BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Bergman, in passing.

Persona’s opening sequence would probably have had Film Society patrons wondering if the technical difficulties that beset previous weeks’ films had continued with this one. The famous montage shatters the notion of cinema, the idea that we’re comfortably going to suture ourselves into whatever film is playing. And he starts with light (not really in a biblical sense) and splices in clips from the ‘beginning’ of cinema. He moves onto animation, slapstick comedy, horror, pornography (Fight Club wasn’t so anarchic in that respect). Film is instead imaged as a violent art-form, something which tears, destroys, kills. Bergman adopts the idea that cinema captures death – what we see is no longer living, it stopped living the moment it was captured by a camera – and all we see are ghosts of the original trace. Throw in explorations of the tyrannical artist, charting the alienation of human contact, and an emphasis on the frailty/constructed nature of the visual image and you have one of the all-time masterpieces of world cinema.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s brooding, inclement film noir. By STEVE GARDEN.

I LIKE good wine, but there’s a difference between tasting it and drinking it. Many wines are designed to impress at a tasting, but they may not drink as well in front of the fire. And of course, good wine reveals itself over time. At the risk of pushing a strained analogy, the New Zealand International Film Festivals can be like a tasting, but for me it’s always a taste of things to come. I return to many of the films again – sometimes often – and invariably there is much more to discover.

Eric Rohmer’s last wave. By STEVE GARDEN.

NO OTHER film in this year’s Festival arrived with more divided critical opinion than Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Céladon. Rohmer has intimated that this will be his last film, so critics and reviewers have looked to it for the kind of life’s-work summation that neatly enables them to acclaim the artistic continuity of one of the great auteurs. However, many haven’t been able to get past what they regard as its banal anachronistic superficiality. It’s unlikely that Rohmer set out to scuttle them, but this one-time critic has nevertheless produced a work that appears to challenge the cine-literacy of many film commentators. Admittedly, it isn’t immediately apparent where Rohmer is going with this relatively straightforward tale of a romantic misunderstanding that inevitably works out happily-ever-after. We’ve seen it all before, and we’re bound to see it many more times before we see nothing at all, but I wager that few filmmakers will manage such buoyancy and critical potency. Contrary to its seeming triviality, there’s a teasing sense of subtext behind every frame of this deceptively simple film.

Brief, belated impressions on three Festival films. By DARREN BEVAN, CALEB STARRENBURG and ANDY PALMER.

WHEN A film’s billed as 100 minutes of insanity, expectation is high. Hyperbole is one thing, Be Kind Rewind is another. From director Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Jack Black and Mos Def star as Jerry and Mike respectively. The pair is a kind of goofy odd duo who are poles apart from each other. Jerry is a paranoid delusionist who lives in a campervan which is situated in the car park of a power station. He’s convinced this station is melting his mind. Mike, on the other hand, works in the titular video store (yes, they push a video store rather than a DVD equivalent) owned by Danny Glover, who brings him up on a diet of respect and the fact Fats Waller was born in the very store in which they work. One day Jerry tries to take out the power station with a grappling hook and some crafty camouflage. But as things tend to with any character Jack Black plays, it all goes awry and Jerry ends up magnetized. And when he ends up in the store, Mike’s stunned to find the entire stock is wiped because of his friend’s electronic eraser ways. Knowing full well that Glover’s character is relying on him to run things, Mike decides there’s only one way to revamp the entire video collection – by re-recording and recreating them.

Taking Turkmenistan to task. By MELODY NIXON.

THE SO-CALLED ‘holy book’ filmmakers Arto Halonen and Kevin Frazier explore in this rough, patchy documentary is the ‘Ruhnama;’ a hysterical and exploitative work put together by former Turkmenistan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, or Turkmenbashy, as he affectionately called himself. In uncovering what could perhaps be the most esoteric of all subjects in geopolitics, Halonen and Frazier manage to successfully bring to light the intentions, consequences and – ever present in contemporary exposé docos – the multi-national corporate links behind the Ruhnama.

A second take on the Festival’s latest animation programme. By MELODY NIXON.

I HAVE a long-running fondness for Animation Now!. This series of collated animation shorts, brought together for the New Zealand International Film Festivals each year, showcases the latest in animation technology and brings whimsical, sinister and sometimes deeply creepy stories to life in the most vibrant of ways.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: introducing Ross McElwee.

