In other hands, this could have been one more disaster-centred thriller with the climactic rescue at the end. Director Clint Eastwood has instead made an essay on a modest kind of heroism. We know the end at the beginning, and all the tension is built from human reaction and fast-moving technology.

As the plane takes off over New York, it is hit by a great flight of birds, disabling both engines. There isn’t time to return to La Guardia; all they can do is keep their heads down and brace for impact. Flight 1549 hits the Hudson. It will submerge; but before that occurs, all 150 passengers struggle towards the exits over the wings. In the panic, we become aware that one of them is holding a baby. Enormous airbags appear and inflate; the rescue launches converge, while Sully, knee-deep in water, checks the fast-drowning seats.

The lifeboats fill up as we watch the plane sinking. Sully is the last to leave the boat. All  the passengers and crew survive.

The film’s final part, and its major tension, is concerned with Sully’s submission to interrogation by the airline’s authorities. He won’t take the credit on his own, insisting on the courage of the crew and of all concerned. But despite his insistence on the roles of co-pilot and crew, this Sully is still persistently alone, tramping through the streets, not going home to his panic-stricken wife as the news spreads round New York. In his grave persona, Hanks’s performance offers a model of the traditional kind of hero, contained and unassuming.

He confronts the airline authorities, struggling to convince them that there was no chance of turning back to La Guardia. Here, the film’s force is in the manifest gulf between the pilot and his interrogators. Although no lives were lost, the airline bureaucrats are grudging and unsympathetic, as though envying the pilot’s status as the commander, the chief agent of survival and thus the centre of a drama they can lead, but can’t own.

Most responses to Sully have endorsed the tale in its own terms, accepting its romanticism and giving in easily to the heroics; thus was a fierce struggle fought against the odds. Winning out against interrogation, Sully prevails to insist on the roles of everyone else involved in the feat of survival; but on the screen, as his own version proceeds, he’s sitting alone. Some have argued that he works as a stand-in for Eastwood himself, and that it’s all a lone-ranger kind of heroism, despite the stalwart presence of Eckhart’s Jeff Skiles. Sully himself insistently refuses the intrepid solitary role. We may end up feeling that we know too little of the people in the mass rescue – as, obediently herding out on to the wings as the plane sinks, they also refuse heroics.

Nevertheless their presences, with those of Hanks and Eckhart, make the tale in this version one that exceeds its true-story plot. It’s a piece of history drawn towards myth, and it doesn’t reduce to Eastwood’s steering role, forceful as that undoubtedly is. With some help from the audience, it can take us further than even this director meant to go. What’s really at stake in the story – one man’s applauded skill and courage, or the fates of 155? •

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The sternness and sadness are there at the start in Aaron Pedersen’s face; this drunken outback cop is a self-condemned victim. What he cared for is lost, and he’s given up, not only on himself. 

You could read into this a reversal of the optimism signalled at the end of Ivan Sen’s earlier Mystery Road, in which Pedersen played a different, hopeful moment in the life of the bush policeman, Jay Swan. Now, the opening of Goldstone lets us know that the hope has been lost, or else that it couldn’t have been realised. 

The actor’s hair is nonchalantly shaggy, and he slouches round most of the time in a weather-beaten singlet. That image is not only of him, of the character with his manifest baggage of loss; it’s about all that Goldstone means as a place and a history. This is a particular way of looking not only at the outback and the bush but also – as you might see it – at Australia. As in Mystery Road (it could be from the same footage), the wider setting is of a flat, spreading, treeless and grassless landscape. 

There are no houses in Goldstone; the one we see, positioned well away from Goldstone, is owned by the madam, the professional exploiter (expertly played by Jacki Weaver). The rest is a group of squalid vans, anchored in the sand; the main place of business is carried out in one marked by a blinking neon, “Pinky’s.” There is no sense of community, or even of a physical setting; we’re in the desert. 

The girls, who line up dumbly presenting themselves, are Asian; the young policeman, whose arrival provokes their appearance, is utterly unprepared for what he finds. His moments of dialogue with one articulate victim open a perspective on what Goldstone, as a failed mining town and a failed frontier community, has become. The way it performs a story of exploitation is fully there in the bush pilot’s role, as played by David Wenham, brilliantly casual and crass; one of those outback figures who doesn’t know where he is.

The one who does know is played, with grace and irony, by David Gulpilil. The fate of his character can be linked to the whole setting; he isn’t part of its barrenness, but a figure from a certain past, calling the present to account. In his world there’s no place for Goldstone; and in ethical terms, Jay makes a choice to join him there. 

The choice matters, since as an Aboriginal policeman his position is ambiguous. That’s the heart of this compelling story.

The Measure of a Man is the rather ponderous English title of the excellent La Loi du Marché, directed by Stéphane Brizé, and awarded numerous prizes at Cannes and elsewhere. Vincent Lindon plays Thierry, a man in his fifties, struggling first against unemployment, then against the demands of a job that requires him to work against his ethics, to be other than he is – that is, an intelligent man whose capacities are manifestly underused. He’s one who has never found his place. It is a subtle performance, the kind possible in cinema; the events of Thierry’s life are glanced at rather than shown.

So we understand, piece by piece, the family dilemma: the disabled adolescent son, intelligent and self-aware, whose needs will be making claims on his parents indefinitely. The film’s movements are rapid and glancing, with a lot of blurring and shallow focus; it’s a refusal of filmic rhetoric. Nothing is spelt out.

Thus the boy’s gesticulations and struggling speech, Thierry’s impassive acceptance of the hand the fates have dealt him, are all given without explication or commentary. The audience is invited to take this particular family’s life, as Thierry does, simply as part of the way things are; and Lindon’s performance is a model of actorly containment, its meanings unfolding on the way. •

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For the film’s courage, the director-producer Eva Orner should be saluted; the project came out of the toughest conditions of production, and often looks as rough as bags, with passages shot on the run, blurred and jerky. Those elements take nothing from its vividness; they rather convey its urgency. Many committed film-workers put time and money into this film, among them Robert Connolly (Balibo), who acted as one of several producers and helped to secure its release.

On Manus, a large, rusting tin shed, left from the second world war, confines a long row of double bunks. Spouses, parents and children are separated; others are forced into proximity with people they don’t know. Visibly, people are damaged, not only by recurrent physical brutality, but just as seriously by forced inertia and boredom. How Horner and her team got into the places, we don’t find out. Journalists and photographers are forbidden entry – a spectacular case of censorship by the Australian government.

The film brings back the uncompromising pronouncement by John Howard during his reign – remember? “We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.” (I recall some wry comment then on how the inhabitants had no choice when a certain boat turned up in 1788.) The nation’s present policies contravene those UN human rights treaties and conventions to which Australia long ago signed up. It was pronounced as imperative that we must “stop the boats,” boats being somehow more dangerous than planes. Those who supplied the boats, and took money from the asylum seekers, may indeed be classed as criminals; those they’re exploiting are not. With this policy Australia is punishing the innocent – more severely, in fact, than it punishes offenders convicted in the courts, who at least know the limits of their jail terms.

One of the several young witnesses who went to the camps as volunteer social workers said that what she saw made her ashamed to be Australian, a feeling most viewers will share. The film ends with a salute to the late Malcolm Fraser, who enabled the admission of 70,000 asylum-seeking Vietnamese in the 1970s. Many of us didn’t like him much back then; perspectives change.

Chasing Asylum should be seen as widely as possible. Despite the thin attendance, it was some relief to see that at the Nova in Melbourne, six screenings were scheduled for the next day, with an extra at the weekend.

The Sydney Film Festival is in full multiscreen swing, still as ever at the resplendent State, but also scattered across town and out to Casula. The program of restorations and revivals most valuably includes the late Chantal Ackerman’s wonderful Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, and one of the real masterpieces of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story: not to be missed – this is the kind of thing festivals are, or should be for; but there’s only one screening. •

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Of the brothers, Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson), loving his animals, is devastated, but does what he must; Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson), who is at odds with the world altogether, disobeys the general order. It must be negotiated between the two ageing men, who haven’t spoken to each other in years.

But the story isn’t the film, only its spine. The content of the film is the place, rural Iceland, and the film addresses audiences that won’t have been there. The sheep gather and run over bleak, dry grasslands in summer, and in the winter, the setting for most of the film, they huddle under shelter.

Around them are the spreading icy landscapes, areas of snow in dark stretches of rock. In a communal gathering, the isolation of the brothers is apparent, although there’s a visible society there, only briefly met. One young couple enters the story, only to make their farewells; the icy world has beaten them. Except for one authority figure among those who arrive to deliver the shepherds the stern imperative, the young wife is the only woman seen. The brothers’ world is one without women, and their absence is one dimension, something felt.

The gift of the film is there, in its delineation of that kind of struggle and what it can make of its subjects. You can read Cain and Abel into the tale of the brothers, and put their entanglement of enmity and mutual need at its centre; that is what’s affirmed in the end. At the same time, it all happens where the physical world – rocks and snow, mist and ice – finally determines everything. That environment shouldn’t for a moment be seen as symbolic of anything but itself, and part of the film’s excellence is in the way that the place, Iceland, is visibly and unavoidably there.

Rams is cinema; the fusion of sound and image is indispensable to the build-up of meaning. The Man Who Knew Infinity is not cinema in the same way. It is rather a very good film: something like a novel with excellent illustrations, and the difference matters. It also matters that what we are given here is evidently close to history; eminent academic mathematicians have praised its version of the story of a short-lived Indian genius.

The time is the first world war; the main setting is Cambridge, with the trappings of English academic privilege in the period as it can now be imagined. The milieu is potently created; it could be a bit hard to believe in the snobbery and racism in the middle-aged and elderly male scholars, for whom the presence of a brilliant young Indian mathematician from Madras, Srinivasa Ramanujan, is disconcerting, positively untoward. He is literally out of place, and this is the more vividly conveyed because we have seen his home setting, and the incomprehension of his beautiful young wife, at the beginning.

We have also seen, and are impelled to take in, an instance of radical cultural difference. For Ramanujan, mathematics is nothing less than the mapping of the mind of God, and there are therefore limits to his capacity to expound its paths. For the scholars who judge him, it is an entirely secular pursuit, and some of them find his apparent simplicity, with his intrepidly quiet Indian presence, offensive. The tensions are made clear in an array of fine performances, in particular Dev Patel’s as Ramanujan, and even more eloquently, Jeremy Irons’s as the young man’s mentor, friend and defender, G.H. Hardy. It is a complex presence, conveying a particular kind of sadness, which may be read as coming from a deeply scholarly life in which there is too little else. •

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The much-applauded Son of Saul comes out of that framework, as taken up by the Hungarian director László Nemes and those who worked with him to revive public memory. Its focus is on the work of the Sonderkommando, the doomed cohort of those who, set for death themselves, were charged with propelling those thousands of victims into the gas chambers. One agent of the Sonderkommando catches the final moments of a young boy’s life, and becomes gripped by the belief that the boy was, or could have been, his own son. But there’s no answer; the man moves obsessively among the shadowy figures of the condemned.

The imagery works on two planes; the Sonderkommandos themselves are seen at close quarters, the crowds of the condemned as moving shadows beyond them, as though already deprived of any human reality. Some viewers found the device a matter of elaborate stylistics, transgressing the work of history, obscuring the fact that the Sonderkommando’s victims included its own agents; others read the imagery as communicating that irony with quite horrifying power. However that may be, Son of Saul comes from film-makers young enough to be the grandchildren of Hitler’s victims. From that position, their work embodies a command: lest we forget.

“Melodrama” doesn’t have to be a term of dismissal or abuse, but it’s often used that way. Simon Stone’s film The Daughter is melodrama in the best and most classical sense; the drama is within the family, and immediately around it. The social geography is given at the outset: a failing timber town, where the physical world bears, poetically, on the emotional one. We’re in a universe of heavy clouds and mists, a bleak pine forest.

We’re not told what’s in store for the timber workers when the mill finally closes. Its unapproachable owner, Henry (Geoffrey Rush), manages to summon a fair crowd to dance at his wedding to the much younger former housekeeper (Anna Torv), but they seem to be assembled for that occasion only. One of the unanswered questions, in the patterning of the story, is about the meaning of that wedding: did it have to do with the emotional divorce between father and son, and what has the son, Christian (Paul Schneider), long absent, made of his mother’s suicide? Henry stumbles around, trying to tell his side of the story; for his kind of man, the opening up of personal memory is simply too hard, a process of visibly painful wrestling. Geoffrey Rush performs a real actor’s task, the spectacle of male authority confounded and defeated, and then faced with the duty of trying to reaffirm it.

Witnessing his struggle, we then find that the knottier drama involves the younger kin, Oliver (Ewen Leslie), Charlotte (Miranda Otto) and their daughter Hedvig (Odessa Young), the only character who, with the small animals she tends, seems to belong in her place. But we could be anywhere; this tale is in no way about a particular geography, only about a family in the afterlife of their community. The strength of the film is in the way each is accorded his and her own story; each adult has a past to be unfolded and dealt with, while the teenage daughter must deal with the question of her own identity. That, in turn, poses a question for the audience; in the past time of this story, biological inheritance really mattered; for whom should it still? The symbolic link to the crippled bird isn’t overstressed, though the small animals, in their shadowed places, have their own kind of eloquence, and they too have their claims on the grownups. Hedvig – the only character to keep a name from Ibsen’s antecedent – can be seen as an innocent being linking natural and social worlds, until her own understanding of the link is shattered.

Perhaps the family can be rebuilt; since this is melodrama, that is the question, and it’s left hanging, with a limited possibility of hope. The parents must rescue themselves, and in the final image of their sad embrace in the hospital corridor, there’s the chance they may do so; for Hedvig we don’t know, and the uncertainty makes this a better film than it might have been. But the character who, of all of them, remains most expressively in memory is Sam Neill’s Walter, Oliver’s father. He is written, and referred to by himself, as someone fatally lost and compromised; a failure in his own estimation, but still one committed to the life around him, particularly Hedvig’s. Not so far from Henry’s rather improbable mansion, he lives in a caravan in the woods, where the animals also have their places. Neill’s performance gives the film its depth, and its strongest line into reality.

The Daughter, travelling an international round of festivals, has been much argued over. It is “an uninvolved work of commissioned, classic misery,” in the view of a Vancouver critic; another, at the Toronto festival, found it “bogged down in its familial drama,” while Sam Neill’s weatherbeaten presence wasn’t enough “to save the film from its melodrama.” This is a failure to recognise that melodrama is one way – if only one, with a long history – in which the internal drama of the family can be negotiated. Eddie Cockrell in Variety, however, praised Stone’s “radical retooling” of Ibsen as yielding “something urgent and new,” while others have praised the film for the range of its performances; among those, Odessa Young is even stronger here, in communicating adolescent questing, than she was in Looking for Grace.

Simon Stone has come to cinema from a career in theatre; in this case at least, the transition is entirely benign, yielding a film made brilliantly by its actors, with a fine indifference to the standard realisms of time and place. The clouds and mists of the setting are there; but we could be anywhere, and that’s the whole force of it. •

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Hinde took pleasure in reminding us that it was the maverick John Gorton, a Liberal PM who liked westerns, and not the culturally higher-minded Whitlam, who kickstarted the film industry revival; and that with all the tastefulness of the prestige costume dramas – Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career and the rest of them – the real vitality was in the Alvin Purples and Barry McKenzies. There, Hinde argued, we had a popular genre that needed time to grow, but was “suppressed by the snobberies of a minority that didn’t need them.” In the decades since he wrote, the outback horror film has taken over from Alvin and Bazza; the life of Australian film-making is with television and documentary, and not least with the eloquent short sketches, fiction, animation and film-essay that fill the programs of Tropfest. It’s with Jack Irish, and most vividly with Redfern Now. The hardest and most expensive project is still to make a full-scale drama that fills the screen convincingly for two hours, playing to about a hundred people at a time, three or four sessions a day in the multiplex.

The centre of John Hinde’s argument was always that such an enterprise could only work when it – the feature film – emerged to meet a real need within a population; he thought that cinema must draw its life from forces at work in the audience. “Cinema,” in Hinde’s essays, wasn’t the same as “film industry,” though it could well be dependent on there being an industry as the empowering framework. He was writing and broadcasting in a time when, in the excited onrush of the revived industry, aspirations toward high-end cinema were palpable everywhere; the acknowledged principals were directors, would-be auteurs. The French term had currency – and while the industry’s commercial imperatives exerted their force, the director claimed the prestige of the artist at the centre of the enterprise. This was widely acknowledged, but Hinde, in a typically benign fashion from his seat in the ABC, contested all that; he thought that the films of the new industry, struggling for its foothold, had above all to be written, devised and developed from their necessary, central concepts; written and produced, with firm guiding hands on budgets and schedules.

When a new Australian feature arrives, Hinde’s old questions come back into play; in what ways did this film, Looking for Grace, need to arrive and claim its place? It comes from the production team of Japanese Story (2003), with Sue Brooks as both director and writer. It’s not a cross-cultural story; the Aboriginal police officer plays his part without identity issues. The search for the runaway teenager has its place in the wider family story: the spaces between the parents, between them and their adolescent daughter; the problems for a middle-aged man of sexuality, getting older, self-acceptance. Richard Roxburgh communicates those so finely that you can suspend judgement – almost, if it weren’t for the eloquence of Radha Mitchell in the mother’s role; she is the one grown-up in the story, visibly isolated in her adulthood. Their drama is set in wide-open West Australian spaces, but I can’t see the high and wide angles on the wheatfields, the solitary car spinning across the view, as in any way metaphoric. Young Grace (Odessa Young) is trying to cross the distance between home in suburban Perth and Ceduna, where she and her friend plan on reaching a rock concert; the friend gives up and turns back, while Grace tangles disastrously with a handsome young exploiter.

