This lolcat tolcat lovecat is about to tuck in to a delicious slice of Levinhurst

Dammit. Missed out on tickets to The Cure’s “Reflections” show at the Sydney Opera House at the end of the month. They are playing their first three albums – Three Imaginary Boys, Faith and Seventeen Seconds. Would have loved to witness the minimal synth grandeur of those albums in all their truly depressing glory… perfect at the Opera House!

Harold and Maude directed by Hal Ashby

Catharsis is a point in the narrative of a film when an emotional realisation or internal transformation occurs, experienced by the audience, and often felt via identification with the simultaneous cathartic renewal of the protagonist. Not to be confused with the crisis, when the forces of antagonism reach their dramatic pinnacle, it is rather the release of these traumatic tensions within a film, as evidenced below in the examples of Hal Hartley’s Trust (1990), Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990).

Catharsis has its origins in Greek Tragedy, and is defined by Aristotle in his seminal work of dramatic and literary theory, Poetics or The Art of Poetry (c. 335 BCE). The term is derived from the Ancient Greek καθαίρειν – to purge, cleanse or purify (which Aristotle used as a metaphor, as it was prior to this a medical term for menstruation). Aristotle believed that tragedy could have a corrective effect on the audience – who may bring sadness or ill-feeling towards others from their own lives to the theatre, but through the exercising of these emotions, re-experiencing fear and pity via the story, may also find that dramatic catharsis purges them of negative feelings. This theory, and the Poetics in general, was counter to Plato’s assertion that poetry encouraged men towards hysterics and uncontrolled emotion.

Sophocles’ defining work of tragedy, Antigone (c. 442 BCE), is concerned with a main character (Kreon) who is neither purely good nor evil, who through his well-intentioned but short-sighted actions brings tragedy upon himself and his family. By executing Antigone, his niece, he inspires in the audience both fear and pity for the characters who suffer as a result – his wife and son who commit suicide and Antigone herself, whose only crime has been to give her brother a decent burial (which Kreon has denied him as an enemy of the state). These tragic events bring about a restoration of the social balance, creating a feeling of relief and transformational resolution to mitigate the sadness experienced by the audience. Another example of catharsis is to be found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the drama created by Hamlet’s inability to enact revenge for his father’s murder, and the ensuing tragic deaths of himself and many others, is released by his eventual killing of Claudius, his usurping uncle, once again re-establishing the social order.

In American director Hal Hartley’s second, and arguably his best, feature film Trust (1990), the plot concerns Maria Coughlin, an intelligent yet ignorant, materialistic and naïve (to the point where she pronounces this word “naive”) high-school drop-out and Matthew Slaughter, a misanthropic, idealistic and highly intellectual electronics repairman. These two misfits are united by fate, just as Maria tells her father of her pregnancy (to an uncaring and narcissistic football-playing boyfriend), upon which news Maria’s father dies of a heart-attack. Both desperately lonely, they face dealing with both Maria’s pregnancy and feelings of guilt at her father’s death, and Matthew’s disaffection, linked to intense bullying by his father. Amidst the chaos of their conniving and unloving families, together Matthew and Maria define the love that neither of them have ever really found (as the comically simple formula “trust, admiration and respect equal love”. The tragedy of their cerebral love-affair is that Matthew, in his attempt to do the right thing (get his job back at the factory, a job that drives him to depression and extreme acts of aggression, in order to support Maria, himself and her baby), becomes insensitive to Maria and her real feelings, and to his own true self, losing them both on a blind path towards social conformity (Maria – “Your job is making you boring and mean”, Matthew – “My job is making me a respectable member of society”).

The crisis of the film occurs as Matthew attempts to blow himself up with a grenade, taking the computer factory with him, and Maria (thinking Matthew has not only lost his way, but cheated on her with her treacherous sister) has an abortion – scratching all plans for a happy future together. Matthew is arrested, and catharsis occurs as Maria locks eyes with him as he is driven away in the police car, exchanging knowledge of their transformation in one long look. They have lost the only love they have ever had, but at least they have learned what it means, and how essential being true to oneself is to keeping it.

In Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), Harold, another love-starved misanthrope, barely out of his teens and spoiled rotten by his mother with everything but real affection, stages theatrical suicide attempts to try to get some kind of reaction. Harold’s idea of fun is to go to funerals (his everyday habit of dress allows him to blend in easily), which is where he meets Maude, his antithesis. Maude is 79 years old, and embraces life so heartily she bruises its ribs. They are opposites of their stereotypes – Harold is cynical, tired and despondent whereas Maude is vivacious, cheeky and unconcerned with consequences. Their love affair, bridging such an age gap, challenges societal convention and horrifies Harold’s family, yet is deeply transformational and educational for both Harold and Maude. Harold learns to love life, and Maude learns to love death – a necessity, she has decided, given the inevitability of her fading physical self. Maude knows that death is a natural part of life, unless it is the terrifying mechanistic death of war and genocide, which she knows well as a Holocaust survivor (this is a satirically anti-war film, released during the Vietnam war).

Harold and Maude’s intensely moving catharsis occurs when Harold, proposing marriage on Maude’s 80^th birthday, realises she has taken a fatal overdose of pills, and that this is really her goodbye party. Harold rails against this terrifying prospect, taking her to hospital in an ambulance, refusing to let her go the way she wishes to be. Finally he has no choice, she dies. Harold drives his car off a cliff, as Ashby cleverly fools the audience into believing Harold has really committed suicide this time. The film ends as we see Harold has jumped out of the car at the last moment. He plays the banjo, finally able to celebrate that both life and death are part of nature, and are to be embraced. Both fear and pity (for Harold and Maude) are evoked to great dramatic effect in this conclusion of the film, yet the natural order of life is restored and we let these feelings go again with a great sense of release and edification, as we too feel ready to wholly celebrate life and death, essential to a full experience of our own humanity.

Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) is a clear favourite of mine amongst his films, which has much to do with its intelligent and deeply emotional exploration of the extremes of man’s (or monster’s) vulnerability and kindness on the one hand, and selfishness, small-mindedness and fear of the “other” on the other hand. Its quite devastating catharsis plays a large part in it being the kind of tragic film that you want to see again and again, rather than feel too depressed about to revisit. It is also yet another film about an outsider (which says something more about my taste in narratives). Edward is an artificial boy, created by an inventor who died before he could replace the scissors he made for hands with real ones. He lives lonely in an empty mansion on the hill until an Avon lady, Peg, from the suburb below takes him under her wing, inviting him to live with her family. He gains grudging acceptance by the community for his talents at hedge and hair trimming, falling in love with Peg’s daughter Kim in the process, until two scheming members of the community implicate the innocent Edward in a theft and falsely accuse him of rape. The suburb turns against him and Peg’s family. When Edward accidentally cuts Kim and her brother Kevin with his hands, he flees to the mansion on the hill, pursued by an angry mob. Edward saves Kim from her attacking boyfriend Jim, killing him in the process. Kim tells the mob both Jim and Edward are dead, protecting Edward from their wrath. Catharsis occurs with the image of “snow” created by Edward’s annual carving of ice sculptures for his beloved Kim, falling down on the suburb every winter (despite the fact that it is Southern California, and never snows). It falls on Edward’s memory of Kim as the young woman he fell in love with. Society is once again in balance, as the boy who is too gentle and innocent for human company (despite his paradoxical built-in brutality, thanks to his scissor-hands) is exiled forever.

