TIM WONG previews the 2006 Film Society season, marking its 60th anniversary in New Zealand with an epiphanic account of his own Film Society initiation.


OUTSIDE the Paramount Theatre stretches a queue, a long one, encroaching onto the footpath of Courtenay Place. It is the beginning of Film Society season, and Terrance Malick’s Days of Heaven is playing. Too many people have procrastinated about signing up. Prepared, I already have my membership – my first ever, no less. Granted, it took me an eternity to become a member, and I ruefully admit to being apathetic about Film Society in the past. I used my university studies as an excuse. The workloads were horrendous. The classes often ran late. I lived some distance away from the city, apparently another reason not to join. I was a poor student, and reluctant to fork out.

Nevertheless, I caught the film bug my freshman year. Before, I settled for renting movies by the dozen; soon, I began skipping lectures to catch the latest festival films. This escalated annually until graduation, where quite unexpectedly, I had time on my hands. The Film Society beckoned.

That night, I had to wait for my out-of-town friend to shuffle through the queue and purchase a temporary “3-trip” membership. All the good seats were taken. We sat to the far left of the screen, one row back from the front. Last time I sat in such a position was at the Civic Theatre screening of Irrčversible. Needless to say, dizziness and neck pain ensued.

On several occasions during the movie, my friend nods off. But I remain riveted. Throughout, I’m reminded of Malick’s earlier film, the strikingly detached Badlands – a high ranker on any list of great movies. Days of Heaven gathers a similar emotional detachment to that film, but is far prettier to watch. Néstor Almendros’ cinematography is even more sublime on the big screen; Ennio Morricone’s score even more poignant out loud.

Days of Heaven’s tagline happens to read: “your eyes... your ears... your senses... will be overwhelmed.” Suddenly, it dawns on me what I’ve been missing out on: live cinema. A year earlier, I watched Days of Heaven on DVD, squeezed awkwardly into the tube of a 25-inch TV screen. It wasn’t the same. It certainly wasn’t as big, or as thrilling, or as of-the-moment. The swarm of locusts didn’t look as real. The twilight vistas weren’t as twilighty. There’s also something to be said for how movies – so often thought of as static, passive entertainment – are mobilised by the sheer physical body of an audience.


That same epiphany resurfaced last year when I attended a film festival screening of Z: Channel: A Magnificent Obsession – a documentary about how maverick programmer Jerry Harvey single-handedly engineered the shift in exhibition of movies from the projectionist’s booth to the television set. Founded in the mid-70s, Z Channel allowed viewers to subscribe to a cable TV network of round-the-clock movies – a 24/7 film festival of foreign cinema, rare and classic pictures, director retrospectives, cult oddities, and most of anything else important on film. Harvey’s eccentric, downright inspired programming choices earned the channel a vigorous following, and a reputation that would outlast its eventual demise.

The Film Society isn’t too dissimilar from Z Channel; apart from the difference in medium, both are outlets for the proliferation of classic and contemporary cinema. Both curate programmes of diverse, essential, and unusual nature. Both give forgotten and unseen films a second chance. Significantly though, only the Film Society allows new and old generations to experience movies – often for the first time – in a theatre as intended. Z Channel may have revolutionized the way we watch movies – and preempted the archiving of cinema to VHS and DVD in the process – but in doing so it also signalled the migration away from picture theatres.

Afterwards, I wrote that it was time for a remigration back to the theatres. DVD is a godsend as far as preserving film, and making it accessible. But fueled by a culture of convenience and speed, its detriment to cinema is that it encourages people to stay home; to bypass a theatrical screening and “wait for the DVD”; to rent or pirate or download instead. Locally, the dilemma is exasperated by the country’s lack of proximity to the rest of the world. Critics may point to crap movies as the reason for waning box office attendances, but technology must cop its fair share of the blame.


WHICH MAKES the role of the Film Society all the more urgent. 2006 marks the 60th anniversary of the Film Society movement in New Zealand; currently, you’ll find Film Societies in Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, Dunedin, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Nelson, Malborough, Greytown, Whangarei, Waitati, and Queenstown. Programmes vary, but the concept remains essentially the same: regular film screenings, many seldom seen on the big-screen (if not anywhere), over the course of a year. 12-Month memberships not only offer great value for money (even if one only attends half the films scheduled), but fringe benefits too: New Zealand International Film Festival patrons receive generous discounts as members (at last count, $3 less a ticket), as well as concessions at other local cinemas.