The central problem, however, is not the pursuit, but the inescapable family itself. Elizabeth Drake’s music, subtle and discreet, precludes identification with any of the three; we’re being invited to watch a family unravelling, and perhaps, at a cost, being put back together. If such a film is needed, in the sense that John Hinde argued, this one exhibits a difficult, contemporary kind of courage; it places middle-class white dilemmas at the centre. We’re not now in Aboriginal Australia, nor in Asghar Farhadi’s Iran (vide The Past); for the audience, or most of it, the suburban world of this couple, these parents, is uncomfortably close at hand. Hinde argued for attention to what he called, variously, “cultural exactitude” or “cultural precision”; he believed that the sexual anxieties expressed in the Barry and Alvin genres might productively have been explored much further than they were – but that story “was left to go back where it came from.”

With that in mind, we could take another look at Grace’s run into the Western Australian salt flats; not to overload it with symbolic meanings, but rather to suggest that her desire – however unfocused – for a wider life than the one on offer had its own validity. Absconding teenagers aren’t wrong about everything.

In the upsurge of publishing about film industries and cinema, we have Jane Mills and Currency Press’s series of Australian screen classics (I speak as a grateful contributor), and the excellent, developing three-volume series organised by Noel King and Deane Williams, Australian Film Theory and Criticism. John Hinde’s invaluably provocative Other People’s Pictures (ABC Books, 1981) is all but forgotten. It was a cheaply produced and poorly bound volume; my copy, and that of a friend, are falling to bits in their covers. Reprinting and revival are very much in order, and I hear that the ABC is still in the publishing business.

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If the pursuit of the story sounds more than somewhat romantic, that’s because it is. This film invests in the perennial, still irresistible romance of journalism: the lure of getting in close to the action, fighting your way into the middle of the traffic. There’s a sequence in which one of the team, Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), dodges and dashes past people, along corridors, in and out of swinging doors, in a great rush to get to the files before library closing time. He makes it, only to find that crucial folders have been emptied. In this account, the Church has that kind of power. There is symbolic resonance; with all that frustration along the way, the journalistic pursuit is necessary, and necessarily obsessive. Go back, if you can, to the classic filmic versions; there aren’t so many – Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), one which age has not withered for a moment; All the President’s Men (1976), brilliantly written as it was by the real-life protagonists, Woodward and Bernstein; Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), the Edward R. Murrow story, as retrieved by George Clooney and team, possibly to suggest that the ghost of Joe McCarthy could still be hanging around.

Spotlight is in many respects a completely conventional addition to that line-up; it’s a well-structured tale, with clearly interwoven plots and subplots, about the uncovering of evil. There’s the one girl on the team to three blokes, and she is a young and pretty blonde; but Rachel McAdams lifts Sacha’s professionalism, and her personal struggle, well above a decorative role. Like others in the account, she was schooled as a Catholic; as the investigation proceeds, she can’t hang on to her schoolgirl faith, and the process is costly, with her devotion to an unshakably devout grandmother. But “we’re going to tell the story, and we’re going to get it right,” she says, and is shown, briefly but eloquently, having trouble with a cranky dishwasher. Mike’s marriage is offscreen, but we know he’d rather be on the job than at home, and his conscience is under perpetual strain. They and their colleagues win the right to open the records – “the truth is out there” – if at cost all round; and they’re last seen pounding away on their laptops, never to be deterred.

Meanwhile, the technology that frames their professional lives is clearly in flux. We have seen the old-fashioned presses rolling, the streams of newsprint crossing and flowing furiously, the Globe’s huge trucks setting out through the city before dawn. At the same time, the script and fine-tuned, throwaway interchanges show again what time it is; the classified scores are dropping, the new editor – and he’s Jewish, not Catholic – just might shed staff even though the Globe’s figures are well ahead of the local competition. We glimpse the big desktop computers – remember them? The tale of evil uncovered unfolds in changing times, and it is sometimes proposed that the new times’ technologies could make deep-set hypocrisies harder to keep hidden – or could they? When the story begins, the Spotlight team has already been given a full year, in several cases, to carry out investigations and develop the results – for print.

See it twice, and make all the connections you want. They’re real. The end credits most usefully list countries and locations where the Boston story is replicated over and over. There are twenty-two references to priestly corruption in Australia, a country where mainstream journalism on the Globe’s level of courage gets always harder to pursue, and not only because it’s expensive. Spotlight’s director, Tom McCarthy, had a huge production team and a topline cast; but he, and they, also had exactly the kind of courage they attribute to the Globe journalists.

It’s a real question: why dress down a multimillion-dollar feature to make it look like a documentary? That’s the case with Adam McKay’s The Big Short, an essay on the global financial crisis of 2007–08. A group of young Wall Street traders are found cruising around ways to outsmart the system while also exposing its follies. They cross the line (that is, talk to the audience); they are plausible and easy with each other; Christian Bale plays drums in daggy T-shirt and bare feet, and after this nobody can read those elements as cinematic signs of integrity. An extremely sober, bearded Brad Pitt sees through the general fraudulence; but even a slightly older ex-trader, struggling to regain his integrity, isn’t going to save the houses and jobs of several million citizens. This film offers a macabre kind of fun; the problem is the special way in which it stakes a claim on truth. There’s no doubt that there were and are young operators like these; some of them, we’re told in the end-notes, solved things for themselves after the crash by retreating into simple lives in the country (there’s an old mythology there).

The big banks shook themselves, and recovered. The film is swift-moving, and we can enjoy its energy, but note that everywhere, those homeless millions are still floundering for survival. Briefly, we visit a garden where, all of a sudden, there’s an alligator in the swimming pool.

Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job (2010) was a very much better film about the global financial crisis than this one. It probably cost about a quarter as much. •

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Newsfront was the liveliest work on that 1970s list, the days of the feature-film revival and the beginnings of film-craft training at the newly established national film school. Cinematographers, producers, editors, directors and even writers were making their names; journalists backed them energetically, and with all the prestige of the director as artist, the energy was, insistently, for the industry rather than for cinema. Paradoxically, the re-established industry was there to produce art films – high-end, internationally tradeable objects – or, in another corner of the scene, the brash populism of Alvin Purple and his kin.

Newsfront, a sizeable production for Australia, rated as prestige cinema, but it was still a cure for the era’s tasteful costume dramas; watching it now – different as it is in the present, and with all the questions it raises – it still buries the likes of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The first run lasted nearly a year; and Phillip Noyce remembers how, in 1978, it drew audiences hungry to see their own worlds on the screen. Every young reporter of the day knew blokes like Len Maguire, as played with total conviction by Bill Hunter, the kind of forthright, honest-to-god cameraman that no major shoot could do without. Shouldering a tonnage of equipment for Cinetone News (read Cinesound), flanked by offsiders and rivals, his Len Maguire gets up close for the bushfire shots, tracks the amazing Redex motor trials, and faces the Maitland floods (filmed on the Narrabeen lakes) ploughing hard into the water.

Len is a cheerfully unthinking conformist; he makes a good Catholic boy’s marriage to Fay (Angela Punch McGregor), who goes through her several unavoidable pregnancies with a determinedly pained expression. We see Len hanging up his clothes in a separate bedroom; then things develop with one of Cinetone’s production team, the stunningly beautiful Amy (Wendy Hughes). Rivals are also mates; one of those is Charlie, played by John Ewart with a fine turn in neo-Shakespearean lines; “’Twill serve,” he says, swigging an inferior potion. An improbably close-shaven John Flaus, in his first role in a feature, plays a priest obsessed with fighting the communist menace. Len’s brother Frank (Gerard Kennedy) isn’t a mate; he’s shamelessly on the make – in the lingo of the day, a real spiv, and they’re at odds; Frank sells out, and heads off to Hollywood. (The irony here is that Noyce, like his coevals Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir and others, did just that, while occasionally dropping in on home visits to make, for instance, Rabbit-Proof Fence. They haven’t been seen as selling out, just climbing towards success.)

Newsfront was one of those films in which the robust pleasure taken in the making is communicated vividly on the screen. I have it on good authority that through the course of production all those years ago, the lead roles, cast and crew had a lot of fun, and it shows – still. The locations in western New South Wales, Gulgong, Dunedoo, Narrabeen and central Sydney do their work, giving us a world in its time. All that acknowledged, a film seen again after thirty-seven years is inevitably a different film; the present-day experience catches up intervening memories, and changed expectations of local film-making and of cinema at large. That cumbersome camera equipment, so vividly a part of Newsfront’s narrative, is replaced by small, magical, handheld devices as likely to be controlled by women as by men, and rightly so. Those wide editing tables with their giant reels are no more; the decisions once taken on them are effected swiftly on keyboards and computer screens; and gender subordination in production roles doesn’t go unquestioned, far from it.

On the negative side, the perennial worries around the welfare of the treasured industry register in the talk around it, never more so than when the products (sic) come to general attention at the time of the annual awards staged by AACTA (the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts), presenting the country’s most visible prize-giving. This year the prominent winners were George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker. I can’t find anyone prepared to defend the former, seen as quite unworthy of its antecedents, while The Dressmaker is a seriously bad film from start to finish. Even distinguished actors – Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, Kate Winslet – can’t rescue a lame and disjointed script, or save a small-town story when the setting is neither established nor visually explored. It does seem to be making money; let the gains be used to better filmic purpose. If you can, find a DVD of Ray Argall’s modestly excellent Return Home (1990), which told this kind of story with a proper, quiet eloquence.

Meanwhile, there’s a puzzle to contemplate; what standards are in operation when The Dressmaker can be held to outclass a genuine, character-driven work like Last Cab to Darwin? Michael Caton did get the best actor award for his wonderful work as Rex, an ageing Broken Hill taxidriver whose doctors tell him he’s got three months left to live. If there’s a grandchild of Newsfront in its grip on Australian realities, we have it here. Rex heads into the Northern Territory to take advantage of newly instituted laws allowing euthanasia; it’s a long ride, and for his own reasons, he goes via Oodnadatta. He has one close relationship, with Polly, an Indigenous woman played with comic ferocity by Ningali Lawford-Wolf; she’s very much in charge of herself, but she can’t do anything for Rex until he decides to allow it. As other plot elements suggest, black–white relations, out there in a country town back street and on the road, are more complex and just possibly more positive than city-suburban audiences might assume.

Reg Cribb’s script, from his play, wobbles here and there; the film, like Rex’s ride, could be shorter; but the changing landscapes, desert into jungle and back, are more than minor characters. We have here another return home story, one that couldn’t have been made in the Newsfront period; gentle as this film is, it registers elements that, in 1978, were a long way outside the frame. Last Cab to Darwin is one film that knows which country we’re in. •

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There were two big sessions of new work by Aboriginal film-makers, Screen: Black. For several years in May, an Indigenous program called Message Sticks took up a weekend at the Opera House; then, as it seemed at the time, it was cannibalised by the main program. But the festival, like other major cultural institutions, must find its way of recognising the first peoples, and if anything was lost by that move, perhaps more was gained in audiences; both of the Screen: Black programs were sold out. Some of the films from one strand, Songlines on Screen, were and are shared with NITV; others, from Pitch Black Shorts, may still be looking for outlets. The audiences heard deeply foreign Australian languages filling the soundtracks: Djambarrpuyngu (from Arnhem Land); Miriwoong; Kukatja; Yolngu; Warlpiri; Anmatyerre. My two favourites were the magical fifteen minutes of Karroyul (director, Kelrick Martin) in which an unnamed, bereaved young girl discovers home country in bushland which is also a massacre site; and the ten-minute tragi-comedy of Benjamin Southwell’s On Stage, in which Warren Clements plays, superbly, a cross-dressing singer who is both gender-bending and black.

The Melbourne Film Festival, forthcoming (30 July–6 August), is doing black film differently, with a retrospective of David Gulpilil’s screen work going right back to Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and on-stage discussion with Gulpilil; and since, as Charlie’s Country most recently showed us, he’s one of the most remarkable film actors on the planet, this will be highly rewarding.

Most of the Sydney festival’s headline features are slated for commercial release; here, for all those who must have their literary classics illustrated, comes Far from the Madding Crowd; here too the newest version of Madame Bovary. Carey Mulligan is in the first, Mia Wasikowska in the second; those girls are overworked. Among the Australian features, Last Cab to Darwin is already in general circulation; Ruben Guthrie (mixed press) is forthcoming; Simon Stone’s The Daughter and Neil Armfield’s Holding the Man will find their ways. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a great winner at this year’s Sundance, drew some of us in less because of the program description than for Brian Eno’s music; and it’s worth having in any case, a film that asks for your patience, and rewards it; survive the opening passages of ultra-American, familial sentimentality, and there is real content to come. This was an audience favourite; it will get around. So, and deservedly, will Alex Gibney’s welcome exposé of scientology, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.

The films that matter most are those for which we really need festivals; for these we must thank Nashen Moodley’s far-ranging curatorial skills, and for them too we hope for local futures – if only in the crevices of the system. Adventurous distributors are needed for the South African, Indian, Korean and Chinese work, and the Chilean – not only Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button, discussed last week, but also Pablo Larraín’s excellent The Club. (Larraín was the director who memorably, in Pinochet’s final days, made that great documentary called No.)

All this is a whirl of virtual travel. The range, the multiplicities and time collisions of the program also made it tantalising in the extreme; you couldn’t see The Look of Silence, for example, without giving up a chance to look at part of Arabian Nights, the three-part essay on contemporary Portugal which won the Sydney Film Prize; while the earlier screening of the former collided with the indispensable, elating Tehran Taxi, Jafar Panahi’s newest and best work of resistance to the suppression of his work by the Iranian government.  

The music films of which we need copies were especially Mr Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (aka Soul Brother Number One), a very different exercise by Alex Gibney; Song of Lahore, in which Pakistan’s own music meets the world; and Mark Dornford-May’s Breathe Umphefumlo, a South African version of La Bohème – and the singing, in Xhosa with subtitles, is fabulous.

Those works acknowledged, there are several documentaries I’d like to see back and in circulation. Andreas Dalsgaard made The Human Scale, the wonderful essay on liveable cities first seen at the 2013 film festivals; his new film, Life is Sacred, concerns the long-persisting struggles for a principled politics in Colombia, centred especially on a Greens leader, Antanas Mockus, and his fellow campaigner Katherine Miranda. Filmed over five years, this is an essay on the development of realism and realpolitik among idealists who won’t give in; moving in from outside, and working with great patience, Dalsgaard recreates a Colombia that seems amazingly close to home.

In Spanish and English, and a wonderful range of blacks, whites and greys, The Project of the Century tells bleak truths about modern Cuba, struggling in the long aftermath of its time as a Soviet satellite, a time when it was to be the site of a major nuclear power station. The men whose futures were centred on that project are now seen impoverished, ageing, depressed and sardonic, barely surviving physically and psychologically; the unfinished structure looms up, stark and stranded, the grimmest anti-nuclear symbol imaginable. A co-production by Cuban, Argentinian, Swiss and German film-makers, this film has elements of surreal comedy: the kind of comedy that might have been written by Samuel Beckett.

This film, and another equally remarkable co-production, Something Better to Come, use cinema to break through barriers in contemporary history. A Danish–Polish co-production, directed by Hanna Polak, Something Better to Come tracks the life of a girl called Yula from age ten to age twenty-four. She lives with her mother on a landfill site not far from the centre of Moscow, and they scrabble and scrounge for a living. Something endows Yula with extraordinary determination; she’s going to get off the landfill heap, which is filmed in very sharp detail – detritus, scum, scraps of everything; shelters put together from debris, bits of tin, broken glass and timber, anything. At fourteen Yula is raped; at sixteen, she’s pregnant; she gives birth, to give the child away, keeping herself resolute; and somehow, carries out her ambition – just to get off the landfill heap, to get training and a job and a place to live; to have a child she can keep. She gets there; but on the way this film, the post-Soviet Cuban story, and other documentaries in this program confront the privileged of the world (the festival audiences unavoidably represent them) with the spaces where human life is radically cheapened; with those whom Frantz Fanon, sixty years ago, called “les damnés de la terre” – the wretched of the earth.

Perhaps this is one job of film festivals: to take us to the end of the line. •

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The Pearl Button returns there, to the vast field of lifted telescopes, but not so much now to peer into the far recesses of time; it is rather to juxtapose the reach of human aspiration with the depth of human cruelty – and to that, a line of Guzmán’s commentary reminds us, there’s no end, no limit. From the desert, he surveys the length of Chile’s 5000-kilometre coastline: forests, mountains, waterfalls, cliffs and caverns of blue ice, matched to memories of the five indigenous tribes who lived and worked in these coasts. There are still twenty people living who can speak the language of the Kawesqar; of those, a few face the camera now and speak of dispossession, and remember their lives paddling the fjords. They believe that the water is a living entity; they believe it knows; they connect it with the cosmos and the stars. Woven in with their memories, we get the story of young Jemmy Button, the property in 1830 of settlers who taught him English, dressed him up and took him to London, then returned him to western Patagonia, permanently disoriented and homeless. Australians might shudder at this: it’s the Bennelong story, and there’s a jarring moment when Guzmán talks of Jemmy’s journey “from the stone age to the industrial age.” Then, moving as it were through water, the film brings us back to Pinochet’s Chile.

There has been criticism of Guzmán’s strategies, an argument that they don’t work as well here as in Nostalgia for the Light. The charge is that the film becomes incoherent as it shifts from the colonial domination of the Patagonian tribes, their loss of culture and language, to the Pinochet tyranny and then to the refined forms of murder practised on certain resisters: they were bound to slabs of iron from railtracks and dropped, some still living, into the sea. In the present of the film, those stories are recalled by young people, investigators intent on ensuring that the Pinochet chapter is not to be forgotten. A diver swings from a helicopter, goes down into the sea, and with great difficulty retrieves a large slab of iron, encrusted by weeds and shells. Human remains are gone, but in the enclosing conglomerate, a pearl button is found, one like that on the clothing given to Jemmy Button.

