En Francais - c'est tres bien!

Some of you may already know this, but underneath the love of Will Ferrell, the appreciation of a classy euphemism for genitals, the gratuitous use of the words motherfucker and c**t, is a girl who is incredibly snobby when it comes to film.

Yes, just as I don't really like fart jokes, I also am very pretentious when it comes to film. Do not get me started on the subject of why filmmakers should also be film critics. Or try to suggest that watching narrative cinema is a passive experience. I will crush you with film analysis. I will also talk for a very long time with little to no pauses.

As recent posts will suggest, I'm not so pretentious about film that I enjoy art cinema. That's for people who can't tell a story or be bothered hiring a crew that knows what they're doing. It's also for wankers who know nothing about film to discuss the power of the images. Yeah, all I see is Jurgen Haarbemaster and Vulva - helping all of us who prefer to explore film in an interesting way to take the piss about people who can't do it right.

Why, then, am I a film snob? Because I detest films that reveal nothing about either characters, genres or visual styles. I want to vomit at films made purely to generate revenue. I get irate when casting decisions are made purely on looks and not talent.

I like Ingmar Bergman films. In fact, I think he was one of the best filmmakers of all time. I could, hypothetically, talk about why Citizen Kane is so amazing, or why Alfred Hitchcock's films are perfect for several days. I love Jean-Luc Godard and I think Robert Altman is still the master of ensemble dramas. I also think Romero is the zombie film's real father, if not its biological father. I can find subtext in many films people consider to be ridiculous, shallow, or just plain disgusting, like Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. Which is all three, in equal measure.

But more than that, the films I admire and the films I want to make are so ridiculously wanky in scope, that sometimes I astound even myself. I want to reach that perfect combination that filmmakers like Scorsese, Tarantino, Wright, and Coppola have done before me: that perfect blending of style and substance - an exploration of film that doesn't feel shallow, using characters so perfectly that you like them or are fascinated by them even if they are merely a device or yet another exploration of film.

I want to explore the work of other filmmakers and develop my style from them. I want to make analyses of genre so powerful that they inspire a hundred nerdy blog posts like this one. I want to hear lines of my dialogue quoted on the streets and in the statuses of social networking profiles. I want a visual style that people literally wee themselves over, they're so impressed.

I began this quest with the first film I actually wrote, or came up with the concept for. It was a music video for a friend's band. It was supposed to be an homage to those wonderfully bad B-Movies with monsters in them, using ridiculously poor effects. Check out my earlier post on it - Sirens by Fictions, formerly Montana Fire. Whether it was through poor shot choice or whatever, it didn't work. So what we did instead was intercut the band fleeing from a monster with scenes from the 1958 sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. What started as pure homage and an exploration of old filming techniques became an exercise in montage, really. An ability to create meaning between two disparate sets of images. And still, in essence, an homage to old films that didn't have the same kind of technology we do.

The next film was another exploration of genre and the conventions of the buddy-cop drama, much in the vein of Hot Fuzz. However, I wanted to put a twist on it by changing the location of the drama for comic effect: the two cops became dishpigs, and the police station became a small restaurant. It was designed to be a sort of origins story that would form the basis of a television series or feature film, however, again, being student filmmakers and therefore still pretty rubbish, the film had to be modified quite a bit from its original form. The bad lighting couldn't really be saved with colour correction in post, so it became a black and white film. The audio issues couldn't be fixed without a lot more time, either, so it became a silent film. Not just any old silent film, either: a 1980s silent film. I'm pretty sure it's the only one of its kind. While again, my aim was still present - to do an analysis of genre, it's not quite what I had in mind, though people were quite blown away with it, although sadly not the tutors.

Well, that changed with the film I made recently. While on my student exchange, I decided I wanted to direct a film to see if I could do what I had wanted to do for quite some time. And the film I had to make was a film with a non-linear narrative. That was the part that was the most exciting. So when I first started thinking about it, this is what I wanted to do:

Make an art film that was not actually an art film, but a series of randomly assembled homages to scenes in films that sort of relied on an artistic feel - surrealism and all that sort of thing. The techniques some early filmmakers were going to be played with, too. So the scenes I wanted to rip off were the following:

The in-camera editing style of Melies
The organisation of time in Un Chien Andalou
The dream sequence in Carrie
The end of Blow-Up

Good, right? Yeah. The film changed but the pretentious ambition I always had for it never changed. The original story goes something like this: a couple are on a way to a party. They're trying to take a shortcut suggested to them by a friend of the guy. They get lost in these eerie, surreal woods and strange things start to happen. They become angry with each other and the guy leaves the girl. While they're separated, he stumbles across something sort of awful, but while looking for her he trips and bangs his head, knocking him unconscious. The girl looks for him all night and finds him unconscious, thinking he's dead. He wakes up, and in his groggy state he tries to lead her to what he found, with her help. And what is it that he's discovered? They're in a children's playground. They've been lost in a playground the entire time. To top things off, a little girl is playing and she was been playing with them while they've been lost, taking their things and giving them gifts.