Poster for Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames"

We are off to a friend’s house tonight for a screening of Lizzie Borden‘s “Born in Flames”, a 1983 film, about feminist activists 10 years after the United States has undergone a socialist revolution. We watched this the other day, but are up for another viewing already.

M forwarded me an article in The Independent film magazine, featuring an interview with the director which is definitely worth a read (linked to this article). It was particularly interesting to me in light of my recent thoughts about filmmaking. One of the reasons I started this blog was to help myself formulate my thoughts about my own film/video/art/activist practice, asking myself some fairly fundamental questions like “why make films?”. This question is particularly pertinent, given my ruminations in the last couple of months on the implausibility of a viable career in film/TV. As my friend Jean Poole asserted at Plug n Play the other night, independent filmmaking is “broken”. This came from an interview he was reading with one of the directors of Sundance, who mentioned that out of 2000 film submissions, the festival could screen 200, and out of these perhaps 20 would be picked up for a cinema release. Apologies if I am misquoting the math, and forgive me for the next batch of inaccurate arithmetic. Let’s say your chance of actually getting funding or finance to make your independent film is something like 1 in 100. Then if we calculate the chance, based on Sundance’s figures, of getting your film distributed is also 1 in 100. Let’s say then, for argument’s sake, your chances of making a film and getting it seen in the cinema are 1 in 10,000. These are really not great odds.

So if its so damn hard, why make films? The interview with Lizzie Borden highlights one of the really good reasons to do it anyway. Because film is transformative, not just for the audience, but for the filmmaker themselves. Lizzie Borden talks about finding her subject matter through reading the work of socialist and anarchist women writers, discussing how despite the fact that feminist ideas are often present in the intellectual vanguards of these movements, they are rarely incorporated into any actual revolution. She looked around her and saw how fractured the feminist scene was in New York City “Class and race really did divide people, and just a slightly different political stance divided middle-class women”. She looked at herself and asked “And how many black women did I know? None. And how many Latin women did I know?”.

She decided to begin the process of making a film, to bring different women together, into the film and into her life, making the film in a slow continuous process over five years, including substantial re-shooting and re-editing. The film wasn’t written as a finished script, and then produced over a year once some money had been found, it was made piece by piece, which allowed for a real evolution of the content over time. Various cast members lived in her house at different times, allowing for spontaneous shooting when the time and the ideas were right. Asked if she would do it again, she says “”if I had only made four films in my life and they were films that really changed me, I would”. Regarding the women who became part of her life, “The people I see every day at this point are different from the people I saw every day then… The most important things in life are the smallest: who you speak with every day.” Beyond this, the community around the film is transformed also, “It’s important to me when I see some of the relatives of the black women who were in the film liking the film because they wouldn’t normally  go to films like this”.

This is a fascinating departure from the ordinary process of filmmaking, which does open up the possibility for a filmmaker’s subject to feed into her life, and feedback into the film again, transforming the self and the film at the same time. The creative process, as much as the result, is a major motivating factor for most artists, which the unusual process for “Born in Flames” highlights (somewhat akin to community cultural development processes). This film is an antidote to the inevitable sense of futility that I, and many filmmakers, feel in response to such a hostile environment for our work to be supported, and seen.

Gena Rowlands, star of A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977) and Gloria (1980), and wife of John Cassavetes

While I’m catching up on my blog today, I thought I’d add an essay I wrote last semester on three films by one of my favourite directors, John Cassavetes, starring one of my favourite actors, Gena Rowlands. Written in the midst of production of my second short film for this year, it was a bit beyond me to fully structure these thoughts in the way I would have liked to, but I found this a very useful exercise in interrogating the work of one of avant-garde cinema’s true mavericks. Cassavetes is another filmmaker to keep in mind when gathering the courage to attempt what might be a beautiful failure or just an ugly disaster rather than something more achievable, and less extraordinary.

The films of John Cassavetes (1929 – 1989) eschew many of the stylistic, narrative and generic influences of cinematic tradition, which can be appreciated when pulling apart his vibrant and distinctive body of work as an independent filmmaker working outside the studio system. Cassavetes’ disruption of conventional approaches to genre, narrative and style can be found to varying degrees in three of his films chosen from the 12 in total he directed between 1956 and 1986: A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977) and Gloria (1980). While the master narrative of Cassavetes’ films can be thought of as the revealing of the performative mask of identity that each of us wear in our daily lives, and the “style-less style” he pitted against the gloss of Hollywood can be observed in each of these films, Gloria represents Cassavetes’ decision at various points in his career to veer more towards accepted modes of style and narrative, even to the point of invoking, though once again disturbing, elements of genre. In order to examine these films it is helpful to make reference to Cassavetes own description of his cinematic project, and to how his films have been treated by critics and academics, both whom tended to ignore or deride Cassavetes’ work during his lifetime. It is important to consider the prolific body of work on Cassavetes and his films that has been created by the staunchly anti-commercial academic, Ray Carney, and also to examine critics who illustrate Cassavetes’ influence in more recent avant-garde film practice such as the Dogme ’95 movement.

Ray Carney has focused on Cassavetes’ work for much of his career, having written many books on this his favourite subject, which have been partly responsible for reviving academic interest in his films. Christos Tsiolkas refers to Carney’s righteous fury about the lack of recognition Cassavetes received in his lifetime in the online film journal Senses of Cinema: “a righteousness which can seem defensive and contemptuous of any accommodation to Hollywood” (Tsolkias 2001). As Carney indicates, Cassavetes films are problematic to the traditions of mainstream cinema, and film criticism, alike. A fruitful critique of Cassavetes’ films should not only investigate how the poetry of his visual metaphor or cinematographic virtuosity measure up against the work of other directors (or they will simply be found wanting), but should include an emphasis on the elements he chose to focus on as a director, mainly character and performance, and his motivations for achieving a “style-less style” (Carney 1985).

Cassavetes’ films are like most directors’ nightmares of what their film might turn out like if they let the actors take over – stylistic and formal elements are subservient to performance. An interview in Playboy magazine, conducted not long after the release of Husbands (1970), clearly shows Cassavetes’ antagonism towards cinematic processes beyond performance: “Aside from cameramen, everyone else on a set is the actor’s natural enemy, because they don’t give a damn about what they’re doing. You’ve got to go to war with people like that.” Whereas, as one of Cassavetes most frequently used actors Ben Gazzara has said, actors are given free reign: “John creates an atmosphere where an actor can do no wrong” (Playboy 1971).