The criticism is that the film, with these disparate components, doesn’t hang together. What’s forgotten here is the foundational insight of Eisenstein, that the stunning potential of cinema is exactly that: the power to put together elements that are totally unlike, but which in juxtaposition yield up meanings not to be gained from any image taken on its own. (They called it montage; as you might say, one and one make three.) What’s also forgotten is the necessary work of the viewer. With The Pearl Button, we have a wild ride through a gallery: heaving waves, telescopes, mountains and stars; the faces of witnesses from radically different cultures. We are invited to make for ourselves the connections between the imperialism of two centuries ago, with all its certainties and unwitting cruelty, and this chapter in twentieth-century fascism.

Some won’t want to make them; we are told that Chilean society in the present is pervaded by the will to forget, or else by a kind of inertia in the shadow of recent history, and the work of resistance today is precisely “the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But there is too much to remember. After the Pinochet coup, some 30,000 dissidents were arrested, and many of them tortured; almost 3000 were disappeared – those whose remains the women were seeking in the Atacama desert; some thousands were sent into exile, but were then pursued across the globe by the nefarious Operation Condor, an intelligence network allegedly upheld by the CIA. Guzmán lets the connections hang, unspoken but crucially operative; his lyricism is exercised not merely to make extremely beautiful cinema – though, ironically, it does – but also to wake up areas of memory always threatened by sleep, recover the central trauma and name it. At the film’s heart, there is anger and a challenge: forget the Pinochets of your world, and you may well be inviting them back.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence, also screened at this year’s festival, engages a kindred project. It follows The Act of Killing, shown in last year’s program, which opened a history long shrouded in too much discretion, the massacre of suspected communists, more than a million of them, in Indonesia in the mid 1960s. That earlier film surrounded investigation with elements of parade and performance, the one-time killers performing their own past roles with apparent glee; in the glare of nightmarish comedy, the threads of real history were almost lost. This film doesn’t have that kind of bravura, and some critics have seen it as a lesser work for being more conventional. But it goes deeper, more clearly and directly into the centre of that long-obscured chapter, part of the workings of the cold war in our region. But what did Australia know? Very little; for audiences here, this film is the more significant.

In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer was his own interrogator; in The Look of Silence, Adi is a gentle, open-eyed surrogate, seemingly young at forty-four; he is at once horrified and spellbound in the process of this enquiry that he himself, with the director, is driving. The film is about blindness; Adi is a travelling optometrist, checking eyesight for a few very old men while he asks them what they remember about the killing times of fifty years ago. Before he was born, his own much older brother Ramli was one of the victims; their father, now aged 103, can’t or won’t remember; their mother remembers only too well. She has had to go on living among the unabashed killers, seeing them daily in the village; it’s horrible, she tells Adi, she hates them. Not only avowed communists but also suspected fellow-travellers and ethnic Chinese were targeted by the death squads; the rivers were filled with bodies, to the point that villagers couldn’t use them for washing. In some memories, it was that circumstance that brought the spate of murder to an end.

Repeatedly, the surviving perpetrators tell him they can’t remember. Or if they do, it’s about the value of drinking their victims’ blood, supposedly to ward off madness; or to recall the way the flesh of a woman’s breast, hacked off her body, looked like a coconut milk filter. There is no sign of remorse. If someone was merely a prison guard, did that make him complicit in the killings? The interviews are staged, calmly, in benign afternoon light inside houses, sometimes outside in green and gold light among the banana trees; people are seen where they belong. The director’s gaze, like Adi’s own, is steady, and the impact is the greater for it. It becomes clear that for the Indonesian people through all the decades since, the official history has been that the actions of the death squads were necessary; they were killing the young nation’s enemies, and that was that.

But now, in a country with a lively press and active intellectual life, is there no significant dissent from that version? Caution is still in order; this film’s credit list is telling. The project attracted funding from within Indonesia, and from four other international sources; Errol Morris and Werner Herzog came on board as executive producers; and now The Look of Silence has just won the audience award for a feature-length work at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. But here, as in The Act of Killing, many of the production team are named as Anonymous.

Those were two particularly rewarding films among the 250-odd on the 62nd Sydney Film Festival program. Each happened to count in the International Documentary category, but the categorical boundaries didn’t matter much as we sifted our responses; and “documentary,” as I’ve argued earlier in this column, means less and less. Film performance crosses the boundaries between the work of actors and that of witnesses to history, and the cinema’s storytellers find the conventions they need to deal with what seems urgent. In many of this year’s gatherings, the pressure of necessity came through: here were stories needing to be told.

I’ll comment next week on some of the others, on the essential work of such festivals, and on where we might go from here. Meanwhile, it is excellent news that the Sydney festival’s major retrospective, ten of Ingmar Bergman’s works, will be screened at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra from next Thursday 25 June. Worth the trip, believe me. •

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The bookshop’s time overlapped with that of the cinema of the same beautiful name; that also ran for twenty-seven years (1979–2006). Its owner, Andrew Pike of Ronin Films, likes to remember how the opening night film in 1979 was Monty Python’s hilarious Pleasure at Her Majesty’s; having had the nerve to open a small cinema in Canberra, Pike and his friends didn’t think anybody much would show up, but they did, in packs and droves. Through the following decade Electric Shadows ran European, Australian and Asian films, with Q&A sessions, attention to Indigenous film-making and the work of local Canberra film-makers; there was a night everyone remembers from 2002, when Phillip Noyce came to attend a screening of his unforgettable Rabbit-Proof Fence, and the overflow audience compelled a second late-night screening, and more work for the director. The cinema was a centre not only for cinephiles, but also for fully engaged intellectual life, a place where culture, politics and cinephilia came dynamically together.

The closing night screening was of Pedro Almodovar’s Volver; not the Spanish master’s greatest, but still a fabulous symphony of love, lust, murder and motherhood, death and reincarnation, and the colour red. The choice of that film for the last night was flying a defiant flag, a choice calling that the life of cinema, with its outrageous extremities, would go on, even though there in Mort Street, and across the globe, the lights in thousands of small cinemas were going out.

It wasn’t meant to be a farewell. The multiplexes were catching up; the goodwill from Electric Shadows was sold to Canberra’s then new Dendy complex, seemingly to everyone’s satisfaction, and in the faith that the lively programming of European, Asian and Indigenous cinema would continue. But then the Dendy changed hands – twice, and the connections with crucial distributors were lost. Elsewhere, the Palace Electric cinema keeps an echo in its title, and also seeks to sustain a comparable range of offerings. The bookshop held on; it has closed not because business was falling off, but because the building is being demolished, to be replaced soon by a larger one in which Electric Shadows has been offered space at a much higher rental, something even a thriving and popular bookshop couldn’t afford. Removal to Canberra’s outskirts would mean the loss of urban lifeblood.

Two notices are pasted up behind the glass. One is Nigel Featherstone’s eloquent valediction from the Canberra Times. He argues that while everyone is buying books on Amazon and reading them on Kindle, the business of book-making and the desire to own the physical objects have been amazingly sustained; that bookshops endure, somewhat as cinema has and does, because people want to go out and meet each other, and discover what’s unexpected. Bookshops go on offering adventures; books on cinema are essential. This enduring and proliferating form demands developed responses; they will find their ways, their readers and writers.

The other cutting in Electric Shadows’s window offers seven highly appropriate lines from the Four Quartets: In my beginning is my end. In succession/ Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/ Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place/ Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass./ Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,/ Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth… Eliot gets it about right, though there’s no open field around here; there may be perhaps something more like a factory; it’s all about “new timber”: “redevelopment.”

Meanwhile at the movies, films that might once have been labelled “arthouse” (awful term) are pulling them in steadily. James Kent’s version of Testament of Youth is costume drama, yes, but in a peculiarly satisfying way. It was discussed in Inside Story in early April by Brian McFarlane, who linked the present film to the TV series and to the book itself, which keeps its power. Now, we look through the film back to the book, and to the history registered in Vera Brittain’s enduring story. In the hands of an admirable cast, it is given back to us for the present; here is all we could want of the pacifist case as a young woman, who had fully paid her dues, spoke it a hundred years ago. Alicia Vikander, graceful and large-eyed, is a new Audrey Hepburn, and perhaps a better actor.

Emily Watson and Dominic West are excellent as Vera’s parents, good people clinging to the past while wartime drags them forward. We get a passage full of the mud and blood of the battlefield; then in a horrific shift of mentalities, Vera is summoned back from nursing in a field hospital, crowded with the dead and dying, to a supposed family crisis. She finds her mother in distress because the cook has left, and because wartime rationing is a bit hard to cope with. There are no hysterics; the mother–daughter collision is dealt with matter-of-factly, but that chapter signals towards Western feminism, the refusal of the middle-class woman to be the angel in the house.

The real crisis in the personal story, however, comes when Vera’s fiancé, Roland Leighton (Kit Harington), comes back from the front emotionally frozen; she can’t reach him. That trauma has everything to do with her arrival at a pacifist position. The film works, in its beautifully costumed, old-fashioned way, but for Max Richter’s music, of which there is far too much. With the real grief made palpable – Roland’s locked responses, the dying German soldier, then Vera’s loss of both brother and lover, the great scale of that war – we don’t need wistful violins telling us how to feel. Vera Brittain stands in history; she is not to be sentimentalised. She is still, and always, there to be read.

Now disappearing from the circuits, X+Y is a brilliant little dance of a film, its choreography centred on Sally Hawkins’s role as Julie, the mother of autistic Nathan (Asa Butterfield), who is, the doctors say, “somewhere on the spectrum.” That indefinite position compels him to refuse her love and anxiety, but leaves him able to grope toward human contact while he reaches toward excellence in mathematics; nothing, he says, is nicer than maths. We see blackboards crowded with theorems and equations, and see Nathan’s obsession with prime numbers as he surveys the food on his plate. As he is moved by his teachers towards the International Mathematics Olympiad, he gives Julie a pretty hard time. She is brightly intrepid, a picture of devotion and resilience; but martyred motherhood threatens. There is relief when she begins a relationship with the boy’s tutor, Martin (Rafe Spall), damaged and ill as Martin is; more relief when Nathan finds affinity and affection with his mathematical equal Zhang Mei (Jo Yang). Some of the transitions, present into past and back, and the film’s ending are somewhat glib, too easy; but at least the obstacles are faced.

This film has evidently grown out of the director Morgan Matthews’s documentary Brilliant Young Minds; both are worth retrieving. Alex Lawther reappears among the ensemble of gifted teenagers; he played the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Thinking of these films, of The Theory of Everything and Particle Fever, there’s a question that presses insistently: is it imaginable that we could have an Australian film, drama or documentary, actually centred on intellectual work?

Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour. The reasons given by the attorney-general and arts minister, George Brandis, for appropriating to his own ministry a chunk of the funding allocated to the Australia Council, amount to egregious doublespeak. He is openly transgressing the longstanding and honourable policy of arm’s-length funding, in which governments of both stripes have recognised, in true liberal tradition, the need that artists, arts and theatre companies should be free to bite the hands that feed them. Brandis’s statement that “arts funding has until now been limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council” implies a centralised system of judgement and selection by a single unified structure, whereas the council’s work has always been, deliberately, dispersed across a wide and varying range of assessors.

At present there are ten panels, assembled to deliver peer assessment in their fields. Those include the traditional areas of literature, music, theatre, visual arts and dance, besides panels for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts; the arts and disability sector; community arts development; cross-disciplinary and experimental work, with provision for the formation of new panels as the needs emerge. There are no sinecures among the assessors; they change with each round of allocations.

Not satisfied with those arrangements, Brandis proposes something he’s called a National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, which

will allow for a truly national approach to arts funding and will deliver on a number of Government priorities including national access to high quality arts and cultural experiences. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts will make funding available to a wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia’s audiences.

Various other programs, the Major Festivals Initiative for example, will also be transferred to the ministry from the Council, “ensuring that government support is available for a broader range of arts and cultural activities.”

Funding for film and TV-making is organised outside the council’s reach, but not outside Mr Brandis’s; Screen Australia reports annually to the government. The Australia Council’s affairs have to do with film, in the sense that the broad ensemble of crafts and skills that make up a production team draw on the experience gained from work made possible through the council’s panels.

But doublespeak always looks plausible. Anyone who didn’t know otherwise might scan the minister’s recent media statements and conclude that the Australia Council’s provision for the arts has hitherto been undesirably narrow in focus, with too little address to local audiences; but that view pays no respect to the actual work of the panels.

While his program for “excellence” is brewing – the guidelines are still to be announced – the minister is said to be paying close attention to the appointment of a new CEO for the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. AFTRS is a statutory body, and the appointment will be decided by its council; but its links to the federal government, like Screen Australia’s, go through the ministry for the arts. Be afraid, be very afraid… •

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This work is largely composed of footage shot by British, American and Russian cameramen when, in the spring of 1945, the Allied forces opened the camps, confronted the full horrors and scale of the Nazi atrocities, organised the mass burials, and freed and fed the survivors. Sidney Bernstein, of the British Ministry of Information, directed the initial assemblage of the film, taking in material shot at several sites of liberation. He brought in two expert film advisers, Alfred Hitchcock and later, Billy Wilder; one consequence of that move was that Hitchcock was wrongly believed to have been the director. In fact he advised on the developing project for only a month, and the correct credit made him a “treatment adviser”; but if you want to find one Hitchcockian touch, it is surely there in the shift from images of ostensibly innocent, prosperous rural life to the camp at Bergen-Belsen.

Later, Auschwitz and the other camps are seen more briefly, with the huge piles of shoes without owners, the spectacles, the stacks of human hair. A Christian burial ritual is briefly seen as the bulldozers shift the mountain of emaciated corpses; and the commentary notes that no one knows who were Catholics, Lutherans or Jews. That, in later responses, becomes an interesting disavowal; there is the implication that this wasn’t all about the Final Solution. The initial intention of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was to expose, as widely as possible, the realities of the camps and to bring them home to the German people; and the film says aloud that no German could have been ignorant of what was happening in Belsen, Mauthausen, Auschwitz and the rest: we look at the maps.

In the space of a year, that aim changed with a shift in the ruling policy. Retribution gave way to reconstruction, and there were early intimations of the cold war. For the Western Allies, this meant it was time to begin making friends with Germany, devastated as that country was, and notwithstanding everything that could be said about collective guilt. For those reasons, the film remained for decades in London’s Imperial War Museum, unfinished. There were five reels to be edited, a shot list and typewritten commentary. A sixth reel was missing; this has been put together from unedited footage and the shot list, with commentary re-recorded and spoken now by Jasper Britton. The present version had its premiere at the Berlinale of February 2014; and for audiences there the appearance of the film might have helped them forward in dealing with what many writers and film-makers have called “the unmastered past.”

Viewers here and now include elderly survivors of the camps, and people who were born to survivors; some of these find the film unwatchable, while others – seemingly anaesthetised – appear to welcome this wider circulation of the truth. There are those who observe that while we are shown the gas ovens, with company names in evidence, we should be told more of the complicity of Krupp, Volkswagen and their like. And there are others in Australian audiences, generally the young, who rise during the Q&A after the screening to remind us that the Australian viewing position is not an innocent one. This country too builds inhuman barracks; this country too has been merciless. Older voices then come in to say there’s no comparison; but the critical point has to do, not with comparisons, but with the ethics of viewing: knowing where you sit while you watch.

The limited presentations of this film, restricted as they have been, are the kind of work the National Film and Sound Archive should always be engaged in through its public programs. While the NFSA contends with increased budgetary limitations, those programs must not be given up. I will write more before long on the present and future of this institution, in an Australia now governed by rulers who would rather we didn’t think, least of all on film.

On the second world war and the camps, there’s a much better film to look at: Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955). (It is retrievable, and the whole work can be viewed, inadequately, on YouTube.) Only ten years after the liberation, Resnais made this thirty-two-minute essay on the sites of Auschwitz and other abandoned camps, with commentary by the survivor Jean Cayrol; Chris Marker, uncredited, assisted with both script and direction. Green fields are visible through barbed wire, then in black and white, stills and moving film from the archive, we can see the abandoned barracks, the boxcars, the rail tracks, and see the German soldiers marching in order. The film owes some of its life to the way the Nazis, compulsively, filmed everything they did, including the extreme wretchedness of their victims. Their film archive outlasted their rule; they left the materials for their own condemnation.

The words of the narration run across the images, with Hanns Eisler’s music. They are concerned less with memory and history than with addressing the viewers of the future, and the way these sites will be seen: “Nine million dead haunt this countryside… We pretend to be hopeful again, that all this is going back into the past… We pretend that it could only happen once, in this place at that time… The icy water fills the hollows of the mass graves, while War goes to sleep, but with one eye always open.”

When the film-maker and artist David Perry died in Sydney two weeks ago, another link was broken with the creative upsurge of the later sixties in that city, when it seemed that there was another poetic, exciting no-budget film essay on show every week in basements, university spaces and ramshackle group houses. David, with his friend the late Albie Thoms, was one of the principal moving spirits in Ubu Films, named for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi; a group of filmers (his word) who didn’t believe in budgets or scripts or in those toilsome processes known as pre-production and script development; they believed in free-ranging camerawork, and indeed films made without cameras – scratched, painted, drawn, dyed; in the tribal friendship network, and imagination. The output was funny, ribald, subversive; sometimes you could call it juvenile, but a lot of it – by Albie, David, Garry Shead, Clemency Weight, and many others – still glows and dances.

The films were of course about sex; once about defecation (It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain); about pregnancy (A Sketch on Abigayl’s Belly); about seeing (Bolero); about art and modernism (Thoms’s Marinetti). Sometimes, in registrations of anti–Vietnam war rallies, they were even about politics. What they were notionally about, however, mattered less than what they were: serious, insubordinate fun with the basic resources of cinema, exploring, playing with style, technique and then-new technologies, especially video. (This essential, but under-recognised cultural history is explored very fully in Peter Mudie’s superbly documented work, Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies, published in 1997 by UNSW Press with the Australian Film Commission.)