The way it would play out is that it would start with the couple fighting, then cut to the girl by herself, staring at something offscreen. We'd then cut to them at night, trying to work together. Then back to day time, and they've found an old tape recorder. Upon discovering that it works, they dance to the music. Then back to the girl, only this time we would see a little more and also we would see the little girl staring back at her. Then slight tension between the couple during the day when they are trying to find their way. Then we would return to the fight at the beginning and see the guy walk off. From here, the film would be linear but still surreal - we'd then cut to the girl looking for the guy and discovering him, then discovering the playground. Then, the little girl would begin playing a game of imaginary tennis and the girl would join in.

Oh, wanna know the best part? The film is called La Cour. Which in French is...playground. See what I did there?

Structurally, the finished film is still the same, minus the dancing scene (we didn't have time, shame), however, we shot in such a way as to make it even more confusing than I intended. Basically, the film goes like this: we start with the couple fighting. We then cut straight to the girl. Then, we cut to them walking together at night. Then the title. Then, the slight tension on the bridge during the day, followed by the repeated scene of the girl staring at something, followed by a little girl. It's now obvious that they're in a playground. Then, we cut back to the fight again, repeated but not quite as long. Then we see the girl searching for her boyfriend and finds him. It's no longer clear what's happened to him. Then we cut to them reaching the playground. The girl helps her boyfriend sit down and, seeing the little girl, throws the imaginary ball to the little girl for a while.

It's incredibly confusing, but now I say it's supposed to be. And it is - through shooting the film it became more about this couple in this odd, surreal wood setting. The playground at the end makes it a little more hopeful than absurd and ridiculous and I wanted the structure to sort of suggest the state of mind of the characters. Now it could even resemble the girl's memories of that time in her life.

I'd now like to share with you some of what I wrote for my tutors when handing in the film:


What sources influenced your practice in this work? This must include works by filmmakers and/or artists, but could also include works of fiction/poetry; theory; newspaper articles; music; dreams or conversations (for example.)


When I first researched this unit of the course in Australia, I originally conceived of an artists' moving image film, and I wanted to use this film to explore the relationship between art cinema and narrative cinema. The film would be, in essence, an homage to surrealist film techniques and the more abstract moments in some of my favourite films, including Un Chien Andalou (Bunuel and Dali, 1928), especially the quote from Bunuel about the film: “No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.” My rather lofty and perhaps pretentious ambition was to create a film that rejected all atempts to find meaning within it, using images from narrative films.

I then decided to develop a narrative and was inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone called 'Strange Planet.' In the episode, three astronauts crash-land on another planet, and without resources or a way home, tension begins to mount between them. One walks away and the others look for him. As they search, they find a symbol drawn in the sands. When they find him he is near death and before he can explain the symbol he does in fact die. As they continue searching the landscape, they make a horrific discovery: the symbol was supposed to represent power lines. They have been on Earth the entire time.

The films I wanted to pay tribute to were the following:

Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973) - the scene in which the young lovers escape to the woods and dance to the song 'Love Is Strange'. I really liked this part of the film, because it represents a slightly surreal and almost absurd moment between the characters. I wrote a scene as an homage to this scene both to heighten the more absurd elements of the story, and to provide light relief in the mounting tension between the two characters.

Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976) - Susan's dream, in which she visits Carrie's grave – it was shot backwards and reversed in the editing process and I wanted to employ this technique, as I was still interested in experimenting with different ways of filming to create a surreal effect. Within my script for La Cour, the moment in which one of my protagonists, Laurie, is literally separated from her boyfriend Cabe, it is at a point when she is most affected by the landscape – she has been searching for him all the night and she is numb with cold and fear. I wanted to reflect this visually through the shots and also the editing.

Blow-Up (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1966) - the end of the film, in which David Hemmings' character revisits the park in which he captured a murder on camera. The mystery is never resolved; when he gets to the park, a group of mimes play imaginary tennis, and for a moment he plays along. The film is about a photographer who witnesses a strange event in a park, and the unassuming park becomes a dangerous other realm through the lens of his camera. He believes this evidence he has captured will change his life, but it changes nothing – he is still witnessing other people through a lens. After his experience and a night of hell looking for the woman who may know more about the murder, he returns to the park only to find the mimes who had disrupted social order in the street earlier in the film have disrupted the order of the park. At this point, the absurdity of his situation seems to hit him and he has nothing to do but to play along with the absurdity. I wanted to recreate this as the ending of my film, as I felt the story echoed this element of Antonioni's film (yes, I am actually comparing myself to Antonioni. How uncomfortable), the characters going through a night of hell only to be presented with an absurd and almost meaningless resolution. The horror of realising they had been in a park all along would give way, especially for Laurie, to a sense that she could do nothing now but to play along with the game she and Cabe had been unwittingly been involved in all along.