Ray Carney goes to great length to justify Cassavetes’ choice not to focus upon certain stylistic decisions – including formal elements designed to enhance the emotional or symbolic meaning in the scene such as the lack of “mood-music orchestrations” (Carney 1985). Cassavetes re-shot his first movie Shadows, as he felt it to be too reliant on techniques employed to manipulate the film experience – camera angles, lighting, music, other than the actors’ performance. As can be seen in A Woman Under The Influence, Cassavetes chooses not to always follow conventions such as the building of a rhythm of shot-sizes from wide, through mid-shots and over-the-shoulder shots to close-ups. He doesn’t tend to utilise perspectives such as a low-angle to indicate a character’s dominance, or dramatic lighting to indicate the importance (higher key), mystery (silhouettes or profile lighting) or scariness (lighting from below) of his characters. It is also important, however, to keep in mind the budget constraints Cassavetes has as an independent filmmaker, and his lack of formal training as a film director, which would have played an important role in many of his stylistic decisions. When complimented on his optical techniques using hand-held camera in Shadows (1956), Cassavetes countered “You stupid bastard. I couldn’t afford a tripod.” (Playboy 1971). Angelos Koutsourakis makes a comparison between Cassavetes work and that of the Dogme ’95 movement, referring to the Dogme practices of shooting on location, using hand-held camera, and the avoidance of extra-diagetic music as stylistic choices inherited from Cassavetes (Koutsourakis 2009).

Yet despite his maverick tendencies, certain basic stylistic and formal conventions are very much adhered to in the films of John Cassavetes. His actors perform roles in front of a film camera, to a script (his work is largely scripted, rather than improvised, as is sometimes assumed). His films are shot at locations or on sets that represent settings that are the real, often ordinary and domestic, places the middle-classes inhabit. His dialogue is either recorded on location, or post-synced to represent the way people converse in reality. Elements of mise-en-scene are not unfamiliar from what we find in conventional film drama, and don’t signal to us as an audience that we are watching an “art” film. The experimental nature of his work is to be found in the actors’ performance of their roles, the delivery of their lines, and the narratives that are constructed largely from the volatile motivations of these characters. Rather than following carefully orchestrated plot-points and essentialised character transformations, his narratives seem directed in a calculatedly haphazard fashion from one moment of conflict to another, exploring the performative extremes of personality. His films tend not to manipulate emotional response along a familiar arc, but prefer to veer off the path, and tear screaming around unexpected dramatic corners.

Cassavetes described his cinematic aims using the key terms “human”, “life” and “feeling” (Carney 1985). He was committed to developing original methods of directing his actors to push the boundaries of cinema, to get at what he saw as a new kind of truth in filmmaking. Yet the truth to be found in Cassavetes films is not in the realism of an exchange between his characters. It is the volatility and unpredictability of human nature, and the unreal nature of identity. Paradoxically, these truths about humanity are figured in an exaggerated and non-realistic fashion – the turbulence of human experience is externalised in a performative, and often unconvincing fashion. Yet this is a truth about experience that can’t be more eloquently purveyed. As can be seen particularly in A Woman Under The Influence, Cassavetes’ characters try to convince themselves of a course of action, with all the desperation bound up in not knowing what to do, before plunging off blindly in another direction. Koutsourakis refers to Cassavetes’ cinematic aim of discovering “truth” as finding a corollary in the Dogme ’95 movement, whose manifesto states a Dogme director’s “supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings” (Koutsourakis 2009).

Carney refers to the dominant mode of cinema as the “visionary/symbolic aesthetic”, which Cassavetes work contradicts (Carney 1994, p. 3). This cinematic mode which was dominant during Cassavetes working life as a director, which Carney differentiates Cassavetes from, does tend to essentialise and simplify story elements, editing out the boring or contradictory parts and the parts that are hard to understand. We can often be left with the reductive fundamentals, embellished with visual metaphor and sensory stimulus – rather than the cacophonous and conflicting disharmony of human stories, which can be found in A Woman Under The Influence, and Opening Night.

Given that Cassavetes chooses not to employ many of the stylistic techniques and narrative conventions found in mainstream cinema, many of his choices come down to performance and the messy, intricate narrative of each of his characters. In A Woman Under the Influence, Nick Longhetti (played by the charmingly wall-eyed Peter Falk) is torn between his natural instincts towards loving acceptance of his wife Mabel (performed captivatingly by Gena Rowlands) and her odd behaviour, and his terror and rage at how this behaviour conflicts with societal convention. He feels responsible as the man of the house for how she reflects upon him and the family, and vacillates between furiously blaming society on the one hand, and his wife on the other. Mabel represents a terrifying vulnerability, which is seized upon early in the film by a man who takes advantage of her in her drunken and emotionally turbulent state. Mabel’s vulnerability is Nick’s Achilles’ Heel, the chink in the armour of his masculinity.

To the family, to Nick’s workmates, and to their suburban society, Mabel represents a threat to the safety and comfort of their conventional middle-class lives. She is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, despite her own attempts to control her behaviour when she senses at times the extent to which she disturbs others. She attempts to adopt a more acceptable identity to please Nick, when she says, “Tell me what you want me to be. I can be anything”. Mabel operates on a much more sensitive and childlike emotional plane, which exposes the phoniness of everybody else around her, and thus cannot be tolerated. When Mabel feels like having fun, she will sing and dance, and beckon others to join her. When distraught she will walk the streets looking for a drink, and an escape.

In contrast Nick is constantly aware of himself, attempting to shut down his emotional responses, unsuccessfully. From society’s point of view it is Mabel who is crazy, but this is a very male-chauvinist stance, given that the facts show Nick’s behaviour to be even crazier. It is Nick who threatens to kill his wife and children, who drags his kids around at the beach and gets them drunk on the way home (teaching them to turn to alcohol in moments of despair). It is he who shakes his colleague’s safety rope in a fit of rage (fuelled by his embarrassment about Mabel) causing him to tumble down a rocky slope and be seriously injured. Aggression, rage, violence, acting-out and drunkenness are all acceptable male behaviours, Nick’s masculine rights as the head of the household. Mabel’s overly affectionate, gleeful, self-harming or otherwise eccentric behaviours are interpreted as intolerable female hysterics.

While Gena Rowland’s Mabel is a fairly convincing (and utterly compelling) portrayal of a woman whose emotional distress has stunted her social behaviour and pushed her almost to psychosis, Nick is harder to understand as the foolish husband who is beyond knowing what to do, or how to react. His inner conflict is plausible, but the manner in which it is externalised is hard to fathom. One minute he strikes Mabel in front of the children, trying to contain her eccentricities, another he is shaking Mabel, telling her to be herself, drawing out her nutty behaviour, just at the moment she is trying so hard to conform to societal expectations, in order to avoid being committed again. Peter Falk is given free reign to let these conflicting forces play out in the scene, thus Cassavetes is using performance to highlight these aspects of his character, which might have been handled through the use of visual or auditory symbolic cues by other directors. But there are moments of expressional truth to be found that are unlike those in the work of any other director, in the way that Mabel’s face crumples as she’s caught in the midst of Nick’s barrage of confusing signals, or in the way Nick drags his young daughter forcibly across the sand at their “day at the beach” he has bizarrely concocted to distract his children from their mother’s committal to a psychiatric institution.