Ubu metamorphosed into the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Ubu News into the remarkable monthly Filmnews. The notion of “experimental film” faded; some of Ubu’s membership joined the nascent mainstream industry, some as mainstream commercial producers, some to make costume dramas in depressingly good taste (Picnic at Hanging Rock, and all its conformist ilk) and then head off to Hollywood. Others carried on, making and screening whatever could be made, sustaining inventive low-budget film-work and a healthy suspicion of the industry.

Of those, David Perry, working for TV here and in Britain, teaching inspiringly, remained perennially engaged in small-scale production and in communicating its pleasures. He remained cheerfully and generously “a dedicated amateur” – his phrase – and until his last illness he was looking, painting, drawing, thinking. His splendid feature, The Refracting Glasses, registered his passions in modernism, especially the inheritance from the Russian Constructivists, brought that inheritance back to life – and linked it all, furthermore, to local adventures and the tale of Ern Malley. This film, the first for which David had substantial funding, had a premiere at the Sydney Film Festival of 1992, then a poorly attended one-week season at the Chauvel; there, David wrote, “it sank like a modernist stone in a post-modernist ocean.” It’s the only film I know – there may be others – that imagines again the never-built Tatlin Monument, that helical structure to be built for the Third International; a building meant to be taller than the Eiffel Tower, and composed, as they said, “of steel, glass and revolution.”

David left us his lively recollections in Memoirs of a Dedicated Amateur (Valentine Press, 2014). He was given a great send-off; The Refracting Glasses was played through at the funeral, as was his 1970 compilation, Album. He was eighty-one, almost eighty-two when he died; but David never stopped being young, and his output is testament to the gifts of a long-sustained youthfulness of heart.

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Someone leaves the house, and then re-enters; the light goes out, and a big car moves away; a long train pulls into a station. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is meeting a friend from Moscow, Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), a lawyer who may be able to help Kolya and his family save this house from compulsory acquisition by the local mayor, a bully intent on demolition and redevelopment.

They’re old friends, but it’s clear that life has not treated them equally. Dmitri is handsome and assured; Kolya, a motor mechanic, feels besieged by the community’s demands on him – a lot of unpaid attention to battered old cars – while the mayor’s threat overhangs. Multiple tensions begin to play out; Kolya’s young wife Lilya thinks they should move away. In a performance of sustained subtlety, Elena Lyadova communicates, from the outset, Lilya’s depression and lack of hope, and also her capacity for resolve. At the breakfast table Kolya’s adolescent son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev), the child of a first wife long dead, breaks out in general resentment. Later, we’ll see Kolya hitting the vodka hard. Zvyagintsev packs more psychology and politics into the film’s first fifteen minutes than most others would manage in two hours.

In the mayoral office, where Dmitri presents documentary evidence of past conniving and corruption, the picture of Putin is up there, ominously watchful. In another sequence, a passage of ferocious comedy, images of past leaders are used for target practice on a drinking and shooting picnic; we see the heads of Lenin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, none more recent. The host remarks that there was a picture of Yeltsin available, but that should wait for longer historical perspective.

We’re on a remote edge of northern Russia where there is less than no faith in the distant leaders, no Chekhovian dreams about life in the capital. The church, commanding authority and wealth, is entirely on the side of Leviathan, the Hobbesian state; the priest reassures the mayor of his right to greed under divine will, and preaches scripture in an opulent edifice among gold-framed icons. There’s another church in the film, the ruined, roofless edifice where Roma and other teenagers hang out for drink, smoking and general adolescent derision.

It has been observed that in Zvyagintsev’s films women are the principal carriers of pain; remember the maternal burdens in Elena (2011). In this much larger work, there are only hints of Lilya’s desire for a world beyond the village on the Arctic coast, but it’s there when she offers herself to Dmitri. We see them together in a strange, still, uncommunicative moment after sex – and while sex has clearly happened, love-making is hardly the word for it; there’s not the glimmer of a smile, not a tinge of comedy. It’s rather as though adultery was an inevitable part of the general bleakness, no more than a momentary distraction. While Dmitri will go back to Moscow with nothing accomplished, Lilya’s path is perfectly, horrifically Tolstoyan. Despite the comradeship of the women who work beside her in the fish cannery, she’s as much alone as Anna Karenina.

Women have another role here. Three of them preside in the courtroom, judges adjudicating Kolya’s plea for his property; are they the Fates, implacably indifferent to human wishes? The details of the case are recited in a relentless harangue, and it’s clear at once that Kolya hasn’t a chance. Later, the viewer is positioned within the house, in the place of a threatened inhabitant, as the giant excavator – which looks more like a prediluvian monster than a machine – smashes the glass walls; the familiar dinner table, and all it means about everyday life and sharing are trashed and swept away. Then Kolya is again before the judges, and again he hasn’t a chance. The one element of hope is with the boy, and what will save him is community, the links formed among women in the daily bus run and the assembly line in the cannery.

It is tempting to see this great film as an anti-Putin tract; the list of Russia’s martyrs grows, with Boris Nemtsov’s murder joining those of other journalists and activists – Paul Klebnikov, Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova and others – through the past ten years, and people in the Russian street said of Nemtsov: Leviathan killed him. The term is current; Zvyagintsev has been publicly rebuked for a film that’s “unpatriotic”; while in the popular view, the state is a living monster, larger and longer-lived than any one of its agents.

With all that, the film is not to be reduced to a parable. Bring what responses you will to the clanging iron door, the thrashing sea, the beached whale skeleton, the machinery of destruction; let the implications play out indefinitely. At the end we’re back on this beautiful Arctic edge, with the stretches of dark land and pale water. Philip Glass’s music comes in, surging and hammering, retreating and returning like the sea. It doesn’t stop with the visible action, but rises, repeats, returns again across the final images and through the long flow of the credits, as though to say: there is no end to this tale of provincial life, and no release in sight for those who live it.

Ava DuVernay’s Selma is not so much about Martin Luther King as a story and argument built around him, a potent history essay angled necessarily to the present. We begin with the Nobel Prize, King’s installation in the line of official heroes; as they carefully fix his tie for the event, we take in the dynamics of the relationship with his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo). With Ejogo’s fine performance and David Oyelowo’s as King, we get a portrait of a marriage that was never tame or ordinary. There are two particular long moments, when their hands reach towards each other through the bars while King is in jail, and again when Coretta waits for his answer on his outside affairs – did he really love those others? There are several terrible seconds before he says, “No.”

A year later, the Nobel Prize wasn’t enough to convince Lyndon Johnson (superbly played here by Tom Wilkinson) that it was high time for legislative action, then in March 1965, to endorse the right of black citizens to vote. From King’s point of view the matter was urgent; too many, turning up at civic offices for registration, had been denied. In one unforgettable sequence the activist Annie Lee Cooper, vividly played by Oprah Winfrey, is refused her civil rights by an officious, racist functionary.

We don’t get the legendary “I have a dream...” speech; the texts of the actual speeches were denied to DuVernay’s screenwriter and collaborator Paul Webb, who did brilliantly in writing the words spoken here. The fiction in the film is not in those words, but rather, according to expert witnesses, in DuVernay’s version of King’s dealings with LBJ, who did not in fact hold out so long on bringing in the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, King led three marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma – one cut short by the battle in which Alabama state troopers attacked the marchers with tear gas and cattle prods, one aborted for the sake of peace by King’s own decision, and the third in which he led the marchers, peacefully, from the bridge to the state capital. Before the final ringing speech, the film negotiates huge crowds in turmoil, the surges of white support for civil rights, and the sheer ugliness of the racism which some, like governor George Wallace, held to be the natural order of things.

What matters now about Selma is its appearance in hard times and a reactionary climate, with the killing of young, unarmed black men in several cities, one a boy of twelve; racial persecution persists in the United States, fifty years since the events named in the film. Barack Obama marked the anniversary at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in a speech that called for a new civil rights movement, one that would include women, gay people, Latinos, Asian-born Americans and Native Americans among others.

At that point Australians, with our vaunted multiculturalism, might properly stop in our tracks. Our responses to the film called Selma should not be too comfortable, too muted; more could be made of our own present fiftieth anniversary, that of the freedom rides led by Charles Perkins. A film called Moree, or perhaps Brewarrina? •

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There’s a wide shot of an installation in the desert, with a group of radomes; but it’s not Pine Gap, it’s the National Security Agency’s storage site in Bluffdale, Utah. Pine Gap isn’t mentioned in the film, although it is a node in those global networks Edward Snowden is talking of, referring simply to “other national governments.” The point is that Snowden’s story is true; we here are part of the same story, and at least some local audiences know it. They bring their knowledge to the experience of this extraordinary film, and that intensifies its energy; Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s activities also involves us, and the information systems in which, through the technological shifts and transformations of only three decades, we have become inextricably enmeshed.

At the same time, the film is a great defence of journalism, the force of determined professional enquiry. If it’s a portrait of Edward Snowden, it is equally one of Glenn Greenwald, a journalist of persistent independence in both life and work. He is seen in Rio de Janeiro, explaining the Snowden story in fluent Portuguese (it appears that he and his partner live there because same-sex marriage is not yet permitted in the United States). The director Laura Poitras has different reasons for living and working outside America. Following her earlier films, on the Iraq war (My Country, My Country, 2006) and on the intrepid whistleblower William Binney (The Program, 2012), she has been harassed and interrogated repeatedly on entry to the United States; her phone, computer and notes have been seized. She is now based in Berlin.

Snowden chose these two to film and report on his account of the NSA’s relentless tracking of the email and internet traffic in ordinary citizens’ lives. They meet him, swapping the agreed introductory phrases, in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, and over eight days record the crucial interview in his room. They were primed. Ahead of time, Snowden had sent them documents that gave details of NSA intercepts of email and mobile phone conversations – some of possible military value, others more doubtfully showing traces of the agency’s paths as “intelligence targets” were tracked, pursuing people “whose movements intersect,” movements of no interest to anyone but themselves. (Citizenfour doesn’t give that information, but Greenwald does, in his book No Place to Hide; so did Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker in December 2013, noting that “The NSA contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle.”)

Poitras is heard but unseen as she handles the camera; Greenwald’s questions, and those from his colleague Ewan MacAskill of the Guardian, are the triggers for Snowden to tell them and us why, with no care for his own future, he’s chosen to blow the whistle. He is very clear on this; he believes that the citizen should be enabled to deal with the state, and should not be overpowered by it. As he told a Reddit forum, “The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed.” Privacy is linked to the liberty of the citizen, therefore also to her responsibility. In this country, it’s worth saying that that ethic is as much within American traditions as the NSA’s operative notion that government has a given right to know the citizen’s business.

Some critics, noting Poitras’s elisions and omissions, have had trouble with Citizenfour’s dazzling cinematic fluency; they try to separate the film’s aesthetics from its messages. This is the old struggle to analyse form/content relationships; they are separable but not separate. Poitras and her small camera crew keep agile pace with dialogue; Mathilde Bonnefoy’s editing is subtle and precise; music is present intermittently, as a kind of dark undertow – an electronic growl, not unlike a didgeridoo. We enter the story through a long, dark tunnel with strip lighting as Poitras drives into Hong Kong; white lettering against the black shows her initial email exchanges with Snowden, as he tells her that he didn’t really choose her – through her earlier films, she chose herself.

For all his expressed wish that he shouldn’t himself be the story, Snowden becomes the central performing presence; the black, white and neutral t-shirts could have been picked by a wardrobe department. He is disconcertingly young, clear-eyed, graceful and very much in charge of himself; the drive, the certainty, come out of long-built purpose, developed from his discovery of what, as an employed intelligence contractor, he found himself involved in: a system of god’s-eye surveillance seeking fully global reach.

At every point, the film presses against its own limits. The 9/11 attacks on the United States hang there in recent history as overwhelming imperatives; since those things occurred, every kind of surveillance is permitted; the NSA and its kindred organisations flourish, and Orwell’s visions look like coming true. In Snowden’s hotel room it is observed that they could be in a John le Carré novel; it could well be remembered that the spies and counter-spies of le Carré’s marvellous confections often find themselves on hidings to exactly nothing. Snowden is accused of serious crimes by the White House, but the president – caught, it seemed to me, like a rabbit in the headlights – tries to be somehow conciliatory: Snowden could, he believes, have proceeded lawfully, and we might have found ourselves “in a better place.” Not if you think about the FBI charging in on the wheelchair-bound William Binney, and not if you consider the way the chiefs of the NSA and their confrères were prepared to lie, under oath, to a Senate enquiry on national intelligence activities. That occurred, as the film shows, some months before Snowden began leaking classified NSA documents, pages and pages of them, in June 2013, and before he chose to go into tactical exile.

Snowden’s findings are possible because he’s a young man of the twenty-first century, highly adept in computer processes; the knowledge he shares has been made possible by his own years of employment within government, within the CIA itself and with computer firms that enabled the programs of that agency and of the NSA. The knowledge he shares in Citizenfour has not been casually gained, but built up over years; what’s admirable is his determination to share it, and to take responsibility for the consequences. The United States has revoked his passport; he is held to be guilty of stealing government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information, and communicating classified intelligence to unauthorised persons – film-makers and journalists, that is. The irony now is that he has asylum in Russia, where in quite recent years journalists intent on telling the truth have been murdered. He believes, however, that his form of opposition is Hydra-headed; if he is silenced, others will take his place, and the film’s ample, wide-open ending suggests that it’s happening already. The next whistleblower emerges, from an unexpected direction; Greenwald and Snowden are regaled. The audience, watching them as they survey a great mess of shredded evidence, is invited towards both laughter and relief: look at this – for all their surveillance, that endless expense on data and metadata, all that ambition for overruling knowledge, look: it collapses into chaos, it’s totally out of control.

Calm and undramatic for much of its length, visually sparse, driven by the certainty of its pursuit, Citizenfour is a smashing piece of cinema. Some reviewers ritually gibe at the Oscars, but those can be cheap shots. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can get it surprisingly right; as they did last year, for example, with the foreign-language lists, in recognising Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, this year with Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. With the nomination for Abderrahmane Sissako’s marvellous Timbuktu, seen at last year’s film festivals, a superb work of African cinema is there on the map. So they find places on the major list. For these works to be better known in Australia, we need a much wider non-commercial exhibition network than we have.

As it is, quality cinema has been on hand, in more comfortable offerings. Timothy Spall’s performance made Mr Turner a very superior costume drama. In this version of his story, the artist is gruff and crass; his treatment of women is appalling; he is absolutely committed to his work, and there is appreciable comedy in his relations with the Royal Academy. The image we will remember is not of sunsets nor of ships, but of the man being lashed to a mast in the storm, the better to form his great images of the ocean in tumult.

Though its period is recent, The Theory of Everything is also costume drama, set in the 1960s and 70s, very finely performed by the prizewinning Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. From numerous TV versions of the Stephen Hawking story, we are familiar with the sight, and the synthetic voice, of the heroic genius; now we have also the devotion of his wives. There is nothing, however, to show us what is really at stake in the changing cosmologies, in that “space-time singularity,” which he can prove, then adroitly disprove at will. Somewhere inside this circumspect version there’s a story about a woman, her life with music, literature and religious faith; about what it might mean to turn away from a highly approved kind of devotion to the crippled superior being – where were the blood and tears? The film offers pictures from a well-known history. All quite harmless; the story is tidied up, and therefore lost. •

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To judge from magazine versions of Strayed’s well-published account, Wild delivers the story much as she told it. She was, at the outset, walking to deal with both grief and shame: grief for her mother Bobbi’s early death from cancer at forty-five, grief deepened and complicated by their fraught and messy relationship; Cheryl was exasperated by Bobbi’s failure to leave, decisively, the violent husband and father. The shame was for herself, her disgust with herself for messing up her own marriage and for her sexual fecklessness afterwards. The account of the gruelling hike is broken by flashbacks, rather too many of them; we’re threatened by glib psychologising, in which the past is constantly being called up to explain the present. So she’s walking away from protracted adolescent turmoil; what can she walk toward? The huge backpack is bigger than the actor; the visible process of the journey has to do with managing it, learning the tent, the right fuel for the portable stove, dealing with damaged feet and shoes. There’s something to think about in these practicalities, and in the relation of the traveller to the land as it changes around her; as she reaches the travellers’ posts with the guest books, and enters the quotes from Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Robert Frost (But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep).

Much more could have been done with those elements, and what they signal for people on long walks. That more, however, would be outside the literal/liberal genre which Wild convincingly inhabits. The whole outcome inevitably invites comparison with Tracks, John Curran’s film last year from Robyn Davidson’s memoir. These films approach adequate illustration, but illustration they remain. Each of them subtends the book; it does not take off from the book, it doesn’t get airborne. For each therefore, go back, read the book, and imagine. Or take a turn along the Larapinta Trail.

You could think of him as the wild man of world cinema, the prolix, extravagant Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who can somehow pull together big-budget films from seemingly anti-commercial elements. Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is dividing audiences and commentators round the globe. In comparison with Babel, where he won and lost us by turns, this one offers something like an integrated story. Once upon a time the actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) was the star in the Birdman franchise (read Batman), ritually blowing up cities, flying above the skyscrapers and coming to the rescue. It emerges here that he had purposefully pulled out of the fourth in the series, wanting to build another kind of career, terrified of irrelevance; and now he’s got a serious, small-scale play on Broadway, one drawn from a Raymond Carver collection of stories (published 1981), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Low-budget, fine cast, accredited literary antecedence – what more could the over-indulged, demanding New York audience ask?