THE FILM SOCIETY has opened its mini-retrospective of brilliant American documentary maker Ross McElwee with two of his earlier short-ish films: Charleen and Backyard. The recent spate of self-deprecating, confessional documentary-making (e.g. I Am a Sex Addict) have their roots in McElwee’s distinctive work. His essay-films merge the social and the historical into something, well, personal (though not necessarily about himself). His hilarious, incisive work reaches its peak with next week’s Film Society film Sherman’s March, but these two little films provide plenty of pleasure, and point to his later works’ idiosyncrasies.

Brief encounters at the Melbourne International Film Festival. By ALEXANDER BISLEY.

LE dysfunctional family! Like Kings and Queen, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a truly outstanding film. Elegant and penetrating, A Christmas Tale grandly explores life’s messy unresolve. Desplechinian themes of family, art and mental illness are plumbed when Catherine Deneuve’s matriach Junon’s cancer demands a dysfunctional French whanau get together for Christmas’ ceremony.

Artisanal spirit in sound hands. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

I DON’T know about you, but whenever I see a Steinway grand piano – whether it be on the stage of the hallowed Carnegie Hall or in the corner of an alleyway bar –, it impresses of having always existed in its finished state; an instrument so stately one struggles to imagine it as a composite of specialised parts and labour, let alone a log fished from Alaskan waters. After viewing this down-to-earth documentary, however, it would be difficult to ignore the intricate artistry that goes into making what, musically-speaking, is much more than the sum of its parts.

Obscure objects of desire compete in Céline Sciamma’s teen milieu. By DAVID LEVINSON.

NOT COUNTING the crystalline emptiness of the teens who populate MTV’s möbius strip of “reality” shows, for most of us adolescence poses a frustrating paradox: Often, at the time, you feel too heady with angst to take charge of the freedom of being young, but from thereon must be subjected to vision after vision that mines that pain for poetic frisson. Water Lilies, by firsttime French director Céline Sciamma, is the latest offender that romanticises – and, by proxy whitewashes – the struggles of puberty, giving itself over to a kind of softcore pageantry.

Into the melting pot: gender, culture and identity. By JOE SHEPPARD.

THE CENTREPIECE of this year’s Festival was a celebration of local talent and ethnic diversity. Both the curtain raiser Take 3 and the main feature, Sima Urale’s Apron Strings, danced closely with the typecast roles that race plays in this country, but the stories ultimately championed the courage required to confront such obstacles and to assert individual identity.

Remembering a past marked by death. By CATHERINE BISLEY.

A DOG RUNS. One by one more dogs join it. They converge in a mass of slather and snarl. They race through terrified blue streets to Boaz. Twenty-six, he tells Ari in an early morning bar. I couldn’t kill people so they had me shoot dogs. There are always twenty-six dogs in my dream because that’s how many I killed. Don’t you have flashbacks to Lebanon?

New Wave German Cinema; Run Yella, Run! By JOE SHEPPARD.

CHRISTIAN Petzold’s estranged and troubled young female leads have graced the Paramount theatre lately in The State I Am In and Ghosts, and Yella protagonist Nina Hoss could easily have been celebrated alongside the other Fräuleinwunder in the recent Film Society season of Pool of Princesses, Requiem, and Longing. Here German reunification casts a long shadow over Saxony-Anhalt, the bleak former-Eastern state where economic recession has destroyed Yella Fichte’s marriage and bankrupted her ex-husband Ben. Yella flees west to the opportunities of Hanover, trading the shelter and hard-earned cash of a simple domestic life with her dad for hotel rooms, suitcases, and making money out of nothing. She is also escaping an ex who stalks and threatens her at every turn and whose actions, as they cross the Elbe on a friendly drive to the train station, recall Caesar at the Rubicon in terms of violence, calculation and irreversible consequences.

The multi billion-dollar industry that preys on the ocean’s most ‘feared’ predator. By CATHERINE BISLEY.

A SHARK is finned alive and tossed back in the ocean: unable to swim it sinks to the bottom, blinking. I went to Sharkwater, the debut documentary of Canadian Rob Stewart, in the hope of ridding myself of a Jaws-induced terror of sharks. Commoditised by Steven Spielberg, this common, yet statistically irrational phobia, has kept my sea going to a shallow and fear filled minimum. Now, with summer only six months away, I have made the firm decision to liberate myself from the chlorinated and, let’s be honest, urinated, surroundings of the Kilbirnie Aquatic Centre. When The Lumière Reader offered to assist in allaying my – previously mentioned – statistically-irrational phobia, I quite naturally leaped at the opportunity. And it worked. The fear was gaffed, finned and finally drowned at full fathoms five.

