All posts tagged essay

Catharsis: Trust, Harold and Maude, Edward Scissorhands

Posted: May 26, 2010 · Comments: 0
Harold and Maude directed by Hal Ashby

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 80th 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.

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands

Posted: September 4, 2009 · Comments: 4
Gena Rowlands

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.

We Don’t Need Another Hero

Posted: May 2, 2009 · Comments: 0
Aunty Entity

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.

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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

Mapping Knowledge – Texta’s House

Posted: April 8, 2009 · Comments: 4

This is something I wrote for my Centre for Ideas subject at film school, about mapping my neighbour’s “archival system”.

Colour Coordinates at Texta's House

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 textas1.

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.

Paul Cox, the Satyricon, John Waters and Bastard

Posted: April 4, 2009 · Comments: 0

A few reflections that made into my “intellectual journal” at film school this week, after a lecture by Paul Cox. The lecture was hugely inspiring – he was passing on the baton of avant-garde and anti-commercial film-making (and art-making) to a new generation – or rather passing on a molotov cocktail… served in a martini glass. He seemed to possess an odd mix of revolutionary and bourgeois taste, one minute talking about getting arrested for incitement to riot, and another complaining about loud modern music being played in the supermarket. But the main thrust of Paul Cox’s message was to reject commercialism in art at every turn, to live a simpler life in order to keep the money out of it as much as possible. To question everything, attack capitalism, revolutionise plastic consumer culture, and never compromise. A message to hold close to the heart.

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

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

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.

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