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Post-fest Wrap 2004 [Part A]
TIM WONG wraps the best – and the rest – from Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals 2004.
» Part A | [Part B]
ON PAPER, 2004 was the year of Guy Maddin, the activist film, Martial Arts and some seriously good Korean Cinema. In reality, it was the year of genitalia, the inner child and Modernist clichés. Certainly of those, the most invigorating thing to come out of the TNZIFF was the reoccurring motif of an elusive childhood. Direct experience was well catered for: in I'm Not Scared and The Return; the late adolescent growing pains of Evil; the child-parental bond in Father & Son; and particularly, the bubble-bursting immersion of Nobody Knows, with its pig-tailed poster-child Yuki-chan and her three entirely likeable siblings, each inviting us into a private underaged microcosm eroded slowly away by the onset of grown-up responsibility. Despite crossing the point of no return well into the its projected outcome – one of downward-spiraling inevitability – Nobody Knows remained one of my festival favourites, probably because I'm bias towards anything Japanese, but mostly because of the film's triumphant, depression-saving final images. There's also great irony in the fact that the children's draft-dodging single-mother-of-a-parent displays the immaturity, selfish dependancy and squeaky-clean voice of a 4 year-old girl.
The Hayao Miyazaki triptych, however, was a high-point in childhood-simulation, and worked – as all his films tend too – in a totally non-retrospective sense. If anything, a Miyazaki film doesn't so much as return us to past experience, but instead shunts it forward into the present moment. Carl Jung (or whoever it was) tried to define it as the "inner child", but it's really as simple as allowing oneself to imagine – as difficult as that now might seem. I was reminded of this with Spirited Away previously, and especially here in the nostalgic self-discovery of My Neighbor Totoro, which is maybe the perfect childhood film. It's impossible to pin down, but Miyazaki – through a secret-formula of mythic storytelling and the richest of animation – is able to impart within the temporary sphere of a film's duration that gift of imagination. We're all programmed with this from birth, and yet there's a point where it becomes obsolete – or just doesn't work as it used too – along with the Barbie Doll, GI-Joe and Santa Claus. For children, these films are a staple, but for adults – at least those like me who still cling on to the "Wonder Years" – they're a long-sought revelation.
If there's a litmus test for the amount of "high brow" at any film festival, it's the number of static, prolonged shots of nothingness to be counted. Enter Michael Haneke – familiar Euro-Modernist-agitator of the festival circuit, and notable absence from this year's lineup – who himself nows seems to suggest that the whole stripped-back, fashionable economy of cinema is nothing more than cliché when used as blatantly as Hollywood takes to special effects. Two films – Tropical Malady and Goodbye Dragon Inn – took this fad to an extreme, and unlike others, came out on the right side of cliché. Both directors here, of course, have made slow-burning minimalism their aesthetic of choice. Apichatpong Weerasethakul – or "Joe", as I've heard him referred too – created an unprecedented series of walkouts with last year's Blissfully Yours, probably the most spaced-out movie I've ever seen. Joe makes the same bold, elongated moves with Tropical Malady, and gets away with it, simply because it feels like he's ripping the very fabric of cinema to shreds. Tsai Ming-liang also opts for the motionless and wordless, and it's more pronounced than ever beneath the aging silences of Goodbye Dragon Inn. It's a film that lives and breaths purely within its own momentary projected time-span, catching us in the act of wallowing in images of dark, empty theatre-spaces, and reflecting it back upon us, the viewer, and the very looking glass of cinema itself.
Last but not least, an obsession with genitalia proved to be the festival's most blasé-reactionary trend. For better or worse, full frontal nudity – and what is done with it thereafter – escalated in the 90's onwards from the faux-artistic, heroin-addicted pages of The Face, to a more than regular quota of legitimate movie screen time. This year, more than any other, films and their filmmakers actually seemed to be competing against each other for the title of "best penis/vagina percentile to film length ratio". Peter Greenaway's brain-teasing Tulse Luper Suitcases made the most of its airy, honey-coated nakedness; Guy Maddin threw in a urinating close-up, among other things; the director of Open Water even made his wife go nude in a scene of gratuitous, confused DV-Dogme-naturalism logic. Unsurprisingly, the French out-exposed all others; the hairy erogenous-zones of Anatomy of Hell a clear winner on the day. A deliberately pretentious, semi-version of In the Realm of the Senses – complete with intimidating barriers of intellectualism and status – Catherine Breillat's experiments in sex and more sex turned out to be kind of amusing, especially when Rocco Siffredi, in a moment of priceless indecision, seems as if he can't decide which end of the garden rake to use. Twentynine Palms was a lot better – and a whole lot more cinematic – but brought me to the realisation that below-the-waistline nudity really hasn't had much shock value since The Crying Game. That of course concludes this year, and I wait until next, as always, with equal amounts of excitement and canned cynicism...