Irrelevance still threatens; and his alienated daughter Sam (Emma Stone, delivering fury with the biggest eyes in movies), just out of rehab, gathers up his fears and throws them back at him. It’s vengeance; as a father, he was never there. Her mockery is multiplied in the nervy gibes of Riggan’s star Mike (Edward Norton) and the exasperation of his friend and producer Jake (Zach Galifianakis). It doesn’t help when the current girlfriend has a pregnancy scare; and then, when Riggan’s ex-wife visits, we seem to be looking at the only grown-up in the lot of them. Here, in the midst of verbal and physical violence, profanity and mayhem, Amy Ryan’s performance has a fine, intelligent stillness. She says she’s trying to remember why they broke up; an attentive audience could devise its own answers.

There are other, crossing perspectives, from Naomi Watts’s Lesley in the on-stage cast, pathetically unable to believe she’s really making it on Broadway, and going into meltdown backstage (“I’m still just a little kid”); and from Lindsay Duncan’s waspish theatre critic, hooked on her own bit of power. It’s all an old story: the perilous allure and then the fading of stardom, the awful grip of the success/failure psychosis. There’s a fragmentary Raymond Carver poem, speaking the desire to “feel myself/ beloved on the earth”; and so, legibly, the film moves from Raymond Carver’s own story – much like Dylan Thomas, he flew high, and then drowned in the drink. Riggan identifies with Carver’s desire, but escapes his fate because he’s not a poet, but a performer who can whistle up magic-realist devices. Aspiring to seriousness, he grasps it precariously, and is then allowed to command the air again as Batman/Birdman – or if you like Peter Pan, who has his storyteller’s permission never to grow up. Michael Keaton does a wonderful job, balancing Riggan’s infantile self-absorption with a sad, open-eyed self-knowledge.

You might find the elements clichéd; some commentators have judged the work sour and shallow. Not if you go with its flow; Iñárritu, and his extraordinary cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have transformed the whole assemblage with sheer cinematic energy. In a continuous surge, we pursue Keaton and the rest along the narrow backstage corridors, watch from the flies above it, see night changing to dawn behind grimy facades, and then, as high farce takes over, pursue a near-naked Riggan pushing through the Broadway crowds: an extraordinary image of humiliation. The film’s narration isn’t so much in speech or in individual performance, not even Keaton’s; it’s in the drive, the fierce tidal rush, the purposeful circling of chaos.

Praised here, rebuked and reviled there, The Imitation Game is more than worth a second viewing. It is important that the Norwegian director Morten Tyldum’s film, written by Graham Moore from Andrew Hodges’s book about Alan Turing, disavows strict accuracy; the claim in the opening credits is that what follows is “based on a true story,” not that it actually is one. The story of the wartime cryptographers of Bletchley Park, and their role in cracking the codes used by the Germans in plotting their assaults, is now widely known from TV and theatrical versions; so is the name of Turing, the mathematical genius who devised the first massive mechanical computer. Images of its cumbersome, clanking operations, the banks of wheels watched in fear and hope by Turing and his team, are at the centre of the film. The yield from their calculations, from Turing’s claim that yes, machines could think, though differently, was crucial to the progress of the war.

Because we all vaguely know the antecedence of our endlessly pattering laptops, some commentators have written the film off as too comfortable to matter, too conventional in its telling. Others quibble at historical points, but the film isn’t trying for the long prehistory of cryptography; its centre is Turing. With the attention given to his lonely schooldays, with a beautiful brief performance by Alex Lawther as Alan, aged twelve, it forms a partial life story (which is not the same as a biopic). At that rate, some of the critique is off the mark; on questions of history, for instance, it surely doesn’t matter that in the milieu at Bletchley Park, Turing may never have met that colleague who turned out to be spying for the Soviets.

The Imitation Game offers a history behind the man’s suffering, his personal isolation. Benedict Cumberbatch gives a great, complete cinema performance; at close quarters, we look at gaucherie and near-autistic literalism in the workplace, at stumbling gestures towards fellowship, shy responses with rare smiles, and an awful retreat into stone-cold rejection when the girl comrade and colleague, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), proposes a shielding companionate marriage. Whatever intimacy Turing knew is reported, not seen; what’s seen is a near-incurable loneliness, mitigated – and to some degree overcome – in the major shared task: cracking the code.

Condemned for homosexuality when it was a criminal offence, and then punished by the barbaric method of chemical castration, Turing was pardoned by the Queen some fifty years after his death. The whole idea of the pardon is itself grotesque, but at least it carries important recognition; we now hear that Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry have together initiated moves towards extending such recognition to all the other, anonymous victims of that period’s punitive homophobia.

Thus filmic storytelling can make a difference, perhaps the more easily when its mode is classically conventional. As though sitting at a play, we can enjoy the turns of a great cast: Charles Dance doing inimitable top-brass nastiness as Commander Denniston; Rory Kinnear, visibly shifting sympathies as Turing’s police interrogator; Matthew Goode and others changing viewpoints, coming over to Turing’s side on the team; and Knightley in a role she endowed with the liveliest intelligence – you end up believing that she could indeed finish that testing crossword in five and a half minutes; and even knowing Turing’s end, you could stand and cheer for all of them. Forget the quibbles, and wave towards the wider histories beyond and behind our computers; by virtue especially of performance, this is a marvellous film. •

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We can follow the interactions of a group of scientists, Italian, American, Turkish, Iranian; we take in their talk around the water-cooler and coffee machine. Some have refugee histories, some did many other things before choosing this career; the brightly elegant Fabiola Gianotti, who will take over as head of CERN from 2016, once began to be a ballet dancer. The other woman in the central group, the younger Monica Dunford, is the most absurdly healthy screen presence you could imagine; when not in the main workplace, she is bicycling furiously or pounding the treadmill in the gym. Gaining virtual knowledge of them, we can still know little of the processes they are setting off, nor can we imagine what it means to talk of mass in sub-atomic entities. The images of the great ATLAS detector show us something of the actual machinery of discovery; the visible complexity is a marvel, stirring memories of old future-fantasies, the dreams of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. But we can get very little idea of how it works, and the film would have gained from some attention to engineers and technicians alongside the scientists.

All we can do is go with the flow. The film was co-produced by David Kaplan and Mark Levinson, both physicists, and directed by Levinson; they, with cinematographers Wolfgang Held and Claudia Raschke, and editor Walter Murch, turn the pursuit into intelligent entertainment. The film’s own daring resounds with that of the scientists’ project; Kaplan said, “You have to ignore how irrational it is to think that you make a documentary film about science when you have no idea what the ending is going to be, and you just plunge ahead and believe that at some point you’re going to get a compelling story out of it.” The compulsion is in the quest, and in the palpable shared obsession. At the point of arrival, the film-makers are saying that with the crucial particle identified, these scientists have gained the top of the mountain; and here they call in Beethoven, with the climactic passage from the Ninth. Some viewers found this quite offensive; I’d call it a bit of overly triumphalist excess. While the Collider itself is international and European, this film is American – profoundly so: a romantic affirmation of exploration as a major human right.

The part that matters comes a bit further on, when lines of speculation are explained. There’s some play with opposing views of the universe: “supersymmetry” (yes, there is something out there that loves us) versus the sprawling multiverse (no, there isn’t; there’s only indefinite, formless chaos). Along lines of connection that only these master-physicists understand, the determination on the mass of the Higgs boson will point us one way or the other. The needle settles in the middle. The implications, so far as they are explicable, will give comfort neither to believers, nor to such fiercely devout atheists as Richard Dawkins; but the confirmed agnostics, those who can believe only in deep uncertainty, may find it an intellectually satisfying outcome.

There are numerous explanations for the general superiority of New Zealand’s film-making over Australia’s. My own preferred theory is that their film-makers are blessed with better confidence than ours have in their home audience; they’re not looking sideways towards Hollywood, or away toward the sensitive European art film. Another part of it is the strength of the Maori presence, something the film industry inherits: you can go back, if you want, to the Treaty of Waitangi, and ask what kind of difference such a treaty (long called-for, delayed and therefore denied) might have made to Australian filmic storytelling. (Consider: if some Aboriginal directors – Ivan Sen, Warwick Thornton, Beck Cole – make stronger films than most, this could be because they’ve got better stories to tell, and a greater need to tell them.)

The questions are provoked again by The Dark Horse, a close-to-true story written and directed by James Napier Robertson about the troubled life and work of Genesis (Gen) Potini, played superbly by Cliff Curtis. Gen, diffident and incurably bipolar, is fatally at odds with the masculine Maori world of the small town where, stumbling around in search of a track for his life, he spends time in residential care. Emerging from the institution, he finds someone he wants to look after, his unhappy adolescent nephew Mana (James Rolleston, who had the central role in Taika Waititi’s splendid Boy in 2010). Mana, like others in his age group – both boys and girls – around the small town of Gisborne, is adrift; he is also threatened. The big tattooed bullies of his hapless father’s gang want to induct him into their version of manhood, a culture of violent bikie rebellion.

In thrashing rain, Gen sleeps under a sheet of plastic on the ledge of a monument. He wanders at night, compulsively muttering to himself; he’s an overweight shambles, his front teeth knocked out. There are theories about mental instability and skill at chess, but if they come into play here, it’s not to offer solutions. Despite his own homelessness, Gen manages to pull the kids together into a determined chess group. From the fast montage of the ensuing games, you could learn little more about chess than you might about advanced physics from Particle Fever; no matter, what we do know is that the tournament becomes a stiff contest of Gen’s young Eastern Knights against privileged young pakeha teams from well-resourced private schools. There’s grist here for your class antipathies; but think longer about the centre of the story, and the stark pain enacted by Wayne Hapi as Mana’s father Ariki. His ways of looking are enough to communicate the sadness of an adult male caught between the claims of his fatherhood and the need for approval from his own cohort. The gender issues are half-submerged; alongside Ariki, the women are marginal but vivid presences as teachers and mothers, and the girls are bouncing around, defiantly holding their own among the chess players. The issues are powerfully unstated; what matters is the conflict over what it can mean, in that world, to become a man.

The Dark Horse has won several well-deserved awards in New Zealand – best film, best direction and screenplay, best actor and supporting actor, best score for Dana Lund. Find it if you can; the dawn of Christmas means the silly season on the cinema circuits – “it’s a positive desert!” cried one cinephile friend. “There’s absolutely nothing to look at.” True, but not for long. Finding Vivian Maier should also be sought, a beautiful, complex, meandering work which, more darkly than Bill Cunningham New York, brings photography and cinema together. Co-directed by John Maloof with Charlie Siskel, the film is the story of Maloof’s own obsession; he made the recovery of Vivian Maier’s vast archive of great city photographs, and that of her own story so far as it can be known, his project. She lived from 1926 to 2009, working as a servant, a carer for children and the aged, and taking photographs in her time off with a Rolleiflex, always held waist-high. As she looked at her subjects from above the camera, she could meet their gaze, and the results are utterly remarkable. She left images of children, strays and layabouts, of anger, resentment, rock-bottom poverty, and their vitality is in the way they return the gaze and look back at us through her.

Maloof says that some of the art establishment still ignores her, but for others she is named along with Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. If she really wanted to remain unknown, she has failed in the end, not only because the photographs communicate her great skill in perception, but also because there are so many of the worker herself – self-portraits, using mirrors and other reflective surfaces – in the 1950s and 60s; she is still young, clear-eyed, determinedly isolated, and manifestly lacking in the kind of feminine vanity taken in those years to be proper and normal. Then there’s the darker thread; the witnesses – mostly her long-past employers and charges – come out with their memories of her savage and punitive moments; and there are the French connections, offering other insights altogether. It’s clear that it’s the work, the enormous load of it, that has its claims, not the fragmentary and undramatic biography. There Maier, perversely as you like, sets her own heavy question-mark against our period’s major cultural obsession: the tireless burrowing into authorship, the relentless probing of love lives and pathologies. Curiosity granted, we could do with a great deal less of it.

Finally for Christmas, a salute to those valued confrères who have left the televisual scene. No matter how often I and others might have disagreed with Margaret or with David, or with both, their responses have been at all times worth having. I have regretted that they didn’t make more room for documentary, but then the program has always threatened to burst at the seams with filmic variety; the lineup of classics has been marvellous. The two have done everything to build and sustain a general consciousness of cinema as a vast array of works worth taking seriously, worth maintaining as a local industry and local culture, and always worth arguing over. That said, they’ve been great TV as well (though I have at times wanted to say: please David, that tie should be taken out and shot). I hope Margaret gets to keep all those fabulous little numbers, and the shoes. The dynamics were terrific, she with her passionate enthusiasms and great humour, he with his unfailing, gentlemanly liberalism and encyclopaedic knowledge. They’re irreplaceable. •

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The dilemma at the core of this tale might seem schematic; you could reduce the plot to an ethical fable, a hypothetical: how many of the sixteen staff at Solwal will choose to keep Sandra on the job, as against getting their primes (bonuses) if she’s laid off? All are conflicted; in every family, schooling expenses, food and clothing need two breadwinners – and there are mortgage payments; the perceived alternative is social housing. There’s no time to stop and contemplate that choice; Sandra’s pursuit goes on. Her workmates make their choices; Sandra will emerge from sodden depression only when she can authentically make hers. She recovers; then slides back, dead-eyed – you could get fed up with her; then she plods on again, going the rounds of her workmates through the weekend of the title, seeking their support while trying not to be, as she says, a mendicant. Her husband Manu goes to amazing lengths to keep her on the rails. Sometimes, maybe four times in the course of the story, she smiles; when a Van Morrison song comes through in her friend’s car, there is a revelatory flash, a moment from another life, a space for music and happiness. The film’s final ten minutes are worth analysis: a conclusion in which nothing is concluded, but where politics, ethics and emotions come together in an image of a special, costly kind of freedom.

As ever, the plot is not the film; the hypothetical is transformed by performances; and while Marion Cotillard’s is at the centre, Fabrizio Rongione’s Manu matches it, while the Dardennes’ ways of giving children their places in the milieu intensify our sense of what’s at stake. The film is about them; it’s also about bottled water and tranquillisers, about mobile phones and different ring-tones, about the rush between work, school-gate pickups, getting the beds made and the food on the table, and the way petty, small-scale pressures can surge up into violence.

That grip on daily life has to do with the Dardennes’ insistent localism. All their work, fifty years of it now, is grounded in Wallonia, francophone Belgium; they wouldn’t shift their production operations to Paris, not even to Brussels. The provincial town in the film is Seraing, where they live and work. That integration of life-position and the practice of cinema is exemplary. It provokes an inescapable afterthought: why don’t we do it here, where are the Australian film-makers building films from where we are?

The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, and the major international critics prize as well; then it came in for a last-minute screening at the Sydney Film Festival, when for its whole three hours and sixteen minutes, an overloaded, movie-drunk audience was held spellbound. Every minute of that time, and every square centimetre in the widescreen format, is organised around a Chekhovian drama of provincial life. In the snowbound Cappadocian village, where houses are caverns cut into the rocks, Istanbul is a distant lure, a bit like Moscow in Three Sisters. Some have recalled Ingmar Bergman; we could also invoke Flaubert, or indeed Antonioni, since in this tale it’s the woman, rather than the self-satisfied, culturally ambitious husband, who needs wider horizons and better scope for action.

The film, now on general release, fully repays a second viewing (and strength permitting, I’d be up for a third). Aydin (Haluk Bilginer) was an actor once; now he runs a hotel called Othello, and owns a lot of the village, where people struggle to pay the rent. A sullen nine-year-old flings a stone at Aydin’s truck and shatters a window; the hard-pressed family has to pay up. Ceylan doesn’t underestimate kids; late in the film we find that the child had his reasons. Aydin and his beautiful, much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen) respond very differently to their world, and there’s a strand of comedy in Aydin’s obtuse, misguided attempts to organise her. His tough, jaded sister Necla (Demet Akbag) needles him from the sofa in his study while he tries to produce a newsletter for the community. She is adrift, recently divorced, plainly in need of work to do. They are rich people living among the poor; morally, they flounder. Neither charity nor forced apologies will bridge the gulfs. The deep silences are eloquent; some of those belong to the child, who hasn’t a line of dialogue, but is nevertheless a presence at the centre of the story.

Outside, the snowscapes are vast, and the wild horses of the steppe violently resist being broken in and sold; some might find metaphoric links there with Nihal’s will to freedom, but there are ambiguities in the implied story of the marriage. Something that was once there is lost – you’ve only got to look at Nihal’s eyes as she contemplates the world beyond the window. Inside, firelight plays constantly on the dark, solidly furnished spaces; unnamed women move in and out with tea – and this film is richer for its visible female dimension than Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, marvellous as that film is. Around Winter Sleep, for all the prizes, there is disagreement; one critic found it “a laborious cinematic novel.” In that case, put in the labour, learn to read the language, and gather in the rewards.

The pursuit of cinema takes us away from all our beaten tracks, and none of the nationally or culturally based festivals should be dismissed because of opposition to the policies of the governments that frame them – if only because, as I’ve argued earlier, so many film-makers are working from precarious dissenting positions. The crosscurrents of Middle Eastern politics churn through the programs of the Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian film festivals; all include works that register the large and smaller-scale impacts of conflict and occupation. Following the appearances of Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, one of the very best films of the year, and Dror Moreh’s tour de force The Gatekeepers, The Green Prince, winner of this year’s grand jury prize at Sundance, and a co-production from German, American and British as well as Israeli sources, will emerge before long on the circuits. This one too, by all accounts, probes betrayal and compromise on both sides of the divide. It was one of more than forty films on the Jewish International Film Festival program, well supported by sponsorship; it played over two weeks in Melbourne and Sydney.