Synchronised swimming frames Céline Sciamma’s tale of cruel adolescence. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

IT’S a cliché to state that adolescence isn’t necessarily easy, but if you take the Hollywood approach, it’s full of perfectly formed teenagers who eventually find everlasting love. Water Lilies takes the opposite approach: tumid emotions, barely-suppressed hormones, and unrequited infatuations appear the norm. The film looks at a love quadrangle, but one which is full of sharply defined characters who scramble for higher ground with self-interest and selfishness. Barely a trace of love is there.

The Dardenne Brothers revisit an underworld of human transactions. By DAVID LEVINSON. (contains spoilers)

FOR ALL their nominal prestige, there’s a welcome lack of pomp surrounding the event of a new Dardennes’ film. Maybe it’s because, unlike the Coens – whose in-house pecking order sees to the divvying up of writing, but not directing duties – the Belgian duo enact their craft under the same industrious anonymity that informs their characters. Whatever the case, Lorna’s Silence, their latest collaboration, opens on familiar terms – with a nod to Bresson: Mimicking L’Argent, we witness a cluster of Euros changing hands, unspooling a bleak scenario that finds the title character hitched to a junkie named Claudy (Jeremie Renier) in order to gain citizenship. Strictly a formal arrangement, the pair cohabit a flat in Liège, where – hair cropped boyishly close – Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) flaunts an obvious lack of empathy over her spouse’s struggle to give up heroin. (More salient, as it turns out, than her steppingstone existence as an alien-bride, is the one she pictures alongside her thuggish boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), with whom she dreams of opening a snack bar.) But Lorna, like Claudy, is just another pawn in a plot overseen by Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) – a shadowy cab driver who, after removing Claudy via a forced overdose, seeks to marry her off to a mafioso known as “the Russian.”

Good cops turn bad cops in José Padilha’s cruel world. By JOE SHEPPARD.

THIS YEAR’s Golden Bear went to the Brazilian film Elite Squad, a kind of antidote for the youthful hope and retro-chic of the immensely successful City of God. Again the subject matter is chiefly the favelas or slums of Rio de Janeiro, but José Padilha highlights here the brutality of the special forces unit ‘waging war’ against the druglords and exposes the endemic corruption of the ordinary fuzz, whose top brass runs protection racquets much like the mafia.

A grisly, Gallic horror overcome with bloodlust. By JACOB POWELL.

NOT A FILM for the faint-of-stomach, Xavier Gens’ (Hitman) recent addition to the growing Gallic-Horror genre, Frontier(s), throws personal atrocities at the viewer in fast and furious succession creating, after the obligatory 20-minute plot setup, an almost non-stop bloodbath of genre clichés. Presenting spectacle after grisly spectacle, Gens unashamedly ticks more genre boxes than other films would venture to do in twice the runtime. It is as if the director sat in a room with a few guys one night throwing ideas around for a horror film and then didn’t edit out a single one!

Juliette Binoche anchors (and multitasks in) Hou’s ecstatic new film. By TIM WONG.

HOU Hsiao-hsien’s inquisitive, richly lensed companion piece to Café Lumière finds the Taiwanese shî fu on foreign soil for a second time in honour of a cinematic touchstone: Albert Lamorisse’s beguiling The Red Balloon (also screening at this year’s Festival with White Mane). Yet whereas Hou – whose similarities with Yasujiro Ozu are limited mainly to the sensitive portrayal of women, and a fondness for the interior middle shot – filmed his commemorative Shochiku offering not in style, but tribute, Lamorisse’s beloved children’s picture is a vital kindred spirit. Vibrant, ethereal, and seemingly suspended in mid-air, this delicate homage is no remake or pastiche, but an inheritance of sorts; the eponymous inflatable passed on to Hou as a symbol of levity, of cinema taking flight.

Reanimating Ari Folman’s devastating lost memories. By JACOB POWELL.

TAKING its title from a surreal scene in which an Israeli soldier, under heavy fire, enters into a trance-like dance in the middle of a street junction in Beirut under the shadow of several massive posters of Bashir Gemayel (president elect of Lebanon), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is at once a surreal journey into lost memory and an incredibly sobering documentary of the first degree.

Impressions on seminal albums by Lou Reed and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. By JOE SHEPPARD.