People often refer to Cassavetes’ body of work as an “actor’s cinema”. This is true in many senses – firstly the director himself was an accomplished actor, from a theatre background who later became a well-known actor in films and TV series (largely as a means of financing his own work as a director). The performances of actors in his films are also the primary communicators of meaning (however fragmented this meaning may be) as opposed to other formal elements. His cast members do not merely perform monumental symbolic actions of figure expression, but occupy their screen time with myriad actions of a more minute nature. For example, you would be unlikely to see a character in a Cassavetes film do something as simple as ride off into the sunset on his motorbike. He would be more likely to ride off on his motorbike in the middle of a conversation, get caught in traffic, make faces at girls in a limousine, veer off the road to stop for a packet of cigarettes, find he has no money, plead with an old lady for some change, end up in an argument with her, and so on. Cassavetes would also be likely to choose the take where the actor dropped his bike, his performative mask slipped, and a genuine smile or grimace emerged from underneath. In fact, what advances a Cassavetes film are not so much plot points, but moments of conflict interspersed with elements of an actor’s “business”, the things that occupy her while she is busy expressing herself. Smoking cigarettes, drinking copious glasses of whiskey and having an argument would be enough to propel many a scene, if not an entire movie.

The influence of Cassavetes’ community of actor friends and colleagues, and his family of actors (given his marriage to Gena Rowlands) is clear. Speaking in Playboy of casting for Minnie and Moscowitz (1971) Cassavetes said, ”As the casting may indicate, I believe totally in nepotism”. When asked why this was the case, he replied in true Cassavetes clownish trouble-making style, “Because it impresses the hell out of my family and friends”. A Woman Under The Influence, Opening Night and Gloria, all feature Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, in a starring role. Rowlands face is his most expressive performative surface, which catches the dynamic, shifting moments of truth he was determined throughout his career to capture. Gena Rowlands is watchable in the way that Al Pacino is watchable – you don’t even care what she does before the camera, you are bound to be transfixed – though in these three films Cassavetes gives her more to explore as a performer than most actors (and especially actresses) would enjoy in a lifetime in film.

It is easy to imagine (though unfair to assume) how life might have imitated art in the Cassavetes’ household, how the performative qualities of their acting lives may have impacted on a scene played around the Cassavetes dinner table, and how art might have imitated life in return. While Cassavetes’ characters appear unconvincing at times with their vamping and extremes of expression, they would all make more sense if they were scripted as actors themselves (as is the case in Opening Night), who are naturally more prone to externalising or performing versions of their emotional interiors. This “theatrical” quality in his characters means they are likely to express an abstraction of the way they are feeling, rather than something more direct. The surface characters show to each other, and to the audience, is not just the standard modification of underlying emotion that any person makes when negotiating a social situation, but it has been given an extra theatrical twist. Cassavetes characters endlessly play games with each other, though they may not be conscious of this in what they believe to be their sincerest moments. An audience who expects any of the usual styles of cinematic performance – from melodrama through to realism – will naturally be put off guard by Cassavetes’ decisions in this regard. The viewer must watch several of his films to begin to understand this new language of performance, to start to get the hang of a Cassavetes’ character, and feel at ease with the unpredictability and lack of inherent, stable, meaning in his narratives. Cassavetes’ narratives do contain plenty of meaning, but they do not hold the totalising meaning of other narratives, instead they involve a multiplicity of fractured meanings for each character, which themselves are always to be seen as in flux.

When it comes to narrative, performance and character, Koutsourakis observes, “the major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.” Opening Night is key in terms of this blurring of performance and real life. In the film, Cassavetes and his wife Rowlands play ex-lovers, Myrtle and Maurice, who themselves perform roles as partners in a play within the film. These layers of confusion between life and performance drive Myrtle towards an identity crisis, which threatens her sanity. When Myrtle and Maurice are on stage together, playing a heated scene as the bitter, drunken couple Virginia and Marty, Marty/Maurice/Cassavetes strikes Virginia/Myrtle/Rowlands, and the audience is left uncomfortably unsure as to what part of this scene is performance, and what is not. Further to this, the audience is left to wonder what part of reality is not in some sense performance, a central concern of Cassavetes, most strikingly observed in this scene.

At the end of A Woman Under the Influence, Nick and Mabel have a terrific fight. In his rage Nick hits Mabel, she and the children run from him around the house, in fear, as he threatens to kill them all. In the final minutes however, Nick and Mabel come together, resolve their dispute and tuck the children lovingly into bed, telling each other they’ve gotten through the night, and that everything is okay. This neat suturing of a raw dramatic wound is simultaneously stupendously unbelievable, utterly truthful, and possibly a comment on the saccharine trend towards neat resolution to be found in much mainstream cinema. In the most immediate sense you cannot believe that these two could make up their huge differences so easily. Considering this again, though perhaps in reality the scene would not play out in such a heightened dramatic performative state, this is indeed an insight into the eye of the storm in many a troubled relationship, the moments of denial and blind optimism that can sustain a damaged familial dynamic. And finally, this almost throw-away “happy” ending seeks to protest the finality and resolution of most cinematic endings, whether they be “happy” or “sad”, which either way tend to contradict the reality of human experience. The narrative of our lives is constantly being told, and re-told. An event that occurred in the past may hold a certain meaning at that moment, then feel resolved by events experienced later in life, only to be thrown open again by subsequent events and changes in ourselves. We are constantly telling ourselves that we live and learn. The truth is that our experiences do pile on top of each other, shedding light on what has gone before, but the meaning we extract from this shifts and changes over time, as do our emotions, motivations and perspectives. The Cassavetes narrative echoes this fluxional experience, rather than simplifying elements from a story to support a particular meaning, frozen in time.

Within the mainstream of film we are taught that our films must be reducible to a basic theme, an arguable statement that may considered in the positive and negative throughout, but comes to a firm resolution by the end, either way. Thus film is a way of manufacturing seemingly complex character explorations that are in fact neat, simplistic understandings about life, ideally presented in an entertaining, ideally hair-raising, but ultimately re-asssuring manner. Films must be adequately resolved, and no messy inconclusive scenes will be tolerated, as they will leave the audience ultimately unsatisfied. Given this approach to film, it is true that Cassavetes films are often unsatisfying. Koutsourakis recalls Bertolt Brecht’s similar rejection of dramatic catharsis, as a political decision designed to leave space for an audience to participate rather than passively consume a more digestible dramatic outcome (Koutsourakis 2009).

In A Woman Under The Influence, Gloria, and Opening Night, a more open-minded audience can appreciate this rejection of conventional narrative standards that is in itself a political act designed to challenge the commerciality of the studio tradition. Though perhaps Cassavetes aims could be considered to be more spiritual or philosophical than political, or at least that his discernable filmic ideology would extend beyond the immediate social and political concerns of the day. It is clear that the director equates living (in terms of both existence itself, and the potential one has to maximise one’s life experience) with a more truthfully chaotic experience. In Gloria, Gloria Swenson makes the dangerous (and ultimately fatal) decision to leave her comfort zone to save a small boy from a mafia revenge killing, but lives and loves more in her final days than she ever could whilst comfortably ensconced in her apartment. In A Woman Under The Influence, Nick Longhetti chooses middle-class convention over Mabel and her troubling freedom of expression, to the detriment of his young family. In Opening Night, Myrtle disturbs everyone around her as her personality disintegrates into a psychotic fear of aging, as she attempts to preserve her illusion of youth, before ultimately confronting and conquering her inner demons – only to take the stage (to perform her life) once more.