Visiting the festival briefly in Melbourne, I was grateful especially for the chance to look at Write Down, I’m an Arab, a small, powerful essay on the life and work of the major Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008). This film was to have been shared with the Palestinian film festival, a modest program that ran over one weekend each in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra – with no commercial support, relying entirely on volunteers. Something went badly wrong in the negotiations, and in the outcome, the Palestinian program lacked that account of Darwish (whose abundant work, in poetry and prose, is available as If I Were Another in English translation from the Arabic by Fady Joudah). There were other rewards, however. If there’s one film from the Palestinian group that should find a path to wider audiences on large and smaller screens, it’s Mark Kaplan’s The Village Under the Forest, an essay on memory and history, in which the destroyed Palestinian town of Lubya continues to exist in the minds of a population, underneath the woodland built and cultivated to obliterate its remains. To this film, you could bring all the symbolism you like about levels of consciousness; it’s the facts of history that count. •

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The session was presented as a well-deserved tribute to Pat Fiske, producer, director, writer, long-term activist; and, for the record, a one-time builder’s labourer, in that brief day of milling liberationist action. A woman could be seen shouldering a plank and wielding a shovel on a construction site, as she could be seen campaigning for election — or, in this film’s helter-skelter action sequences, helping to occupy the threatened sites in The Rocks or on Victoria Street, Kings Cross, and being forcibly carted off by the cops; she could run a residents’ action newsletter and be disappeared and killed for it, as Juanita Nielsen was, and live on in this film’s capacious memory chest. Here women from the nicest possible suburbs are seen discovering their own powers of resistance; here Betty and Kath from Hunters Hill appear, middle-class, middle-aged and modestly spoken, to tell us that in their struggle to save Kellys Bush, their forested patch on a northern arm of the harbour, they wrote to some thirty organisations for help; only the BLF wrote back.

Kellys Bush is still there. The black bans became green bans, and much of Sydney was rescued. Then along the way, the BLF met its enemies among the master builders and developers; the venal, old-style union bosses; and the bean counters and punishers of Robert Askin’s state government. Those forces won, in that the BLF was deregistered, and its most vocal members became reluctant but active parts of local government. But, the film asks at the end, was it a defeat? In many senses yes, an honourable defeat for that time, but there were undoubted gains: for one thing at least, in the

continuing tradition of resident action, and the wider understanding that communal force can be exerted for the public good. What was most centrally at stake for the BLs in the early 1970s was the scope for low- and middle-income people to go on living near the city and in it.

Rocking the Foundations first emerged two years into the time of Hawke’s Labor government, a time when we could believe that the gains won by the BLF were endorsed in the world at large. The film is a miracle of orchestration, with images from numerous archives linked to 1980s footage shot by Fabio Cavadini and Martha Ansara, in a great work of editing by Fiske, Jim Stevens and Stewart Young, with the dancing energy and an edge of sweetness in Davood Tabrizi’s music. The shovels and jackhammers and giant cranes do their work at close quarters; the sheer brutality in the destruction of the old and beautiful makes its impact — you could weep for the Capitol Theatre of once-upon-a-time. We see the high-rise blocks going up, with the windy canyons between them: someone’s relentless idea of modernity.

The film is made of faces and ways of speaking, like those of the stalwart Nita McCrae and her cohort in the battle for The Rocks; Bob Pringle, Joe Owens, Janne Reed, Bud Cook, along with Jack Mundey, still black-haired and eloquent — they become people we know, and now can meet again. This union’s demands were for basic rights only grudgingly recognised, if at all, before then: decent pay and conditions; occupational health and safety; recognition of skills and skill development in fast-changing conditions of construction. Beyond all of that, the BLs claimed their right to active concern for the wider social world, sharing in the massed opposition to the Vietnam war and the marches for Aboriginal land rights, insisting that the liveable city should remain real and imaginable.

When such a film returns, the yield is renewed knowledge of a lively inheritance, of struggles worth remembering and reviving. Seen again on the big screen in the week of Gough Whitlam’s death, its impact connects with his due in the headlines: their story, his story, have to do with the largest issues of justice. In such a week, it was rather grimly satisfying to know that Rocking the Foundations continues in constant demand from its distributor, Ronin Films. Coming from the period of the so-called Australian film renaissance, it’s worth the whole stack of those genteel, conformist costume dramas that made up the prestigious art-film list. Documentary? Just call it cinema.

Antenna also offered, among much else, a chance to look again at The 50-Year Argument, shown earlier at the Melbourne film festival. This is an affectionate view of the New York Review of Books from its founding in 1963, co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi. The journal’s beginning was incitement: Elizabeth Hardwick wrote an article denouncing the blandness of most reviewing, asking for serious, longer-form attention to the consideration of books. This was taken up by Jason Epstein of Random House; he, his wife Barbara, Robert Lowell, Hardwick and Robert Silvers together founded the NYRB, in the wild belief that they could publish all they wanted so long as they could pay the printer. The film tells some very good stories, and gives us the milieu; this has been the heart of metropolitan intellectual life, its disagreements circling around a liberal consensus; work on politics, science, art, religion, social struggles, feminism – nothing has been alien. We get a lot of the irreplaceable Gore Vidal as both player and commentator; and there’s a lively grab from Town Bloody Hall and Germaine Greer’s famous dialogue with Norman Mailer, with interpolations from Susan Sontag. The benign central figure, Silvers, is seen getting older, working obsessively on and on, in a giant cavern made of books, endless haystacks of them. (One possible response from any writer watching this is to think: how can you possibly want to make one more?)

As film about print, this one hasn’t quite the edge of Andrew Rossi’s Page One (2011), on the New York Times and its survival. I’d have liked to know more about Barbara Epstein (1928–06), and about important changes of the NYRB’s collective editorial mind. Some readers believe they have noted genuine shifts in the coverage over time – on, for example, the Middle East; against the background of strong pro-Israel belief over the decades, the steadily dawning understanding that the Palestinians do have a case. That said, The 50-Year Argument matters as an eloquent affirmation of a city’s and a whole society’s intellectual life, engaged, working and active in a marketplace, outside academia, but extending indefinitely the understandings won within it. And not least, defying all the odds: this is a work of print on paper, surviving by virtue of quality and substance.

Documentary was once taken to be primarily information, instruction for citizens (and guaranteed boredom for schoolkids). Over the past half-century it has burgeoned in ways that make the single term questionable; we’re talking of film essays, film polemics, film argument and film history, of cinematic exploration along endlessly various tracks. Antenna offered a high-level reconnaissance of recent international production; from all of it, if there’s one film you’d want all Australia to see and take on board, it would have to be David Fedele’s The Land Between. And that, as it happens, seems to be a film the gatekeepers would rather you didn’t see.

It’s a film about refugees, desperation, homelessness and exclusion. A few hundred migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are found camping in a mountain forest area of northern Morocco; many have fled from wartorn and impoverished parts of Mali, some are from Cameroon. They’re not far from the Spanish coastal enclave of Melilla, separated by a well-guarded triple wall strung with barbed wire. The refugees we meet are determined to breach the wall and somehow get from there into Europe. (I had to go to the atlas; I didn’t know Melilla was there.) In the forest, the wanderers find food in garbage heaps; they tend fires; we watch them improvising shelters from sheets of plastic and making floors from cardboard. They pray aloud together and sing like an opera chorus, and they care for the kids (who play around happily, and look amazingly well). They tell their stories freely to the camera, all affirming an insistent belief in a God who is somehow, somewhere guiding them, and a completely unfounded certainty that Europe will in time become a home. We learn that many who have scaled the walls and reached Melilla have been sent back, only to be beaten, abused and hounded by the Moroccan authorities. Like the “boat people” struggling towards that Australia they have believed in, these too are punished for their desperation, and punished for sustaining their hope.

Out of their talk, “Europe” figures as a paradise, tantalisingly close and reachable – except that we know it isn’t. The characters who emerge most strongly are the vocal, determined Yacou Traore, and Aicha, a valiant young mother of four who sees her life as an ongoing fight for her children. She saw her husband tortured to death in Mali; the children are both her purpose and her recovery. There is no clear resolution for these or their friends; the audience must take in and live with the facts of their endurance. The last news of Aicha is that she and the children are in a place of immigration detention, a place which sounds horribly like Nauru or Manus.

David Fedele is an Australian, working independently from London. He made several return visits to the community; his extraordinary film took some years to make. It was judged the best feature-length documentary at the FIFE (International Environmental Film Festival, Paris) for 2014, and has won three other awards in festivals in Naples, in Lampedusa (that point of entry for so many refugees, and the place associated with so many drownings), and in Rome at the Festival del Terre.

Four international prizes, however, aren’t enough to get the film on to Australian TV. Both the ABC and SBS have rejected it, sight unseen – they declined preview DVDs from the distributor. There’s no money for a theatrical release. Perhaps NITV will consider it, and Maori TV in New Zealand seems to be interested. I’d like to chain our immigration authorities to their seats and make them watch it – twice.

Unlike other nationally-based programs, the Palestinian Film Festival has no sponsorship. This year it is running in six sessions over next weekend (6–9 November) in Sydney, and five each in Canberra (7–9 November) and Melbourne (14–16 November). The Sydney program offers another chance to look at Hany Abu-Assad's splendid Omar, one of the best films of the year, which has been on release in Melbourne.  

Meanwhile, like Antenna, the Canberra International Film Festival thrives; there’s still a week of it to go. Not to be missed: a great afternoon of documentary this Saturday, with Particle Fever (that’s the one on the Large Hadron Collider, packed out at earlier film festivals by spellbound non-science-minded audiences) and China’s 3 Dreams, highly recommended. •

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In the thronged reception hall on Ellis Island, we find two sisters; the more purposeful, Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard), urges the younger, frailer Magda (Angela Sarafyan) to control her coughing. They get brutally short shrift from the authorities; Magda is brusquely tested and quarantined, and Ewa, for some unspecified transgression on shipboard, is held to be “a woman of low morals.” Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), an entrepreneur and predator, engineers an ambiguous kind of rescue, involving Ewa in prostitution and in the life of the low-rent music-hall, where the dancing girls know their sustenance is under threat from the advance of moving pictures. Phoenix gives us a classic Victorian cad; but Bruno falls in love, and Ewa into pity, the trap set for all of her kind. Some link the resilience to her Catholicism, but she’s hardly observant, letting a long time go between confessions; the piety, the keeping of her soul, has more to do with the immigrant’s determination to find a human world she can live in, and to that end she withstands one humiliation after another. Nor is there a solution in the love of a good man; the good man in this tale is a frail magician (Jeremy Renner) but his magic is only for the stage; he’s more vulnerable than Ewa herself.

Marion Cotillard gets away with an amazing degree of saintliness. She learnt Polish for the role; she gives her portrait of endurance in that language and in English, with the barest trace of a French accent. With pale clear skin and bruised eyes, she evokes her cinematic inheritance: Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, Ingrid Bergman stumbling up the mountain track in Stromboli. This film, however, breaks out of its generic confines, and finds our positions in the audience. From where we sit, the stubborn, buffeted immigrant is pleading at the gates; the bullies of Ellis Island in 1921 are figures and faces in our present. At their tender mercies, those girls would be off to Nauru, or – even more dishonourably – to Cambodia, in pretty short order.

Outside theatrical circuits, at large in the wider educational networks, some of the best documentaries build audiences over time. Over the past year, reports came through of a particularly engaging project being developed by the Canberra-based producer-director Andrew Pike, a work on the complex Mungo Lady story, where the traditional owners would have their say along with archaeologists and others involved as scientists and landholders. Now Message from Mungo (co-directed with the historian Ann McGrath) has emerged, a dynamic essay that asks for the widest general attention. It brings together black and white, present and distant past, pastoralist and scientist, and radically different kinds of knowledge. It also, subtly but clearly, investigates that difference.

You can find Lake Mungo on the map in the southwest of New South Wales; the dry lakes are shown as fine-ruled areas outlined in blue. The film opens on wide, seemingly unpeopled landscapes, miles of low scrub, emu and kangaroo country, and stretches of furrowed sand, stirred by wind. The processes of erosion exposed an extremely ancient gravesite, and the bones of a slender young woman who was buried there, with evidence of ritual, about 40,000 years ago. In 1968 those remains were removed from the site and taken to Canberra for scientific examination.

Mungo Lady, as she was named, made the site one of great archaeological interest; distinguished academics from across the world came calling, and Australia-centred archaeology gained in international prestige. But meanwhile, Aboriginal people who shared responsibility for that country began to argue, with increasing force, that the bones should be returned; that Mungo Lady was an ancestor to be respected, and that the discovery bore out their repeated affirmation: “we have always been here.”

In the filming by Andrew Pike and cinematographer Scott Wombey, the witnesses become vividly known to us, not least the late imperial elder Alice Kelly. By the time of the film she was dead, but others remember her intense interest in the scientists’ activities and her insistence on gaining understanding; this is taken up today by her daughters and granddaughter Tanya Charles. They are vivid presences, since they’re in charge of the story; there’s no ruling voiceover here, no white authority knowing better. The witnesses guide us through the story, and though archaeologist John Mulvaney opens the tale of the discovery with authority, he’s a participant, not a guide.

This documentary has been very carefully built; the patience needed for its making has become part of its content. If the most important message from Mungo concerns those utterly different concepts of time, deep time, kinship and inheritance (“we’re part of her, and she is part of us,” says one of the witnesses) there’s also the other side of it – our side, if you like. It’s about the white scholar’s process of learning, coming to estimate the scope and depth of philosophic difference. The archaeologist Isabel McBryde reverses the traditional balance of white specialist to Aboriginal informant; she tells how tentative she felt about being present on the day of the handover, and how important it was to be invited by the traditional owners to share that moment, in 1992, when Mungo Lady was returned to her land and her people. McBryde gives a gentle, eloquent description of her journey – running late, driving alone at night through solid dark and stars, to reach the occasion. Unseen but remembered, that purposeful drive now becomes both history and symbol. •

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In a year fairly drenched in commemoration, Sophia Turkiewicz’s brilliant feature-documentary, Once My Mother, has arrived as a special kind of disturbance: put world history and traumatic personal memory together, and you change the present moment of the audience. Its central character, the director’s redoubtable mother Helen, says at one point that the historians lie; they leave out much that really happened. This film exists to set down in public memory some parts at least of what Helen, a veritable orphan of the storm, lived through in the worst years of Europe’s mid-century. It is driven by Turkiewicz’s own unspoken imperative: this is what she inherits, these are things which should be known, and her own wrestling with her mother’s actions must be dealt with as well.

Helen was born in the 1920s in an impoverished Polish village, to parents who died in her early childhood. She was uncared-for, denied schooling, and grew up as an illiterate servant, pushed and chivvied from one menial corner to another. She became one of a dispossessed Polish population that was ruthlessly trekked and railed to a desolate, snowbound corner of Siberia, and from there by stages through central Asia to Tashkent, across Uzbekistan to the Caspian. The crossing of that sea becomes vividly metaphoric; these refugees will not return. They join the polyglot crowds, refugees moved from eastern Europe into America, Africa, Australia. Helen wanted to reach England; but in Lusaka she had become an unmarried mother, and for that reason England didn’t want her – those were the days... Sophia, retrieving her own story, finds her father and his family in Italy; luckily for her, that meeting is a happy one.

“Harmonic” is a word that occurs as we watch the assemblage of archival film from the near and further pasts of the story, brought together with images from the moments of its making. A symmetry is uncovered: Helen left the child Sophia in a Catholic orphanage in Adelaide for two years while she worked to support their lives. She hadn’t much choice, and she visited on Sundays; but two years is a long time in a child’s life, and for decades Sophia didn’t forgive what she felt as abandonment. One thread in the story is her own process: finding the pieces, making sense of them, forgiving. Past and present are brought consciously into balance: here’s the aged Helen in the old people’s home, joking with her daughter that it’s her turn now to be put in an orphanage; explicitly, they forgive each other, knowing what they’re doing with their histories as they speak.

All that is, as it were, the film’s inner process, parts of the story’s arrival; but the images of its material journey are unforgettable – the blowing snows, the Siberian forests, the long trails of trudging, always expendable humanity heading for god-knew-where. They ate grass; they ate the flesh of dogs and horses; they often ate nothing. Meanwhile there are images of Stalin, Hitler and the Western rulers, playing with the fates of populations. “Harmonic” becomes inadequate; the film is a symphony.

Its genius is that it brings that story home, to this place and to the present. We see Helen, having found home in an Adelaide suburb, tending her garden and blessing the Australia that welcomed her. In her last days, she doesn’t know that it’s no longer that Australia at all; she will die in merciful ignorance of its cruelty. As ever, the audience must complete the film for itself.

A Most Wanted Man has been packing them in around here, and this may be partly because it’s known to be the last outing for a great actor, the much-lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman. It may also be from word-of-mouth, spreading the attractions of a thriller in which all the key references are up to the minute we live in. Much of the film commentariat has written it down as a potboiler, a mere concoction; but they underrate the film’s brilliant speed and precision, its fidelity to its cinematic traditions, and its fine-strung attention to the global confusions of the moment.

The hunted victim in the story, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), is a refugee; at the outset, he has escaped from a Turkish prison. His story is overladen, over-determined; his teenage Chechen mother was raped, and Karpov’s empowering hatred is for the unknown Russian father. (For those who might be curious on the back-story of Chechnya, vide the well-translated accounts by the martyred Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.) All Karpov wants is to get rid of a load of tainted money inherited from that father, and pass it on for the benefit of others who are hunted and homeless. He comes to the attention of a German civil-rights lawyer, Annabel Richter, played by Rachel McAdams – who, for all her purposeful energy, seems a bit too young and beautiful for the part; by contrast Robin Wright, as the seasoned CIA official who turns up everywhere, intently observing, is better linked into the narrative web. There’s a particularly compelling sequence in which Wright’s Martha exchanges questions with Hoffman’s German anti-terrorist operative, Günther Bachmann, who downs tablets and laces his drink as they speak.

