On the frontline, SIMON SWEETMAN looks back on week one of his Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival sortie, with His Big White Self, Avenge But One of My Two Eyes and Black Sun among the fluctuating highs and lows.


I DID WELL early on, went to two pre-screenings of Film Festival flicks and, so far, they’ve turned out to be the best two films. Saw Dave Chapelle’s Block Party at the program-launch. And then got to a media screening of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. These films are both highly recommended – and they’ve already been raved about on this site. But they’re examples of must-see cinema. Particularly viewed close together; the Gore film is one of those documentaries that doesn’t exactly make you proud to be a human being, but it does make a huge impression on you, make you leave the cinema wanting to be a better person. This says a lot about the subtle intensity of the film’s sweep. And Block Party is like the antidote to many intense films (a necessary addition in this year’s festival, hence the decision for it to be shown in a pre-launch capacity). It’s the Bloody Mary when you’re suffering a hangover, it’s the best advertorial for harmonious living that could ever exist; and it’s just great for NZ audiences to get a glimpse of the genius of Dave Chapelle (this generation’s funniest comedian and we can’t get him on TV here at all!?!)

His Big White Self was the first film I saw once the festival started. I’ll watch anything Nick Broomfield has his name on, a giant influence on Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and any other ‘irreverent’ documentarian of the last two decades. The problem with His Big White Self is that it relies very heavily on Broomfield’s earlier doco, The Leader, His Driver And The Driver’s Wife (1991). Broomfield loves doing this, revisiting earlier material. It shows his commitment to the subjects he chooses to document and in this case, as before for Broomfield with his two Aileen Wuornos films, who wouldn’t want to know what these characters are up to now? The Leader is Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of South Africa’s neo-Nazis (AWB). Broomfield has to use plenty of footage from his first film to establish the characters and to show the changes in character. He ventured back to South Africa in 2005 to check on Eugene and the other two titular characters from the first film; he finds Eugene reborn as a church-going poet; the driver is still driving, but now he runs an ambulance rather than being involved in Eugene’s campaign. And the driver’s wife lives alone – helping raise her grandchildren. Perhaps an alternate title could have been The Former Leader, His Former Driver And The Former Driver’s Former Wife? Ah, but that’s the hit-the-audience-in-the-face-with-a-spade technique of a Michael Moore; Broomfield’s faux-bumbling Englishness is actually more subtle than it first seems. And though not a lot happens in His Big White Self; the two things that always stick out in a Broomfield film are on display here once again. Firstly, his balls! Nick Broomfield’s got some major stones. From confronting El Duche in Kurt & Courtney, to his prison-interview with Suge Knight in Biggie & Tupac, this guy is the master of standing up for the pure right of being an interviewer and intrepidly following his subject. And then there’s the fact that Broomfield’s films, whatever other agenda he might have (largely political, but as objective as can be within the confines of making a point) – are about human beings. Often they’re about humans that follow more animal traits than human instinct; but he exposes very real, very sad human stories. For that alone, seeing The Driver reduced to a sorry version of his former mis-guided braggadocio, His Big White Self is worth a watch. And of course, Broomfield is hilarious – there are some magic off-the-cuff, totally unscripted moments of hilarity, as should be the case when you’re capturing reality.

Ok, so that was a good kick-off to the festival proper. Things can only get better, right? Wrong.

I walked out of Avenge But One Of My Two Eyes during an early Monday morning screening. Avi Mograbi’s tightly-wound documentary will, ironically, stay with me forever – for it’s the first film I’ve ever left! (That’s right, I sat through Show Girls!) But I couldn’t be bothered trying to find the emotional centre of a film so frustratingly unfocussed and bitter. Of course Avenge is described in the notes as “an inflammatory critique of his own nation...” and sure, it’s hard not to be interested with the ongoing issue of Israel on the world-stage. And Mograbi has certainly captured some stunning footage, heartbreaking shots of an old woman admitting directly to tape that she’d rather die than live this life. But I had to leave. And not because it was too grim, or because I couldn’t handle the reality; on the contrary – I’m glad I went and the film issued a legitimate response from me: it made me bored. I can watch the news daily, or surf this interweb-thingey to find out similar information. Mograbi’s polemic was not structured or even vaguely arranged in the shape of a film. Instead it sits on the screen like a giant spit-ball of anger and frustration. The same could be said of Don Letts’ early efforts to capture the punk movement; yeah it’s modern history – but it’s not exactly compelling viewing.