I was also inspired by the structure of the novel Catch-22, in which the structure of the novel reflects the memories of the main character, and one incident that forms the end of the novel is constantly referred to throughout the book, using one particular image.

During preproduction, and after consultations with Joe and discussing the look of the film with Sioned, I also looked to the television series Peep Show, which is shot entirely using subjective pov of characters within the show. This was to play up the element of the characters being watched and played with. This was because Joe suggested that the idea of who is playing a game with the characters could be clearer, and Sioned and I decided on shooting the film in the style of Peep Show, in that every shot in the film would be the subjective pov of one of the characters. Much of the shots we had using the tripod were designed to reflect the pov of the small girl we see in the playground at the end of the film. What I was suggesting most of all is that as the writer and director it was me playing the game not so much with the characters but with the audience, however, I'm not skilled enough as a writer or director just yet to make that as clear as I maybe could have.

Nearer, Father, Nearer

I'm currently writing an essay on art cinema and its representation of the body, gender, and identification. Ha. To me, the essay question is, in the words of Cher Horowitz, 'simply a jumping-off point to start negotiations.' Par exemple, take the essay I was supposed to write for the atrocious joke of a compulsory course, International Media Studies. I don't know how many of you out there are aware of this, but the discipline of Communication Studies is a vile pit of horror and despair. In order to avoid this, I would happily drink wasps, stab my eyes out with lit sparklers, and go on an over-60s singles cruise. But I digress. International Media Studies. I can't really remember the essay question - it was something about discussing theories of the way in which communication is enabled across countries or something yawn-worthy like that. Contraflow was in there somehow. It was supposed to be a 'research essay', in which you merely researched these boring theories and made some irrelevant comment on the way in which they applied to international media relations. I'm almost positive that essay would be laughed out of a HSC curriculum for being too simple.

So in the opening paragraph, I outlined exactly why this question and approach to the study of international media relations was tired and crap, and discussed Foucault's concept of power and how these power relations were enacted via the media - this constant back-and-forth between media outlets. I have no idea if this impressed any of my tutors (especially as one of them was ridiculous - she accused an entire class of plagiarism for using a modern version of the Harvard Referencing System - idiot), however, since I received a decent grade considering I failed an assignment due to my sheer refusal to stick to the assignment guidelines, I can only assumed one of them at least valued my articulately and well-written opinion of their ridiculous course.

And now I come to my current essay. Call me a slave to narrative cinema, but upon taking a course that focuses on the development of art cinema, I can now say with conviction that I hate art cinema with a passion reserved only for paedophiles, racists and homophobes. Ok, so maybe I don't hate them that much. I guess what I hate is that anything with a story is immediately dismissed as brainwashing rubbish enslaving a passive audience and a naked dude rubbing tomato sauce on his penis is considered a masterpiece. I'm almost positive this 'art film' has been recreated on many drunken football tours and buck's nights.

Many art films investigating the same thematic concerns as horror films have been automatically placed in a higher cultural category for far too long. For example, Stan Brakhage explores the demise of the human body in several films and while these are difficult to access, they are still praised for their contemplation of human frailty and ask the spectator to respond to the sight of the body in decay. So do horror films. Simply because a lot of them appear to be an excuse to show ample bosoms and graphic violence, they reveal what is usually unseen - death and the body's destruction. The unseen fascinates us, the unknown pulls us toward it and death is one of these things. Most of us don't know what our insides look like, so why not take a peak in the safety of the cinema or our own homes?

Zombie films contain the same themes of death and the contemplation of the body's destruction. Simon Pegg, my dream man, argues that slow-moving zombies are a metaphor for death, slow, yet sudden, always inevitable. Yet these are considered a lower form of cinema.

Artists who work in film always suggest that the experience of watching a narrative film is too passive, and their work challenges the spectator to be more active. Well, first of all, fuck you. The act of watching a film is never passive. They assume that simply because sitting in a room focusing your attention on a single space for a prolonged period of time is passive. It's an illusion. If watching a film was truly passive the images in front of us would not make any sense. Our brains and eyes are constantly assembling the footage we're given, and many films demand a physical and emotional response from us as well, such as horror, melodrama and, ahem, porn.

Many horror films privilege bodily sensation over narrative, and thereby form an alternative to narrative cinema. Sound familiar? Yeah, art film wankers say the same thing, only because a person decides it should be in a gallery it's better than a film about a guy cutting up teenagers with a chainsaw, or a film about the undead chowing down on human flesh like it's a tasty bucket of chicken.

After viewing many of these ridiculous films (and skipping more than the odd class out of sheer frustration), I have decided that the only value they have held is that now I know better how to make fun of them in my own narrative films. So how am I going to answer the essay question mentioned in the first line of this post? Well, essentially, I am going to suggest in an articulate and well-written prose style that art cinema and horror do the same shit, only horror does it better. Who knows, perhaps this may be my conclusion:

Art films are pretentious shit and horror films such as Wes Craven's Last House on the Left fucking rule.