In A Woman Under the Influence, Mabel Longhetti is finally committed to a mental institution by her husband and the family doctor, as her eccentric behaviour proves too much for one suburban family to handle. The family convince themselves loudly of the merits of this decision, despite the fact that it becomes clear that the only real results of these actions have been to cause deep trauma to a mother and her children at their separation. People in Cassavetes’ films don’t make the right decisions. They don’t embark on a journey of self-discovery, whereby various events and truth-tellers they encounter on the way help them to resolve an internal imbalance and learn to be better people. This is a fantasy – it happens in (other people’s) movies, it doesn’t happen in real life. In real life people do learn, but they don’t always learn the right lesson – and if they do, their experiences may cut both ways, giving them emotional baggage to carry into their emotional scenario. The sour-tasting flipside of a freshly baked Hollywood home-truth, could in reality be damaging emotional trauma.
The closest any of these three films come to a particular film genre, other than the broad category of drama, is Gloria. But Gloria is a gangster movie that defies as much as replicates elements of this genre. The film is set in a big mean city (New York City) and contains shoot-outs, moral conflicts, suited henchmen and their mob bosses, and (particularly unusually for a Cassavetes film) a stunt involving a motor vehicle, like many a gangster movie. But the film’s protagonist contradicts genre through the basic elements of her femininity, and classically feminine motivations. The plot advances with Gloria’s attempts to protect a small child against a city rife with mobsters on the look out for the boy Phil. At the beginning of the film she reluctantly helps him make his narrow escape, as the rest of his family are murdered by the mafia, in revenge for his father’s informing to the F.B.I. As the film progresses, she becomes increasingly attached to Phil, who evokes maternal instincts she has previously buried, in favour of pursuing a comfortable retirement on her own terms, without responsibilities to anyone but her cat. She ultimately sacrifices her own life to defend this innocent Puerto-Rican boy who has been caught in the crossfire, in contradiction to the pursuit of status and power to be found at the heart of most gangster anti-heroes. Rather than being pulled into the mafia’s influence despite any tendencies towards a moral existence, Gloria betrays the mobsters, shooting the guys she refers to on a first-name basis, and ignoring the advice of her uncle.

Gloria parodies the gangster tough-guy, whilst simultaneously turning this character on its head. She is a force to be reckoned with, can wolf whistle a taxi down from a hundred yards, shoot a carful of mobsters dead at point blank range, and tells anyone who bothers her to “take a walk”. But her tough-guy act backfires, when she tests Phil’s commitment to her, giving him a tough-love ultimatum to follow her inside a bar, or go his own way. Phil goes his own way, and Gloria is forced by her conscience and her growing affection for him, to search for him desperately, getting embroiled in another gun-battle and chase-sequence for her pains. Phil makes pathetic attempts to wrestle the power back from Gloria early in the piece, citing the patriarchal legacy handed-down to him from his father before he was murdered (“I am the man! I am the man!”), which only heaps more contempt onto this classic gangster motif of masculinity.

Finally the bizarre fairy-tale ending of Gloria defies the gangster genre, once again rejecting any traditional resolution. Gloria has been (presumably) killed by her ex-lover’s henchmen, in a final attempt to save Phil’s life through negotiation. Given her failure, Phil should be left alone to mourn her in the cemetery in Pittsburg, but instead a dream-like sequence ensues where Gloria returns in the disguise of an old woman, to sweep him up in her arms in emotionally accented slow-motion (a rare use of such an effect by Cassavetes). The viewer can’t help but be confused as to whether this fairytale ending indicates the whole film has been a fairytale, or if it is just a tragically hopeful hallucination on the part of Phil. If the latter, it is a darkly ironic way to finish the film, that takes away the dignity of the image of a boy left alone in a cemetery, surrounded by death. Either way, it feels reckless, even throwaway, and you certainly would not expect to see such an ending in any conventional gangster movie.

In Opening Night, Gloria, and A Woman Under The Influence, Cassavetes chose to favour character and performance as his primary focuses, largely letting these elements dictate narrative, and relegating other stylistic elements to a secondary role. Out of these three films Gloria is the closest to the trend of mainstream cinema, giving us a clue as to how his experiments in performance might have influenced broader cinematic tradition – whereas Opening Night and A Woman Under The Influence are much closer to his vision of a style-less style, and a more pure focus on explorations into character and performance, that have influenced avant-garde filmmakers ever since.

REFERENCES

Carney, R 1994, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Carney, R 1985, American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Koutsourakis, A C 2009, John Cassavetes: The First Dogme Director?, in Bright Lights Film Journal, accessed 10th May 2009, from http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/63/63cassavetes.html

Playboy Interview: John Cassavetes 1971, Playboy Magazine, July, p. 55

Tsiolkas, C 2001, Meet John Cassavetes, in Senses of Cinema, accessed 10th May 2009, from http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/01/16/cassavetes_meet.html

Tina Turner in Mad Max III: Beyond the Thunderdome

When I heard about Tina Turner starring in Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome as a kid, I imagined the Thunderdome as a gigantic rock stadium, filled with futuristic, potentially robotic, bikers shooting rocket grenades at each other, while Tina (wearing hair metal hair) sang rock ballads and fireworks went off. Somehow I managed not to see any of the Mad Max trilogy until recently, at film school. When I got to number three, I was sadly disillusioned (except for Tina’s hairdo). The Thunderdome isn’t particularly thunderous at all, it is a fairly rudimentary bucky-dome in the desert, in which blokes swing about in an ungainly testicular fashion on bungy ropes trying to hit each other. Though Mad Max is an 80s high concept film, it is Australian after all, and I suppose they would not have achieved such high profit to outlay ratios on the production of these films, had they not had the homegrown touch (which is part of their b-gradey charm).

Anyway, there’s probably been more than enough written about Mad Max by film critics in Australia and beyond, so I’m unlikely to enlighten anyone, but here are a few thoughts on how much Mad Max owes to the Western. I found writing this essay interesting, more than the films themselves, as it reminded me of the films and documentaries I watched and remixed for Spoole‘s live audiovisual Glitch Western show – especially as that performance was also examining the Western in the context of the Australian landscape.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

As the movie begins, we hear the sound of the wind blowing, like a lonely wail across the plains. We almost expect to see a tumbleweed blow across the bottom of the screen – but as the picture fades up from black we see a lone figure on the horizon, silhouetted against a big sky.  Up to this point we could be watching a Western. This lone figure could be about to mount his trusty steed and ride into town but instead as the camera draws closer we see this is a man dressed in a much more modern costume of torn leathers, emerging from a cloud of whirling smoke. This is just the first few seconds of the opening scene of the second film in George Miller’s Mad Max cycle, and already the audience is receiving clear signs indicating conventions (which can be found in all three Mad Max films) of the popular movie genre, the Western. However we also begin to glimpse elements that are prominent in other film genres, including elements distinctive of the post-apocalypse film, a genre that can itself be seen as a sub-genre of both the Western and the Sci-Fi.

