity) praised it as symbolic of Serra’s quest for cinema’s essence and described it as a work of major importance at Cannes this year.
CAPITALISM : SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM : CHILD LABOUR — Avant-garde icon Ken Jacobs‘ slave imagery diptych is, in fact, two very short films, and runs for six minutes; considerably shorter than his seven-hour found footage opus Star Spangled To Death.
EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY– Michelange Quay’s debut feature – its several-minute opening shot of the Haitian shoreline unbroken - announces itself instantly as the work of an ‘artist’ (and all that that connotes). A wildly contentious series of tableaux , it has divided camps into those generous enough to appreciate his dialectic, those who see only heavily coded pretension, and those who – perhaps rightly – see in Quay an artist more fascinating than his work.
MEMORIES — Much as the media kit says: a triptych of shorts from Harun Farocki, Eugène Green, and the celebrated Portugese minimalist Pedro Costa (the subject of a long overdue retrospective at The Melbourne Cinematheque this November).
MY WINNIPEG — Too many obscenely positive reviews to really bother choosing any particular ones, but this was rather exciting (from late last year): after his most recent and wonderful Brand Upon The Brain! played MIFF ‘07 sans the live accompaniment that some US cities enjoyed Guy Maddin told Twitch he would be here soon. Whether he meant to narrate My Winnipeg (the final work in his current trilogy of autobiographical works) as he had recently at the Toronoto Film Festival, or meant something else (or somewhere else!) is merely one of the unanswered questions here.
PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS – Perhaps more gently pushing the experimental boundaries is this, Rithy Panh’s vérité documentary about a Cambodian brothel which, by all accounts, sounds no more experimental than Wiseman.
PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND — Winner of the NSFC Best Experimental Film award earlier this year, and called ‘a masterpiece’ by at least one of my favourite film writers, John Gianvito’s “unconventional landscape film” has been compared to the work of maybe my favourite avant-gardist: James Benning.
REVUE – An archivist’s dream, Sergei Loznitsa’s compilation of 50’s-60’s Soviet propaganda is apparently a move away from the simpler presentation of his similar and acclaimed Blockade; the move being largely a structural one, one involving – gulp! – the shaping of viewers’ perspectives. Screened very recently at Sydney.
THE SILENCE BEFORE BACH – Obviously Pere Portabella has been too busy being a Spanish parliamentarian to make more than two films in thirty years. He has, however, helmed over a dozen works, and is to be the subject of a Queensland Art Gallery retrospective in August, but we Melbournians will seemingly only be getting this, his newest, an abstract and “reflective” meditation on the epochal music of Bach. But!: the return of Yo’s Alex Brendenmuhl!
“WE CANNOT EXIST IN THIS WORLD ALONE” — A live dialectic described as “lively” at NZFF very recently, this series of ten short works by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell involve 16mm prints AND strobe lights.