2005’s programme offered much in the way of the eclectic and influential, beginning with Matthew Barney’s elusive, esoteric five-film conceptual opus The Cremaster Cycle, followed closely by a priceless retrospective of films from Japanese sensei Yasujiro Ozu (the highlight a silent screening of I Was Born But... accompanied by the lively narration of Dr. Tomoko Shimoda). The year also included essentials such as French heist pictures Rififi and Le Cercle Rouge; Golden Age classics The Public Enemy, Footlight Parade and Mata Hari; and a mouth-watering big-screen projection of Andrei Rublev. Long-time members will no doubt recall even more memorable screenings from the past.

This year’s season – beginning in Wellington March 6th, Auckland March 14th, and elsewhere thereafter (check individual Society websites for more information) – opens with German silent film Asphalt (Wellington only), accompanied by visiting American pianist Dennis James (described in some circles as the finest silent film accompanist in the world today). This is followed notably by two scathing Luis Bunuel classics, Diary of a Chambermaid and Belle De Jour, and a retrospective quintuplet of early seminal Jean-Luc Godard films, including New Wave yardstick Breathless, Anna Karina odes Bande a Part and Pierrot le fou, and the starchy Contempt, with Bridgitte Bardot.


The trump card for 2006 (as far as I’m concerned) is the Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Hidden) pairing of Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf – the latter of which fell through festival cracks several years earlier, and will finally screen here for the first time. A post/present Apocalyptic allegory starring the ever-resourceful Isabelle Huppert, Time of the Wolf picks up disconcertingly where Funny Games left off with a home invasion. The circumstances are less sadistic than they are out of desperation, thrusting Huppert and her two children into an eerily defunct French countryside. What unfolds is some of the most startling, terrifying night imagery ever put to screen, with whole sequences shot entirely in pitch black, albeit the illumination of a single, distant flame.

What makes Time of the Wolf’s D-Day trope so hard to shake is that it’s disturbingly prophetic – the Boxing Day Tsunami, Pakistan, Hurricane Katrina all foretold as one grotesque, catastrophic aftermath that manages to uproot us from the bourgeois comfort of our living rooms, and into the maelstrom of a disaster zone we’re spectators to on CNN. Similarly caustic, Haneke interweaves the politics of communication into 2000’s Code Unknown, an instantly provocative, ambitious thesis on racism, disparity and social alienation. Opening boldly via a 10-minute tracking shot on a crowded Parisian street, the cultural divide is cast violently forth. Brilliantly compartmentalised into a volume of single-shot long takes, this is crucial, interrogative filmmaking of the highest order, and certainly one of the most important films of the last five years.


Throughout the year, the programme also serves up some fantastic one-offs: Martin Scorsese’s severely underrated The King of Comedy (with then-regular collaborator Robert De Niro); my favourite Woody Allen film, the gorgeous black-and-white Gershwin riff Manhattan; the electric, French Connection-esque thriller The Taking of Pelham 123 (along with said titles, part of a six-film series on New York); the cult/classic sci-fi duo of Barbarella and The Day the Earth Stood Still; as well as plenty more, including films from luminaries Rainer Werner Fassbinder (his and three other films forming a "Germany Under Seige" theme), Mel Brooks, Henri-Georges Clouzot and the Maysles brothers.


ONE NEEDN'T have heard of such films to make sense of the Film Society’s programme – being surprised is part of the fun. Having an open mind to someone choosing the film for you is even better, as is sharing and discovering it with hundreds of other people (so said Tim Corballis in the Sunday-Star Times). True, film geeks (like myself) populate the Society most weeks, as do the young, old and in between. Far be it from me to suggest what’s trendy, but nor is Film Society uncool. If lawn bowls can rise to the height of urban leisure chic on the back of a newspaper article, there’s hope for the Film Society yet. Starved of the bustling film culture of France and New York, or access to revival theatres or a Film Forum, New Zealand filmgoers have only the Film Society to fall back on. Sixty years old, and it continues to shine as a beacon for the malnourished. I personally may have taken years of indecision to finally make the plunge, but I am sure of one thing – it’s never too late to join.