Genre is simultaneously an easy way for audiences to predict what a film may be like based on its membership in a familiar grouping, a mode of criticism that catalogues codes and motifs occurring in multiple films over a period of time, and a series of conventions which can be used as short-cuts for the audience to understand meaning conveyed in a familiar fashion. David Bordwell and Kristin  Thompson define genre as types of movies that “seem to resemble one another in significant ways”, pointing out that “defining the precise boundaries between genres can be tricky” (Bordwell & Thompson 2008, p. 318) . However they suggest that common themes, characters, plots or formal elements such as setting, lighting, iconography and costume can indicate the presence of genre conventions. When it comes to the Western, they see the central theme as the confrontation between ordered society and the lawless Wild West. The jeans and Stetsons of the cowboys, and tribal garb of the Native Americans are iconographic, scenes of attacks on wagon trains or settlements are conventional.

Each Mad Max film is the story of a reluctant anti-hero. In the first film he would rather be at home with his young family (though he feels the lure of destructive impulses behind the wheel of his V8 Interceptor) – but their murder at the hands of the brutal bikie gang forces him to take to the road to destroy their killers in revenge. In the second and third films he has been so burnt by these experiences that he now wanders the desolate landscape alone, only to be drawn in by a settlement under attack (in Mad Max 2), and by a lost civilisation of innocents (in Mad Max 3) both of whom he is forced, by circumstance, to defend. Each film is set in a desolate desert landscape, and is populated by two opposing extremes of humanity – a representation of moral social order, and a gang of b-grade, comic-book style punks who attempt to dominate them ruthlessly, embodying a brutal, anarchic, destructive force (although the society of Border Town in Mad Max III is perhaps more totalitarian than anarchic, ruled by Aunty Entity’s iron fist). These elements have strong resonances with the Western genre, though the two alternatives that are presented to the desert societies– to band together along the lines of societal convention, or to relapse into a barbaric dog-eat-dog  brand of survivalism – are more reminiscent of the post-apocalypse film, even as they echo the fears of the frontier.

Bordwell and Thompson also remind us of the social function of genre – that the popularity of certain types of films both reflect and play upon the audience’s fears and also seek to reinforce popular, or politically expedient attitudes. The Mad Max trilogy is a good example of this – in that it references the way the classic Western dealt with industrialisation and colonisation which were deep social concerns in the American psyche through the depiction of life on the Western frontier. J. Emmett Winn refers to the possibility that Mad Max 2 played well to the Reaganite neo-conservatism of 1980s US audiences, given that it could be interpreted as a rejection of the other, of the indigenous, the non-white, the homosexual, in favour of white god-fearing (though not overtly in the film) folk (Emmett Winn 1997).

But the Mad Max films also follow conventions of the post-apocalypse film in which audiences grapple with the human need to survive in the face of nuclear holocaust, or other disastrous events. The nuclear arms race, and the cold war were re-invigorated by Reagan during the period the second and third Mad Max films were produced, even as Glasnost and Perestroika emerged in the Soviet Union, and the “communist threat” began to collapse. Without explaining the details of the diagetic apocalypse in much detail, the Mad Max films herald another potential obstacle to human survival – the scarcity of energy, which was present in audiences’ minds from the energy crises of the 1970s, an issue that only demands more attention for today’s audiences given current fears regarding peak-oil and climate change. Mad Max 3 Beyond the Thunderdome is often referred to as a mythic film, and can be understood as a version of the genesis myth. As a post-apocalypse movie, it is however about the re-birthing, rather than the birthing of humanity (Sanes 1996).

In his analysis of the post-apocalyptic film genre, Mick Broderick considers that this type of genesis myth is a method whereby audiences of the 80s could “learn to stop worrying and love the bomb” (a quote from Stanley Kubrick’s more ironic statement in Dr. Strangelove, 1964) through indulging in a utopian fantasy of a newly created Eden on a post-holocaust Earth (Broderick  1993). The post-apocalypse movie is considered by some to be a sub-genre of the science fiction genre, and by others to be a derivative of the Western, but is probably derivative of both. Mad Max is inescapably part of the post-apocalypse sub-genre due to its setting in time and space – in a desolated landscape after largely mysterious apocalyptic events have occurred. In all of the Mad Max films you can find a strikingly dystopian vision, but particularly in Mad Max 3 there is also a glimpse of the utopian Eden in the young community Max finds at the “Crack in the Earth”, and the hope the audience holds for their survival at the end of the film. The Mad Max films show the large debt the post-apocalypse sub-genre owes to the Western, given their themes are derived from the classic Western’s opposition of “civilised man” with the inhospitable desert plains, and the rough men or savages who manage to survive out in the wilderness, beyond the edge of town.

Both Mad Max and Mad Max II have strong representations of savage tribes, the “injuns” familiar to audiences from the simple moral tales of earlier Westerns, before more complex and ambiguous Westerns such as those of John Ford (e.g. Ford’s epic, The Searchers, 1956) or the revisionist Westerns of the 1960s and beyond (such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, 1992). The physical similarities of the post-apocalyptic post-punks to these one-dimensional Native American villains are striking, especially in Mad Max II where the attacking tribe shoot arrows, sport Mohawks and are adorned with war-paint. Beyond this, the tribe also plays the familiar role of immoral, degenerate and barbaric attacking hordes, which launch themselves at the settlement (of nice family-oriented, and white-costumed folk) with no mercy. While the social-function of demonising Native Americans is clear (to justify their slaughter at the hands of the Europeans, and the stealing of their lands), to a lesser extent the tribal punks of Mad Max could raise the social-spectre of anarchism and youth rebellion raised by the punk movement in the late 1970s, which surely must have been frightening to the suburban mums and dads of Australia and beyond. The homosexuality and bondage gear of the tribe are also signifiers of their anti-social tendencies – Max is somewhere in between, in his figure-hugging leathers.

Another familiar trope of the Western is this stranger who rides into town – a character caught between civilisation and the wilderness, between order and chaos. This perhaps exploits the audience’s own ambivalence towards these issues – most people would prefer to sit safely by the fire in our homesteads when the sun goes down, but to pick up the story of the cowboy who roams the plains by moonlight, to read in our rocking chairs. Mad Max is a prime example of this archetype – he is the knight errant (a precursor to the lone ranger) who wanders from place to place, an adventurer following his own moral compass, rejecting the comforts of civilisation. This character’s roots in the knight errant, or the samurai, or its cultural equivalents in other parts of the world, show the Western’s own roots in earlier stories from the action-adventure genre.
Max’s family has been murdered; he has no blood-ties to family anymore. He becomes the tough tobacco-chewing Marlboro Man of the classic Western. The Revisionist Western often re-examines masculinity and attitudes to women present in these earlier films. Gender is a primary, if ambivalent and unresolved, concern of the Mad Max cycle. In the first film his wife represents all that is humane, civilised, and loving about Max – all that is destroyed along with her and their baby. He loses his own femininity (as defined by his wife). In the second film the attacking tribe is overwhelmingly masculine – to the point where the tribesmen take men as their lovers. The feminine is equated to some degree with the weaker and yet civilised aspects of humanity, whereas the masculine is strong, brutal and primitive. In the third film Max tries to subordinate the young woman who leads the lost civilisation of survivors (in his attempt to avoid confrontation with Aunty Entity and stop the young tribe from running head-first into danger) by hitting her, shooting at her, and finally tying her up – but all to no avail, as she escapes. Aunty Entity herself, as leader of Border Town, is a masculinised woman – the only kind who can lead this band of ruffians in the desert.