The film was directed by Anton Corbijn, written by Andrew Bovell from the splendid novel of 2008 by John le Carré (who was himself on the production team) and edited with laser clarity by Claire Simpson from Benoît Delhomme’s cinematography. The supporting cast includes Willem Dafoe and Nina Hoss, among others of notable strength; but it belongs to Hoffman. We should allow a sense in which (here, as with Brendan Gleeson in Calvary or David Gulpilil in Charlie’s Country) a central performance can amount to an important share in authorship. Perhaps, in the facile wisdom of hindsight, we can see Hoffman bringing his own burdens to the role. Günther Bachmann, with his unhealthy sagging body, and that casual, near-suicidal carelessness for his own wellbeing, has the persistent sadness of one whose mind is bigger than his job; his piano-playing moment toward the end says it all. He knows what le Carré’s anti-heroes always know – this kind of operation can only end badly, and the story will turn the term “intelligence” into irony. The watchers are always being watched; the audience becomes conscious of its own role. Somewhere along the line, in this post-post-cold war era, we’re implicated.

As I write now, the annual Israeli film festival is opening in Sydney. There is a demonstration outside the cinema, and many honourable cinephiles, some of my friends among them, believe we should boycott the program. I cannot agree with them; I think it should be recognised that very many Israelis, with Jewish people across the whole diaspora, are not simply opposed to the Occupation but are actively involved in communicating against it. Those include some, if not all, of the film-makers whose work can be seen in the festival program; they are no more to be identified with Netanyahu and his cohort than are most Australian film makers with our present government’s policies towards refugees. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in shutting our eyes and ears to Israeli division and dissent. •

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In Charlie’s Country, there’s a key moment that’s both gross and grotesque. David Gulpilil’s Charlie, confronting the admonitions of a police officer, ejects a set of false teeth and says, “I can’t eat with them, I can’t eat without them, I’m starving.” And indeed he looks it; lithe and active, but a fair bag of bones. Sometime, there’ll be a dentist visiting the community. With his mate Black Pete (Peter Djigirr, remembered from Ten Canoes) Charlie goes off shooting buffalo; they’re in search of real sustenance, relief from the junk food in the local store. The rifle, the carcass, and even the carefully crafted wooden spear are confiscated. Charlie’s funds in the ATM, casually disbursed around the place, run out. Relations with local police seem, at the outset, to be made of amiable ritual banter; but things will turn ugly.

Along the way, we visit two aspects of Darwin, the well-tended tropical streets of the CBD – the Darwin most white visitors know – and the littered camping spaces where the long-grassers, Aboriginal itinerants, hang out drinking. Darwin isn’t Charlie’s home country, which is a long way off in Arnhem Land, with a red dirt road and a police station among overcrowded houses. The film undermines popular sentimentalities about Aboriginal communal life and sharing; Charlie, a bit fed up with the claims of kinfolk, wants a house to himself. Off on his own with a new clutch of spears, in a beautiful, green-glowing jungle, he is seen in his own bush shelter. Spearing and cooking a large barramundi, he sings to the fish as he eats; but then torrential rain sets in, and we know that, as a Darwin doctor tells him, Charlie’s lungs are packing up. After my first viewing, dining in Canberra, we had to go for the barramundi.

After the second, in Sydney, my viewing companion remarked that of course, there had to be a happy ending. Indeed; the audience has been put through a fair ordeal by then, and that ending is double-edged. It affirms Aboriginal survival – under great difficulties, and on Aboriginal terms. At the same time, Charlie’s Country has to make its way as an entertainment product, and therefore make suburban white audiences feel better about the histories of loss, dispossession and sheer degradation which hang behind the story. We can visit that country only as tourists, but it becomes part of everyone’s imagined Australia – imagined, even desired; there are more white visitors each year to the Top End’s Garma festival (and it takes over mainstream TV on next Monday’s Q&A; unthinkable developments once).

However the audiences take this film – and I’ve felt some of them pushing it away, with comments on how they liked Samson and Delilah better, as though any comparison was invited – it pulls a powerful undertow. Several histories are at work; for one, Rolf de Heer’s eclectic range as a director, and this is arguably his best film. Gulpilil’s long track record as a performer goes back to his work on Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout at age sixteen, and he had his magnetism then. Here, at sixty, he is a co-author with de Heer, and not only as co-writer; this is one case where performance is much more than instrumental. It is at the source and centre of the work; the weathered, expressive face, with steady humour in the eyes; the tangle of grey hair, the movements of the long dancer’s body are visually and dramatically central throughout. Thus, when Charlie is made abject in the gruelling jail sequences, the actor takes this character’s extremity to a level where it is inescapably representative. It is about race, it is about class and caste – there’s a lethal accuracy in the scripting and presentation of the young woman parole officer (Bojana Novakovic), groomed and trained as she is to be an agent of the system, fully confident that she’s doing some good in a difficult frontier world. It is about institutionalised denial; it is about the revenge of the coloniser on the colonised who refuse to lose identity and disappear. Charlie’s country is hers, and ours.

Irresistibly perhaps, some have been reading Gulpilil’s own life story into the tale, making it reinforce an old mythography of the gifted and doomed Aboriginal artist, rewriting Namatjira and Robert Tudawali, trading in over-determined tragedies. The biographical element, however, could be taken differently. Charlie hangs on to a crumpled piece of paper; we don’t see what’s on it until late in the story. Finally, from his point of view, we look at a battered photograph of the Sydney Opera House, fronted by milling crowds, on the day the building was opened by the Queen. Forty years later he, Charlie/David, hangs on to the memory: he was one of the dancers there, on that emblematic day.

Rising to a kind of recovery, he will use the memory in a resonant story for children. From there, we must wish the survivor David Gulpilil what he is said to want for himself: more work, more work in films. They gave him the best actor’s award in the special category, Un Certain Regard, at Cannes, and they were right; he’s one of the best film actors on the planet.

The second half of 2014 has film festivals wall-to-wall. In Canberra, a documentary festival, Stronger than Fiction, is running this weekend, with the premiere of the much-anticipated Message from Mungo. This film, from the producer and director Andrew Pike with the historian Ann McGrath, is a closely woven meditation on Lake Mungo’s past and present, involving traditional custodians, archaeologists, historians and pastoralists. It has been long in preparation, and undoubtedly worth waiting for. Canberra’s main international festival will run from 23 October to 9 November. Melbourne’s major event runs from now to 17 August; there is little need here to urge commitment and bookings, since many offerings are quickly selling out. As with Sydney’s program, documentaries are packing them in; and bookings are heavy for works from the established masters – Resnais’s Life of Riley, Godard’s new Goodbye to Language and his Masculin-Féminin (1966), and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). The annual Israeli film festival will run through later August in six capital cities, plus Byron Bay; by a wry coincidence (or is it?), the Arab film festival will run in the same period in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Those with the stamina – and the cash – to take in both will, without question, come out the wiser. The Palestinian film festival is to follow in November. •

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The time, the place, the headlines: we look at films in the moments of their arrival, and as the headlines change so does the way we make sense of what we’ve been looking at. In the backwash of the Sydney Film Festival, one of the films left standing solidly in memory is the Palestinian feature, Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar; it has since had a commercial run in Melbourne, and will reappear in other cities. In the month between festival viewings and in the real world, the story thickens. Over there four young men, younger even than the ones we see in the film, are murdered – three Israeli, one Palestinian. An Israeli mother expresses compassion for her Palestinian counterpart; but from the Israeli government there’s no compassion for Gaza, and you could argue that Hamas’ rocket-men, however understandable, are unstrategic. Children, unknown numbers of them, are blown to bits.

In Hany Abu-Assad’s earlier feature, Paradise Now (2006), two young men are trained and committed to duty as suicide bombers. A girl, a childhood friend of both, seeks to persuade them out of it, not only for their own sakes but also from her conviction of the futility of the action. On their presumed last day of life, their paths separate; in the outcome, they make different choices. This film was much praised as a fine Middle Eastern thriller; it’s that, and more than that. In the film festival notes, Omar was also tagged “a high-impact thriller,” and true enough; but in the framework of the present, it becomes an enquiry into high-level political insanity, and like Paradise Now, a rigorous essay on the ethics and tactics of rebellion. Omar (Adam Bakri) is a young pastry cook; the separation wall cuts implacably through his Palestinian community, so that his comrades and his beloved Nadja, still a schoolgirl, live on the other side. Omar is pretty fit; regularly, he tosses up a knotted rope and scales the wall, dodging bullets as he goes. He finds Tarek and Amjad (Iyad Hoorani, Samer Bisharat) and waits for the beautiful Nadja (Leem Lubany) outside the school.

One day, walking the road by the wall, Omar is harassed by the Israeli security police, in a sequence that communicates petty humiliation more acutely than anything I know since certain passages by Ingmar Bergman. The ground of the story is there, in a world of everyday, relentless harassment and obstruction. The three become snipers; Amjad fires off a shot that kills an Israeli soldier, seen falling in the middle distance; then it’s Omar who is arrested. Through the rest of the film, he is jailed, tortured, interrogated, jailed and tortured again. His interrogator, Agent Rami (brilliantly played by Waleed Zuaiter, one of the film’s producers), gives him one chance to deliver Tarek; he is drawn into playing a double game, appearing to give the Israelis what they want while also keeping some kind of faith with his friends and with Nadja. It doesn’t work; they, and she, come to believe that Omar has betrayed them and the Palestinian cause. After the delicacy of the love sequence between them, her loss of faith is something we can measure only at the end, when she herself, facing the camera head-on, makes it clear.

Fast pursuits in the West Bank’s laneways build up, become a complex figure for the impossibility of Omar’s situation and the whole community’s. Omar and his friends are blundering and young; they can’t begin to find adequate strategies, and what we are shown is that under military domination personal integrity cracks and erodes. The struggle between occupation and resistance is radically unequal, but the exchanges between Omar and Rami have an intense dynamic; these enemies are equals. In another world, they could be friends and brothers.

Outside the cinema, in the world of the headlines, the rocketry does little more than express rebellion, and supply the Israeli defence forces with triggering excuses. The bombs on Gaza have, up to this time of writing, destroyed 869 houses and killed 213 people; one Israeli has been killed. Omar is fiction only because it’s true, and the truth compels this story into existence.

On King Street, Newtown, four people are staffing a table with a petition to be signed against the bombing. One passing citizen calls out to the workers that he’ll sign when they organise another petition, one against Hamas. As ever, the warfare in that Mediterranean corner of the world resounds in our cities, shouts from local headlines and rightly so; it’s our business too.

Calvary, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, is also an investigation, and a complicated case; the viewer’s understanding will have to do with her position in the audience. Believers may adopt Brendan Gleeson’s magisterial Father James as a Christ figure, one prepared to die for the sinners of his world. Others will find themselves watching the workings of faith from somewhere outside them, held by the great intelligence, subtlety and solidity of Gleeson’s performance. He communicates a weather-beaten man who entered the priesthood late, after his wife’s death; he has been a husband, and remains a father, though in that role he has been somewhat less than devoted. Late in the film, his daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) tells him that when he made his transition she had felt abandoned – “you were missing in action”; she had lost both parents. This compels us to consider the meaning of such a choice; looking at Father James’s bleak, monastic little room, seeing him at prayer, the only certain thing is his desire for certainty.

He’s under sentence; the days are measured out. For that reason, with all the film’s beauty and energy, some have dismissed it as being schematic, too much fixed to a plot device. But story and vision flow above the structure. Father James’s parish is a village near Sligo in the northwest of Ireland; Larry Smith’s cinematography gives us the wind and blowing light, sun and shadow crossing the talk, surf flowing in on a long beach. (It looks a lot too cold for swimming, though they do.) On the beach a child of nine or ten, first seen as an altar boy, is drawing at an easel. He’s there, at the beginning and end of the film, to typify the church’s many child victims, who are unseen but present. The priest deals with his community of strugglers; there are infidelities, bank foreclosures, drugs, and inexplicable, vengeful violence. There is a young murderer to be visited in jail; there’s the decrepit American novelist still intent on his masterpiece; there’s black comedy in the life of the pub, all of it underlain by Patrick Cassidy’s music score, popular songs and persisting Irish lament.

Some commentary has called up Robert Bresson’s exquisite classic Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and McDonagh himself has cited Bresson as an influence. His ascetic spirit is there in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, discussed here some weeks ago; like that work, Bresson’s films are subtle, contemplative documents, made of muted screen behaviour by mostly unknown, quite un-starry performers, and questions of earthly happiness are very seldom at stake. But if Bresson offered a point of departure for McDonagh, he moved a long way from it; Calvary is a very different kind of cinema, dependent on high-level acting and drama, and obeisance before the crucifixion can never be the end of it.

Above the beach, Father James talks with the sad, childish rich man of the parish, and promises him further solace. Time is ticking away, and (on a first viewing) we’re gripped by suspense; perhaps the priest won’t be able to keep that promise. Coming towards high noon, he reflects that too much is talked of sin, too little of virtue, and that what’s underrated is forgiveness. The film’s final moment endorses him on that.

A fellow cinephile, who saw Calvary first at the film festival, reports that she needed the full ensuing month to work up to a second viewing, at the local Dendy. I can confirm the film’s total impact, and confirm too that the second time is worth it. •

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When T.S. Eliot wrote that “Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality,” he hadn’t seen the thousands packing in to the Sydney Film Festival’s huge and remarkable spread of documentary. “Reality” – in the sense of truth pursued on locations and in editing suites, assemblages of fact linked and netted by interpretation – seemed to be exactly what they were after, no matter where. It has been said that a film festival is a lot of virtual travel; some of that travel takes in places where, outside of a film festival, we’d never really want to go.

After The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, no one concerned with twentieth-century history would stay away from the next Errol Morris essay. Faced with the operations of the military-industrial complex, the splits in the conscience of the powerful, the illogic of the deeply self-deceived, Morris is the ultimate cunning, soft-spoken strategist; he has described himself as a director-detective, rather than producer-director – once, between films, he spent time as a private eye. The Unknown Known, this year’s examination of Donald Rumsfeld and his obsession with memoranda, isn’t as deeply searching a film as The Fog of War, but that has to do with the level of interest one can feel in the particular human subjects. Robert McNamara, with his many chapters of involvement back to the second world war, was worth more of our time and Errol Morris’s subtle interview-management than is Rumsfeld. That said, The Unknown Known must still count as one of the 2014 Sydney Film Festival’s most telling documentaries, exposing some of the internal workings of US imperialism under the G.W. Bush administration. Rumsfeld is on screen for most of the time; in consequence one emerges with a wry sense of grim knowledge gained, at the cost of spending more than an hour-and-a-half in the company of an accomplished professional liar.

The late and great critic Roger Ebert (1942–2013) praised Errol Morris for being “much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves” – that is, interested in the speaking positions assumed by those interviewed, in the ways in which “facts” do or don’t become evidence. Ebert himself never tired, not only of viewing films and writing about them for the Chicago Sun-Times, but also of ferreting around their pre-histories, and the conditions of production and reception. Another of the festival’s best documentaries is about him; this is Life Itself, directed by Steve James from material shot in the last five months of the critic’s life, with old photographs, video footage of the late-life wedding, and  images from the TV program in which Ebert argued about movies in dialogue with his perennial rival, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune. The film gives us old and new journalism, as Ebert dives into Facebook and Twitter. En route, it’s full of the life of the city and its newspapers; there are moments which echo the early chapters in Citizen Kane, and reminders of Page One, Andrew Rossi’s superb essay on the way the New York Times and its personnel face the digital age: is the Grey Lady on death row? Roger Ebert is; with body, head and face malformed by terminal cancer, he goes on tapping on his laptop in hospital, and continuing, miraculously, to get some fun out of everything.

So many documentaries have to do with survival. For Keep On Keepin’ On, two Australian film makers, Alan Hicks and Adam Hart, went to the United States to make their vibrant essay on the life and work of the trumpeter Clark Terry, who taught Miles Davis and Quincy Jones among others, and who, late in his life – and still blowing his horn brilliantly – became a mentor for a young blind pianist, Justin Kauflin. Terry, Kauflin and Terry’s wife Gwen are their own extraordinary stories, with Quincy Jones’s masterly narration weaving through them, and signalling outward; Jones’s own story is something else again, connecting to those of every other jazz master you’ve ever heard or heard of. Terry’s music, which some called “the happiest sound in jazz,” remains with us in the film even after he, at past ninety and ill, can’t help to produce it any longer; Kauflin’s piano goes on.

It was accidental illumination that this film was seen in short order after the curious, perversely comic The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. This writer’s books, which I haven’t read, are notorious for his special forms of misanthropy and misogyny. Those elements in his disposition are convincingly enacted, by the man himself, in this demi-fictional replay of the days when, on the point of literary appearances, he disappeared from public sight; with him, the supposed kidnappers (played by Luc Schwarz, Mathieu Nicourt and others) engage in meandering, demi-philosophic dialogue while waiting for ransom to be organised. There’s a sour kind of comedy happening in the fogs of smoke and drink; the jokes are all at the writer’s expense, miserably self-absorbed as he is; he defines and personifies a mentality. Moving from this to Keep On Keepin’ On, you understand all over again that jazz evolved precisely to ride over and out from all that, from its beginnings in an underdog culture that refused exactly that mentality – grudging, self-pitying, hopeless – and refused it absolutely.

Some of the most popular documentaries are likely to reach the cinema circuits; those include Particle Fever, on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) on the Franco-Swiss border. This huge and expensive installation is there, in part, to work out what happened at the beginning of the universe. Curiosity drives crowds, even if your family doesn’t include an aspiring nuclear physicist; both screenings were packed out. Of this thrilling tale, more to come. Its distributor, Madman Entertainment, also has the wonderful Sepideh: Reaching for the Stars, and this also is one to wait for. The fourteen-year-old Sepideh passionately wants to be an astronomer, and if possible an astronaut as well; she is philosophically akin to the Saudi-Arabian Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, first met at last year’s festival and then at local cinemas. It will be remembered that the intrepid Wadjda, aged ten, wanted to acquire a bicycle and ride it, against all the rules for girls; and also that as a considerable strategist, she won the money in a competition for recitation from the Koran.