» Part A | [Part B]
POSTFEST
» Part A | [Part B]
ON PAPER, 2004 was the year of Guy Maddin, the activist film, Martial Arts and some seriously good Korean Cinema. In reality, it was the year of genitalia, the inner child and Modernist clichés. Certainly of those, the most invigorating thing to come out of the TNZIFF was the reoccurring motif of an elusive childhood. Direct experience was well catered for: in I'm Not Scared and The Return; the late adolescent growing pains of Evil; the child-parental bond in Father & Son; and particularly, the bubble-bursting immersion of Nobody Knows, with its pig-tailed poster-child Yuki-chan and her three entirely likeable siblings, each inviting us into a private underaged microcosm eroded slowly away by the onset of grown-up responsibility. Despite crossing the point of no return well into the its projected outcome – one of downward-spiraling inevitability – Nobody Knows remained one of my festival favourites, probably because I'm bias towards anything Japanese, but mostly because of the film's triumphant, depression-saving final images. There's also great irony in the fact that the children's draft-dodging single-mother-of-a-parent displays the immaturity, selfish dependancy and squeaky-clean voice of a 4 year-old girl.
The Hayao Miyazaki triptych, however, was a high-point in childhood-simulation, and worked – as all his films tend too – in a totally non-retrospective sense. If anything, a Miyazaki film doesn't so much as return us to past experience, but instead shunts it forward into the present moment. Carl Jung (or whoever it was) tried to define it as the "inner child", but it's really as simple as allowing oneself to imagine – as difficult as that now might seem. I was reminded of this with Spirited Away previously, and especially here in the nostalgic self-discovery of My Neighbor Totoro, which is maybe the perfect childhood film. It's impossible to pin down, but Miyazaki – through a secret-formula of mythic storytelling and the richest of animation – is able to impart within the temporary sphere of a film's duration that gift of imagination. We're all programmed with this from birth, and yet there's a point where it becomes obsolete – or just doesn't work as it used too – along with the Barbie Doll, GI-Joe and Santa Claus. For children, these films are a staple, but for adults – at least those like me who still cling on to the "Wonder Years" – they're a long-sought revelation.
If there's a litmus test for the amount of "high brow" at any film festival, it's the number of static, prolonged shots of nothingness to be counted. Enter Michael Haneke – familiar Euro-Modernist-agitator of the festival circuit, and notable absence from this year's lineup – who himself nows seems to suggest that the whole stripped-back, fashionable economy of cinema is nothing more than cliché when used as blatantly as Hollywood takes to special effects. Two films – Tropical Malady and Goodbye Dragon Inn – took this fad to an extreme, and unlike others, came out on the right side of cliché. Both directors here, of course, have made slow-burning minimalism their aesthetic of choice. Apichatpong Weerasethakul – or "Joe", as I've heard him referred too – created an unprecedented series of walkouts with last year's Blissfully Yours, probably the most spaced-out movie I've ever seen. Joe makes the same bold, elongated moves with Tropical Malady, and gets away with it, simply because it feels like he's ripping the very fabric of cinema to shreds. Tsai Ming-liang also opts for the motionless and wordless, and it's more pronounced than ever beneath the aging silences of Goodbye Dragon Inn. It's a film that lives and breaths purely within its own momentary projected time-span, catching us in the act of wallowing in images of dark, empty theatre-spaces, and reflecting it back upon us, the viewer, and the very looking glass of cinema itself.
Last but not least, an obsession with genitalia proved to be the festival's most blasé-reactionary trend. For better or worse, full frontal nudity – and what is done with it thereafter – escalated in the 90's onwards from the faux-artistic, heroin-addicted pages of The Face, to a more than regular quota of legitimate movie screen time. This year, more than any other, films and their filmmakers actually seemed to be competing against each other for the title of "best penis/vagina percentile to film length ratio". Peter Greenaway's brain-teasing Tulse Luper Suitcases made the most of its airy, honey-coated nakedness; Guy Maddin threw in a urinating close-up, among other things; the director of Open Water even made his wife go nude in a scene of gratuitous, confused DV-Dogme-naturalism logic. Unsurprisingly, the French out-exposed all others; the hairy erogenous-zones of Anatomy of Hell a clear winner on the day. A deliberately pretentious, semi-version of In the Realm of the Senses – complete with intimidating barriers of intellectualism and status – Catherine Breillat's experiments in sex and more sex turned out to be kind of amusing, especially when Rocco Siffredi, in a moment of priceless indecision, seems as if he can't decide which end of the garden rake to use. Twentynine Palms was a lot better – and a whole lot more cinematic – but brought me to the realisation that below-the-waistline nudity really hasn't had much shock value since The Crying Game. That of course concludes this year, and I wait until next, as always, with equal amounts of excitement and canned cynicism...
» Part A | [Part B]
POSTFEST