However women in Mad Max films are for the most part merely victims of, or targets for, grotesque sexual and physical violence. Adrian Martin refers to generic influences to be found in Mad Max from international traditions of action-adventure fiction generally, including the Western as well as the horror-thriller genre film such as Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1975 and John Carpenter’s Halloween, 1978 “for its moments of gore (flashes of severed or charred body parts) and its insistent setting-up of women and children as imminent targets for violence” (Martin 1995, p. 41).

The Mad Max trilogy owes a huge debt to the Western, following many of its generic conventions closely in terms of its setting (a vast unfriendly landscape), a protagonist who is an anti-hero caught between civilisation and the wilderness, chase sequences (though on cars and motorbikes and all kinds of modified vehicles instead of horses and wagons), the savage tribe (in the gangs of neo-primitivist punks and bikies) and more. It is an updated version of the Western, transferring many of these conventions to a futuristic, post-apocalyptic, and even mythic landscape, evoking motifs from other genres along the way. But essentially they are Westerns, using the post-apocalyptic frontier to confront audiences with their fears of the unknown, and the breakdown of civilisation that reveals the savagery of human nature, when survival is at stake.

References
Bordwell, D, Thompson, K 2008, Film Art : An Introduction, McGraw Hill, New York, N.Y.
Broderick, M 1993, ‘Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, November, p. 362
Emmett Winn, J 1996,  Mad Max, Reaganism and the Road Warrior, in Kinema, accessed 23 April 2009 , from http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/winn972.htm
Martin, A 1995, ‘Mad Max 2’, in Scott Murray (ed.), Australian Film 1978 – 1994: a survey of theatrical features, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne
Sanes, K 1996, Mad Max as Social Criticism: 
Technology as a Source of Values, in Transparency, accessed 23 April 2009, from http://www.transparencynow.com/max2.htm

Daniel Gustav Cramer's Cat (1), 2006

“On December 31 I walked with three friends up a hill in Tuhringen,
near Ilmenau. We found a dead cat lying on its back. Her position 
seemed as if death caught her by surprise in a moment of joy and 
play. In the night, we lightened firecrackers. It started snowing. Next 
day, January 1, we decided to walk up the hill again.”

Daniel Gustav Cramer's Cat (II), 2006

I found these pictures to be very moving, if somewhat confronting. I showed these photos to M, who found them to be offensive in an exploitative Damien Hirst-esque way, which I understand. It’s a strange thing for an artist to encounter something sad and beautiful, a small observation in the context of the wider world, but the momentous and final events in the existence of this particular cat, and then exhibit this in a way that doesn’t necessarily show full respect to this being. But how do we show this respect, and why? The cat is dead, after all.

To me, anthropomorphising the appropriate way to mark the death of an animal (wild, or perhaps feral, abandoned, or simply and sadly lost) seems odd also. I wonder if bringing the domesticated cat into our human society as pets affects the ethical dimensions of how we treat these creatures in death. For me this work asks all of these questions, without taking a sledge-hammer to moral codes (which themselves are often hypocritical given the common brutality of the way animals are treated by humans industrially and environmentally), as other more confronting works regarding animals and death may have.

What do I find so affecting about these images? Firstly it is the playful pose the poor cat (surely small enough to still be a kitten) assumes in death. One wonders how and why it has met its untimely end. The second picture shows the same frame, but almost magically filled with snow, which is somehow already amazing, to see this volume of whiteness occupy the space around the cat. The cat buried in snow is a ghostly image, and a very soft and gentle image of death, and imminent decay. A helpless furry kitten paws gently at the surface of a soft blanket of snow, its last gesture towards life. It is also a gentle presentation of the cat’s dire situation, I am not overwhelmed by the deliberate pathos of the image, but can appreciate its tragedy without feeling overly manipulated.

The other main object of interest to me in Daniel’s talk was the power of revealing something through the imagination, by obscuring it. He showed various examples of this:

• a newspaper photograph of the murder scene of a child – obscured by big white cinema-screen like sheets, which were part of a privacy screen constructed by police, which left a surface to project our own horrific imaginings onto, more powerful than what might have been revealed
  

  Image from Murnau's 1922 film, Nosferatu

• the cat obscured by snow (as seen above – though here we saw it both revealed, and obscured, in two separate photographs, and were more affected by its concealment)
• the famous image of Nosferatu’s shadow in Murnau’s German Expressionist horror film of 1922
• my personal favourite – the deep waters of Loch Ness – a perfect place to project our deep fears and curiousities, illustrated by fervent imagination

Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) from Stewdio on Vimeo.

so nice. so sad. so glad they programmed it rather than just animating it.

There’s more info about the creation of this video on the Apple ][+ on Stewart Smith’s Stewdio website. It explains he initially produced this video unsolicited, for the band Grandaddy, who later wrote him a retroactive contract for it. You can download the code for the program he wrote for it there too…

2005. I release the Jed source code making this the first open-source music video. Maybe.

Colour Coordinates at Texta's House

When you enter Arlene Textaqueen’s house, you think of chaos, rather than order. Your first visual impression is like a test-pattern in the moment it disintegrates before your eyes, when you turn off the television after broadcasting has ceased at 2am – a distorted swirl of colour. But an invisible structure of organisation is threaded throughout, holding up piles of op-shop clothes, ornaments, knick-knacks, mix-tapes, art objects, zines and textas^1.

Expecially the textas. In fact the origins of her archival system are to be found here, in the origins of art itself. By this I mean the origins of art for each of us as an individual, the first moments when we, as children, wield a coloured texta to draw our house, our dog, our mum and dad, or the wild and inscrutable contents of our childish imaginations.

A large bookcase is piled on every shelf with coloured textas. On one we find vermillion, pomegranate, grenadine and ruby. On another we find verdigris, teal, chartreuse or mint – or at least the factory-produced versions of these, in pure chemical tones. Arlene’s magic as an artist is in evoking the complex tonal variations of our world, and the multiple textures and layers of personality, which she highlights in her nudes, using these bright and un-mixed shades.
Looking around the house, you begin to discover that this is how the entire contents of her house, a living museum of recycled relics forgotten from other peoples lives, is ordered. By colour.

If you ask Arlene why her house is ordered this way, she will say that with so many belongings, it is simply the easiest way to find anything. But colour is Arlene’s passion. She is so drawn to colour, that colourful objects have a habit of finding their way into her house. Searching one day for a neon coil of pink rope in my shed, I tracked it’s phosphorescent trail to Texta’s house, and there it was, sitting amongst the candy, fluorescent socks, head-bands and novelty erasers on her pink shelf, nestling comfortably with its own colour-kind.