ONE EXCITED woman clearly couldn’t contain her enthusiasm as the lights dimmed for Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, ejaculating abruptly: “Go Nick Cave!” No stranger to celluloid, Cave last hit festival screens at the World Cinema Showcase a couple of years back, penning the bleak and hardnosed Western The Proposition. Since his music videos and concerts have been reasonably well collected on DVD, the premise of Great Australian Albums..., a retrospective look at 1996’s album Murder Ballads song by gory song, promised an interesting window onto a breakthrough moment in Cave’s eclectic career. The film ultimately failed to come together as a fully coherent and focussed making-of story, but the more general interviews, largely with former collaborators and music journalists, proved to be nonetheless revealing for Cave fans.

Remembering a life after death. By JACOB POWELL.

KURT KUENNE’s 2008 documentary feature Dear Zachary may well be the film that puts this American-indie director firmly on the international map, and though it is a work of beauty and great value, it is the story that the film relates which is actually the most compelling part of this movie experience. And how compelling a story it is! Ant ‘Incredibly Strange’ Timpson’s comments regarding the raw emotive impact of this documentary tale are not exaggerated; the film is as wildly unpredictable and wide ranging in its emotional tone as the average New Zealand weather forecast.

Absorbing documentary restores dignity to the survivors of an Andean plane crash. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

IT’s enough make hardened cynics superstitious: a group of mostly 19-year-old Uruguayan rugby players coping with 72 days of unimaginably freezing conditions after their plane crashed in the Andes in the year of 1972, having set out on... you guessed it: Friday the 13th.

Alister Barry charts Don Brash’s political downslide. By DANYL MCLAUCHLAN.

BASED on emails obtained from secret sources within the National Party, Nicky Hager’s book The Hollow Men was an expose of National’s 2005 election campaign under the leadership of former Reserve Bank governor Don Brash. Dr Brash resigned two days before the book was published, his position made untenable by Hager’s revelations that he had lied about his involvement with the Exclusive Brethren and their campaign against Labour and the Greens.

Bayona’s slick and glossy debut checks (almost) all the right boxes. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

THIS accomplished first feature directed by Juan Antonio Bayona has it all. High profile producer (Guillermo Del Toro) – check. Creaking mansion and murderous ghost children – check. All the performances are well-directed, especially lead actress Belen Rueda’s engaging turn as a conflicted mother. The cinematography and mise-en-scene is well-crafted and beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with it – indeed, there is a lot about it that is technically very right. However, despite all this, it doesn’t quite connect. Or at least, it didn’t connect with me. I got it, but it didn’t get me.

Enigmatic musical chameleon Arthur Russell gets the cinematic treatment he deserves. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

AS MUCH an exercise in portraiture as it is a period piece, this loving tribute to the chameleonic Arthur Russell will hopefully open more eyes and ears to the ineffable brilliance of his music. Disappointingly, the session I attended for this intimate biopic was sparsely patronised; perhaps I’m being presumptuous in expecting more than 30 people to be au fait with Russell’s exceptional talents, but somehow I expected an audience akin to the one for The Devil and Daniel Johnston from a couple of years back. After all, it’s no small deal to have the likes of Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg and David Toop singing your praises. And Jens Lekman fans, where were you!? Don’t you want to know who your humble hero’s been cribbing from all this time? Obviously not, or I would have seen you slinking into one of the Scott Walker sessions from last year, too.

Warwick Broadhead revists a life less ordinary for the camera. By JACOB POWELL.

Rubbings From a Live Man, a dramatised documentary from filmmaker/arist Florian Habicht, fuses straight-forward interview footage with filmed, theatre style ‘reenactments’ and dramatic monologues to tell something akin to the life story of its subject: prolific thespian and creative tour de force, Warwick Broadhead.

Ben Russell, one half of experimental shorts programme We Can Not Exist in This World Alone (in collaboration with Ben Rivers), chats to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about challenging the grammar of cinema.

Sardonic comedy springs surprises in the midst of a medieval Belgian city. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

THE BELGIAN city of Bruges is not the first place that springs to mind when one thinks of hitmen comedies, so it comes as some surprise that this gorgeous medieval city plays such an integral role in the success of this film. Seasoned playwright Martin McDonagh’s debut feature is a slyly humorous quasi-fable with several layers of moral subtext and a canny eye for the latent tragedy and sadness lurking beneath many comic situations.

An engaging and though-provoking story of how humanity gets by in the wake of misplaced 9/11 bureaucracy. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

THE IMAGE of a balding white middle-class economics professor drumming African beats in the New York subway could seem trite, but in the warm, capable hands of writer/director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent), it is a heartbreaking expression of futility, powerful and true. Humanity provides the only glimmer of hope in this present-day America, where paranoia renders the very paragon of democracy an unyielding, inscrutable façade reminiscent of a fascist or communist regime.