Onwards.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger was to provide the break I needed from documentary. Bad choice. This film made less sense that Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, or the original version of The Big Sleep. And not in a fun way, like either of those films. This 1975 movie-masquerading-as-art, the way most wanky wannabe art-house pretensions flaunt themselves, was withdrawn from circulation. The film’s star, Jack Nicholson, personally paid for the film to be hidden (money well spent Jack!) Antonioni’s painfully long(-winded) shots can often be beautiful, but the paranoia and genre-hopping just makes this film messy. I felt like this was the film I should have walked from, but I was so frustrated I had to see the long, lingering last frame.


Back to documentary for me, and Black Sun provided the magic I was looking for. This short, effective film (70 minutes) tells the story of French artist, Hughes de Montalembert. Based in New York, the French filmmaker and painter is accosted one night in 1978; muggers attempt to rob him. They eventually steal the most precious gift: his sight. The cruel irony is that one of Hughes’ assailants threw paint-stripper in the artist’s eyes. It buries itself, burning deeply. His eyesight is lost forever. The film was created by Gary Tarn (director/editor/photography/music). Hughes de Montalembert provides the narration – essentially telling his life-story, how he recovered from this incident and picked his life up and carried on. Tarn shows the world all around as de Montalembert tells his story. Images swirl and swoon across the screen – picture evocations of the poetry of existence whether doomed (Koyaanisqatsi) or celebratory (Latcho Drom). But it is the voice – and indeed the spirit – of the film’s subject that makes this film far from being just Baraka-lite. The artist teaches himself to write – long-hand! – and pens the first volume of his autobiography (the seed for this film) and then travels around the world, unaided. He walks without a stick, refusing to erm, see his blindness as a hindrance. It’s a powerful film – making you truly see the world in a better light, as a better place. Again, with all this powerful polemic on offer at the Film Festival, it was nice to leave the theatre, shuffle down Courtenay Place with my headphones on and truly feel grateful to look around at what was happening in our little corner of the world. It might seem hackneyed, it might sound like so many clichés, but I left that film positively affected – I couldn’t – literally – believe my eyes. I felt so pleased to have seen that film; to have been able to, and to then go about the rest of my day. A simple concept as a documentary, and not something for everyone, but for me, this is one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever heard – or seen.

Factotum. Now I’m a huge Charles Bukowski fan! I’m sure that’s the thing to say in general Film Festival conversation, especially in the foyer outside a screening of Factotum. But it, nevertheless, happens to be the truth. I’m not proud of it, nor embarrassed – it’s just the end-result of having wasted three years of my university life devouring anything to do with Bukowski. I’ve read all of his novels and stories many times, biographies, essays, documentaries, his poems, spoken-word recordings, etc – I’ve got a veritable archive I’ve built on the guy. Put simply: I’m a fan. A couple of years back the festival ran a superb documentary on this solipsistic, misogynistic, alcoholic-bum of a writer. So it was clear that Factotum (the first attempt to adapt one of his novels) should be a hit at this year’s festival. Right?

Again, wrong. But thanks for playing.

For a start, Matt Dillon is woefully miscast. He’s too pretty to play Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s pen-name in his autobiographic tales) and he doesn’t bother to get the voice – so crucial to Bukowski/Chinaski. He holds his head well, cocks it to the side, juts his chin out, attempts that soft-shoe shuffle. But he doesn’t get the voice – and that, in a nutshell, was Bukowski. That cool-cat that really didn’t give a fuck how the world saw him. Mickey Rourke’s effort in Barfly (not a novel, but an actual original Bukowski screenplay) still stands as the greatest effort committed to film. The real problem with this – because there were glimmers of hope (particularly from the always-underrated Lily Taylor) – is that it’s a European production. Europeans had some weird handle on Bukowski and his work, revering him as if some drunken deity – merely because he was German-born. But the American writer was the last person to take himself seriously and Factotum is so po-faced. Whereas the book is hysterical. Bukowski’s lackadaisical, downtrodden, misanthropic take on life was always put across with lashings of black humour. But the European audience seemed to actually take him on his word (which is why in the early 1980s there was a truly awful Spanish version of his short story, Tales Of Ordinary Madness). What saddens me is that many people would have gone to this not having read Bukowski, and now probably won’t bother. Buy a copy of Post Office (his first novel, apparently being worked in to a screen adaptation at the moment, fingers crossed that it’s more Barfly than Factotum) and read it in one sitting. If it changes your life, you can thank me. If it doesn’t, it was never meant to be. Deal?

I must be picking the wrong films. Time to cross my fingers for the second week of the festival.

See also:
» Festival by Day: Week Two