Arlene is remapping cultural coordinates in her work, by reinterpreting the female nude, as a female artist. She has rejected an apprenticeship to the Western male tradition of painting the female nude, and instead taken up the artistic tools of childhood, learning to use these in very sophisticated ways. So what if Picasso painted with his penis? That was hardly anything new. In her time-space continuum, the nudes have climbed out the windows of the Musee d’Orsay and are drawing their own pictures, designing their own clothes, emceeing their own shows or performing in their own queer stripteases now.

Charting a passage through the artist’s house, is mapping the coordinates of her self, and her art. Her frames of reference are laid out before the visitor, in the second-hand possessions, highlighting in bright colour the deeply personal meaning they once held for their former owners, scavenged and re-interpreted, archived in the full spectrum of colour.

1. A “texta” is an Australian colloquialism for a coloured marker pen – the name originates from the popular “Texta” brand name widely used in Australia.

I have ordered a translation of Petronius’s Satyricon from the Parkville campus library. What a bunch of freaks! Can’t wait to read it. This sounds like a John Waters movie, 2000 years ago in Rome! Have also borrowed Fellini’s film version.

From an online translation of the first chapter of the Satyricon (translation: Alfred R. Allinson, 1930):

“This is the reason, in my opinion, why young men grow up such blockheads in the schools, because they neither see nor hear one single thing connected with the usual circumstances of everyday life, nothing but stuff about pirates lurking on the seashore with fetters in their hands, tyrants issuing edicts to compel sons to cut off their own fathers’ heads, oracles in times of pestilence commanding three virgins or more to be sacrificed to stay the plague,– honey-sweet, well-rounded sentences, words and facts alike as it were, besprinkled with poppy and sesame.

Under such a training it is no more possible to acquire good taste than it is not to stink, if you live in a kitchen. Give me leave to tell you that you rhetoricians are chiefly to blame for the ruin of Oratory, for with your silly, idle phrases, meant only to tickle the ears of an audience, you have enervated and deboshed the very substance of true eloquence.”

Other than debates about what one should be taught at art school (if anything at all), this passage reminds me of two things I have read and seen in the last week.

Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters

Number one – “Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters” – the chapter where he discusses his stint as a community college teacher in a prison for the criminally insane. O, pope of trash! John Waters teaching the inmates a syllabus including his own films, as part of a curriculum designed to rehabilitate psychopathic criminals seems perversely, wonderfully, appropriate! In fact, Waters’ psychiatrist tells him that he is glad he became a filmmaker, because if he hadn’t, perhaps he would have wound up in a similar institution. This is another case of making a film about what you would much rather do, or see. And sometimes it’s probably better that way… I’m sure John Waters would much rather that Chris Isaak actually turned into a crazed sex addict when hit on the head by David Hasselhoff ‘s turd, which dropped from the sky after Hasselhoff defecated on him accidentally whilst flying above his Baltimore suburb in a plane (as happens in his film “A Dirty Shame”). The authorities, if not the general public, are no doubt much happier such an event occurring only on celluloid. But what could society at large learn from this film about rejecting nice conservative traditions of religion-inspired sexual-repression in favour of embracing the loose, dirty and uninhibited (and gay) aspects of sex. And then I wonder how many fewer sex criminals would be in gaol if they hadn’t repressed desire to the point of true perversion? How many times, at film school, when faced with institutional conservatism, do I ask “What would John Waters do?” Wouldn’t it be nice if his films were included in our curriculum, rather than having to be sent to a gaol for psychopaths to be taught them. 

Bastardy: Documentary by Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Number two – the documentary film “Bastardy”, directed by Amiel Courtin-Wilson, which is surely one of the best films I’ve seen in ages, and I have been at film school watching classics for the last 7 weeks! I watched this gem at a festival for indigenous film outside under the stars at Treasury Gardens.

Halfway through I was wincing with the fact that I was the only film student from the VCA in attendance (as far as I could tell, perhaps there were some) and one of a number of residents from the Fitzroy / Collingwood area (amongst the 1000 or so strong audience) which did not total the number who should be watching this film – given its huge social, historical and political relevance to my neighbourhood.
From Hilary Harper’s review on ABC Melbourne:

“Like the best documentaries, Bastardy gives up its secrets slowly. After wordlessly following a tiny, elderly Aboriginal man around his dossing places, the camera shows confronting scenes of his heroin habit (“this is what a fella lives for”, he matter-of-factly admits) and tells stories of burglaries and gaol time. The scene where he revisits his favourite robbery target is hilarious: “Can we get all of us in the shot?” he asks, gathering around the house’s name-plate. But via 70s stage and film footage we learn that this man is the celebrated actor Jack Charles, star of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, who performed with many of Australia’s most revered directors in between time in the nick.”

There is nothing “pretty” about this film – no familiar “heroes” as we are taught to hold our faith in (the war heroes, action movie heroes Paul Cox freely disdains) in our popular or mainstream culture. But there is so much beauty in this film. And the subject of the film, Jack Charles, with all his faults, is a true hero, who you are left admiring greatly – despite the fact that he’s homeless, a junkie, a robber, and a faggot. This man, who pushed away the one person who showed him real love (his boyfriend in the 60s and 70s) and spent half his life in gaol, on countless repeated charges of burglary, is revealed to be a true and fearless hero of indigenous theatre. His raw talent is obvious from the excerpts shown from his films, and from the fact that he was still called upon for roles despite his destitution. And by the end of the film, he has overcome 30 years of heroin addiction – a feat few would have thought possible.

Anyway, this week at film school, and these extra-curricular influences, have inspired me to make beautiful and fearless films, make films from the heart.

From Robert J. Thomas’s DVD review, some soundtrack details for Badlands (1973):

“Musica Poetica”*
by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman

“Trois Morceaux en forme de Poire”
by Erik Satie

Theme “Migration”
by James Taylor

“A BLOSSOM FELL”
Written by H. Barnes, H. Cornelius, D. John
Performed by Nat “King” Cole
Courtesy of Capitol Records

“LOVE IS STRANGE”
Written by M. Baker, B. Smith, S. Robinson
Performed by Mickey and Sylvia

*Some tracks are on “The Best Of Carl Orff”, BMG 75605 51357 2, 1999:

..Carmina Burana – highlights – about half the 1 hour long masterpiece.
..Schulwerk (School work) – excerpts (collaboration with Gunild Keetman)
…. Rundadinella
…. Guten Morgen, Spielmann (Gunild Keetman)
…. Der Wind, der weht
…. * Gassenhauer (Gunild Keetman)
…. Wer da bauet an der Strassen
…. Malaguena (Gunild Keetman)
…. C’est le mai
…. Carillon
…. Sommerkanon
…. Lügenmärchen
…. Stücke auf Ostinato (Gunild Keetman)
…. Schlaf, Kindleinm schlaf
…. * Passion
…. Tanzstück (Gunild Keetman)

Edit: Apparently the film’s composer, George Aliceson Tipton, composed more original music for the film than is usually acknowledged (thanks to Adrian below for pointing this out). He can be found discussing this in Rosy-Fingered Dawn a 2002 documentary on Malick’s films (which I’ll now try to track down).