Wadjda was a fictional creation, the kind where fiction is necessary precisely because it’s all true. Sepideh, directed by Berit Madsen, is documentary, and like many films from the Middle East, it was enabled as a co-production, with input from four European sources as well as from Iran. We find the girl toiling up a hillside at night, trailing her hijab and carrying her portable telescope. The uphill track is unforced symbolism; Sepideh’s widowed mother is struggling, and can’t but calculate that the best course is a well-arranged marriage for the girl. In countries where honour killings, forced marriages and domestic imprisonment persist – and those include Australia – the circulation of such films must be taken beyond middle-class urban audiences. Their excellence as cinema, both drama and document, isn’t an end in itself.

The major features on the program will resurface, among them Richard Linklater’s remarkable drama-documentary Boyhood, an essay on normally dysfunctional family life observed over twelve years in a sunny Texan suburb, a benign, modern Sons and Lovers. This was in the running for the Sydney Film Prize; the one that got it, the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night, will also reappear. In the meantime, cinephiles aware of Belgian cinema might profitably spend time with  Philip Mosley’s excellent new book on Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and their now-considerable oeuvre, from the documentary videos of the 1970s through the distinguished fictions of the past twenty-five years: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism (Wallflower Press, the Director’s Cut series, 2013). Their story should ring bells for Australians; they took a clear decision, early on, that they weren’t migrating to Paris, but in the teeth of provincial struggle they were going to make movies right there where they were; not even Brussels or near it, but in the province of Wallonia.

With all the productive interaction between festival and film trade, there are still films which, without the festival, would be very unlikely to reach us. It’s because of the Sydney festival’s current size and prosperity that, at the last crowded minute, it could draw in unprogrammed items hot from Cannes, those including the winner of the Palme d’Or, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep.

I can report that this film held a large audience mesmerised for all of its 196 minutes; and as with Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the magnetism has only so much to do with plot; these are tantalising fragments of drama, appearing and disappearing, trailing on into minds and memories beyond the limits of the screen. In this film the enchantment has to do with landscape, the Anatolian steppes, snowbound as we see them here, with the houses cut into the rocks; with the presence of an angry child, whose parents can’t afford the rent; and with the work of a formidable actor, Haluk Bilginer. His character, Aydin, is a former actor and in the present of the film, both a landlord and a columnist for a newspaper called The Voice of the Steppe. Seeing the alienation of Aydin’s beautiful younger wife, we seem at first to be in a world like that of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (also seen in the festival’s retrospective programs). But the unhappiness of women – Nihal (Melisa Sözen), and Aydin’s divorced sister Necla (Demet Akbağ) – is an intractable, persistent element. Nihal understands herself: she needs meaningful work, as unequivocally as the wild horse, brutally captured, needs its freedom. This winter country isn’t so far from Chekhov’s, and Istanbul, like Chekhov’s Moscow, is always there, somewhere across an uncrossable distance.

Sometimes there appears a small film which strikes the viewer as being formally perfect. That is the case with Ida, discussed here in the last posting; it is the case with Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, which, like Winter Sleep, came in late to the festival via Cannes. Sissako, who is spoken of as present-day Africa’s great director, takes up the jihadist assault on northern Mali with drive and clarity. A young deer is seen running over the sandhills; a family is assembled peacefully in their tent; a boy herds cattle in a river, and angers a fisherman casting his nets. It will not be possible for the end-credits to claim that “no animal was harmed…”; the visible death of a very important beast prefigures needless human murder. The jihadist vigilantes want women to be both hooded and gloved, even as they’re cleaning fish in the market. At the end, we understand more about the fleeing animal.

I will give some further comment soon on this super-abundant film festival. Its major Australian offering, David Michôd’s The Rover, is already on the circuits. •

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There are still some around who can remember when the Sydney Film Festival was run by three-and-a-half people on pay, with a dedicated committee and volunteers. The event was both elite culture, and embattled; fine-art cinema in foreign languages, but still not asking for the kind of attention given to gallery art and concert-going, while out in the marketplace the whole idea was suspect, a threat rather than a stimulus to film distribution and exhibition. It could be tolerated if admission was strictly by subscription.

Now it’s a different story, with fully flexible ticketing; and more importantly, the distributors now regard a couple of festival screenings as useful advance promotion. The festival is fully established middle-class culture, and wildly popular as well, with queues for everything, pages of restaurant ads in the program, and bunting all over town and around the suburbs. You had to be up early to get in to the opening night at the State, the indispensable work on Nick Cave (20,000 Days on Earth, to be discussed in good time), and such fine retrospective treats as the Friday 13th screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the Blacktown Skyline drive-in. If now, into the festival’s seventh decade, I remark that it’s bursting quite uncomfortably at the seams, I hope its army of labourers will forgive me. (Great people they are too; unlike those Nazis who shove you around at certain other prominent cultural events, they’re all outstandingly good-humoured and cooperative.) The fact is that without a functioning cinematheque in a city this size – or even half this size – the film festival has far too much work to do.

As of the opening week, with five splendid new works emerging from Cannes, there are more than a hundred feature films in the program. Those include eight of Robert Altman’s oeuvre, Nashville and M*A*S*H included. Such retrospectives are among the most important things a festival can do; this one will give some local cinephiles a chance to discover, or rediscover, a body of work marked by multitudinous invention and also by huge ambition. Whether its output amounted, as some believe, to greatness I don’t feel sure, but I’m glad of the chance to look again at McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Many other films in the program will be released commercially this year or next, and will be considered then; for the present, this column will look at certain special documentary essays, and fictions which, without the festival, would struggle for audiences.

Meanwhile, there are deserving works on the circuits. You could call My Sweet Pepper Land a Kurdish western, and its director, Himer Saleem, is Kurdish; but this film – wild, abundant little narrative that it is – couldn’t have been the film it is without European input, and it is effectively a Franco-German co-production. The generic structure is there; the good sheriff Baran (Korkmaz Arslan) comes to a bad town, a disorderly village on the boundary between Turkey and Iraq, a place with one dismal bar called Pepper Land, and one phone. Here the schoolteacher Govend (Golshifteh Farahani) is trying against huge odds to keep a class going. Baran’s story might make you think, momentarily, of Gary Cooper in High Noon, or James Stewart’s role in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and of the way women show up as schoolteachers in one classic Western after another; but those echoes fade. This is now; Saddam has gone, but other battles continue. There are girl guerillas, a feisty tribal group, dodging round these high, dry mountains firing at the Turks. The schoolteacher is seen trying to impart elementary arithmetic. “One and one?” she invites. “Mother and father?” A little boy responds mischievously: “Mother and father makes ten children.”

In Pascal Auffray’s cinematography the rocky landscapes dominate, with their heights and mists and almost palpable cold. Those images link with music to deepen the sense of remoteness; Baran likes Bach, Mozart and Elvis (Jailhouse Rock), while Govend manages moments of solitary peace, playing a tin drum. She is improbably beautiful; think of the face of Virginia Woolf when young, give her dark hair and you can see Govend. At the advanced age of twenty-eight, she has fought a family of brothers to refuse an arranged marriage, claim independence and make her journey, but the toughs of this town are worse than her brothers.

With all that, Golshifteh Farahani is in the film as a star (she has a fair track record by now, having played roles for Ridley Scott and Asghar Farhadi); and it’s a bit unsatisfying that as the star and within the narrative, her character is isolated. Pepper Land is a male resort; Govend has to bargain and argue for her key to the schoolhouse. The story doesn’t provide any links between her and the women in the village, and no sign of solidarity with the girl soldiers. But it’s in the female struggle, and not only hers, that the film as it were slips its formal moorings, and plunges outwards; this is indeed about Kurdistan, but it is also inescapably about all the places where there are mass kidnappings of schoolgirls, honour killings, and the judicial murders of women who lift their heads and disobey; does that mean everywhere? It isn’t only female independence, the presence of women in public life, that gives offence; the greatest affront is the alliance of female presence with knowledge.

If there are festival-goers who react against the extravagant sprawl of the Robert Altman programs, here’s a cure. Ida, a small-scale Polish–Danish co-production directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is running for a short season at one city cinema and at one location in the suburbs. It is so completely uncompromising a work – sparse and ultra-disciplined, shot on black and white in the old, almost-square ratio (1.37:1) – that we’re lucky to get it at all, and it’s extraordinary that it surfaces on the commercial round rather than in a crevice of the festival. But then, it comes with a clutch of international festival awards for direction, script and performance; they are well deserved.

Set around 1960, Ida is a series of narrative vignettes, tracking a young Catholic novice, a convent-raised orphan (Agata Tzebuchowska), in the last months before she confirms her vows to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Her Mother Superior requires that she go to live for a time with her only living relative, her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a lawyer, formerly a prosecutor in the Communist regime, and as her niece finds her, someone racked and saddened. With Wanda, Anna, as she has been known, discovers that her parentage is Jewish, and that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. They go on a road trip in search of a burial place; a costly ethical necessity opens lives, minds and memories.

The plot, if you trekked through it, might sound Catholic and judgemental, and some will take it that way; but there is more than moral drama in the story as made visible, suggested, lit and shadowed, in the stunning black and white cinematography of Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal. When Anna/Ida makes her choice between return to the convent and the life she has been able to visit in a wider world, the film is neither endorsing nor condemning the outcome, and the audience has a good bit to deal with. Music plays several parts; there is an explosion of Mozartian elation, and a lot of Coltrane (alto sax) along the way.

Critics have had a great time with this film’s antecedents, finding echoes of Ingmar Bergman at his darkest, of Dreyer and Rossellini. They’re all right, of course; but I was most reminded of Robert  Bresson’s extreme discipline, the clarity, force and simplicity of A Gentle Creature, Balthazar and Mouchette. Catch Ida on a big screen if you can; if not, retrieve her in time, and share it.

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THE KINGS are in their counting house, and the cultural workers in the galleries, libraries and archives are cowering in fear. They’ve kept the books up to date and their noses clean, but they know that any minute this or that curatorial role will be found “surplus to requirements.” Then Jack or Jill, who worked for years to earn their niches in the care of books, paintings or film, will be scrounging for part-time employment in alien tasks, while their skills go to waste and the institutions they’ve served lose not only their service, but also banks of invaluable professional memory.

The cuts to staff and screening programs at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra have been widely discussed and argued over – and there’s a twist in this tale: they are not the results of government budgetary measures, but of decisions by the CEO, Michael Loebenstein. His concern, he has said, is not so much to preempt the budget as to reset the Archive’s public identity clearly around its central functions in collecting and preserving the national film and sound inheritance. Billed as a restructure, the changes involve the loss of twenty-eight jobs, among them those of long-serving and deeply knowledgeable staff; I have no permission at present to name them. The work of the beautiful Arc cinema will be curtailed after this winter’s programs; much less of world cinema will be offered. The Archive’s lending services will also be cut back – how far is not yet clear; but the invaluable programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, for example, like non-commercial exhibition in other cities, depend crucially on the Archive’s resources and services. Commercial distributors are reluctant to lend; film prints are less and less available as DVDs take their place; and often hiring and shipping costs are prohibitive.

Two weeks ago, at the gallery, I saw Errol Morris’s incisive and searching drama-documentary on police interrogation and conviction, The Thin Blue Line; this week, in the same series, there are three screenings of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Seen again, Rashomon brings back the sense of cinema’s grandest possibilities, with Kurosawa’s Shakespearean reach, the interplay of high life and low, the orchestration of theatre, music, literature and painting. This series, headed States of Mind, is linked to the current Biennale; it began with Fellini’s 8 ½, took in Last Year at Marienbad and Orson Welles’s The Trial among others, continues with The Manchurian Candidate and, on 28 May, Duncan Jones’s science-fiction poem of 2009, Moon, before concluding with Mulholland Drive on 4 June. Particular tastes aside, this is an extraordinary parade, a ranging exploration called up by one of the country’s very few dedicated film curators, Robert Herbert. Meanwhile in Canberra, the Arc screened masterworks by Satyajit Ray – one director who was saluted by Kurosawa himself; thus, after some decades, I looked again at Ray’s Charulata, and found a film far more complex and beautiful than I remembered.

It’s that kind and level of work which may no longer be on offer for Canberra; and apart from the efforts of a few very small film societies, Robert Herbert’s work is all we have in Sydney – a rich Western city of four-and-a-half million, which has no cinematheque. Without the Archive’s lending collection, his work could not be done.

MORE CAN be said, and will be, on the struggles of film culture in a hostile climate. Meanwhile the world does keep on going to the movies, and numbers of us have found Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel definitely worth a second viewing. Never believe the trailer; this looked like a high-camp romp, and little more than that. It’s rather a film about the necessity of storytelling, and one in which style, the whimsy and flair of the invisible narrator permit him to synthesise history, fantasy and farce. He turns the pages, we look at the pictures, always knowing this isn’t quite the way it was.

Ralph Fiennes plays Gustave H., the concierge of the palatial Grand Budapest, a monster wedding-cake structure on an impossible mountain peak, not in Hungary but in the fictitious, imperilled Republic of Zubrowka. (If you hadn’t seen Martin McDonagh’s excellent film gris, In Bruges (2008), you might have been surprised by Fiennes’s comic mastery; in that piece, he was a marvellous baddie.) Here, with the wide-eyed Tony Revolori as Zero Mustafa, the hotel’s lobby boy, a Sancho Panza role, Gustave leads central European high society of the 1930s in its dance towards the cliff. Hitler isn’t named, but Fascism is there, the dark outside the windows, personified in several episodes by thuggish invading police. The cast is all A-list, with F. Murray Abraham as the old Mustafa, compulsively remembering, and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling reminding us that we’re in Frankenstein’s country. On no account miss the final credits; there Alexandre Desplat’s music, with a full balalaika ensemble, goes brilliantly crazy, and lets us know just how to read the entire composition.

A NEW homegrown feature demands attention, if only because there aren’t many around; the drama that matters to us has mostly migrated to TV. Craig Monahan’s Healing sounded pretty ominous: alienated bad man finds redemption in work with wild creatures, in this case huge (and hugely impressive) eagles at a bird sanctuary outside Melbourne. Hugo Weaving, for once playing a character who’s all good, is the concerned prison officer, Don Hany the struggling long-term inmate for whom Murphy’s law is in force – whatever can go wrong for him will. But the rules of melodrama do their work; the broken family will show signs of mending. The dialogue is often clunky, the script undisciplined; but Weaving and Hany, with Justine Clarke and Tony Martin in solid side roles, Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography, and the wildlife take this film further than it seemed likely to go.

It’s worth a look, also worth a think. It seems that Australian feature-making still needs more inventive producers, the kind capable of tight and purposeful steering, and along with them script editors who know when less can be more. It also needs a sense of cinematic flourishing around it, a fostering critical climate, and one in which audiences can be trusted to be both welcoming and demanding. For as long as I can remember, back to the early days of the 1970s revival, we’ve had an industry in which too many film-makers don’t actually go to the movies, and don’t therefore attain the sort of cineliteracy which enables the witty formalism of a Grand Budapest Hotel – or, much more importantly, the incisive social probing of a Thin Blue Line, let alone the grand fullness of Charulata and Rashomon. •

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LIKE HER subject in this particular cinema portrait, Margarethe von Trotta was prepared to take a great professional risk with Hannah Arendt. This work has been called a biopic; it’s not, if that term means any kind of life story. It is, however, a telling of history; the truth-claim is there in the use of archival footage showing elements of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. We look at the man as he was, in the glass box of the dock. The account takes up one period in Arendt’s life, the time in the early 1960s when she won her brief to cover the trial for the New Yorker. The risk for von Trotta, an eminent survivor of the brilliant New German Cinema of the 1970s, was in her conviction that this part of the Arendt story could work as film: a film about a woman who was an intellectual, a trained philosopher dedicated to political thought and argument, getting caught in a blazing controversy. Some reviewers have found the film rather plodding – perhaps an effect of booklined interiors with old-fashioned, clacking typewriters, desks stacked high with documents, the signs of lives given to thinking and teaching. But the action flows, and there is clear light in the Riverside Drive apartment and a fine sense of New York as seen by European eyes.

Not a love story, though the threads of two such stories are woven into it; and no glamorous figure at the centre – Barbara Sukowa, a clear and determined choice by von Trotta, gives us a solid, middle-aged, chain-smoking Hannah. As it happens, she looks nothing like Arendt (though oddly enough Friederike Becht, playing her younger self, is very like the photographs of Arendt at nineteen). Sukowa, however, makes thinking palpable and visible; in the main courtroom sequence, her shifts of expression are mesmerising. On a second viewing, I noticed the array of ultra-sensible knitted suits; whatever Arendt actually wore, the costume and design departments did well. This woman isn’t there to be a heroic individual, or to draw us into personal dramas.

Those were done with, as the story goes, by the time Arendt (1906–75), having escaped the Nazi regime and survived a grim French internment camp, reached New York and shelter, in her second marriage, to the autodidact and former Communist Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg). She enjoyed success, as both writer and academic, after the publication of her two massive essays, The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism. When the world got the news of Eichmann’s capture by Mossad – sketched here in a beautifully ominous pre-credit sequence – she was fired up. The New Yorker didn’t choose her; she came knocking, but her prestige was high enough by then for its editor, William Shawn, to send her to Jerusalem. As Shawn, Nicholas Woodeson gives a most satisfying picture of the unpretentious, workaday editor whose job is his life. He has considerable patience; Arendt will overstrain it, and he has to argue with a hostile colleague who insists, correctly enough, that philosophers don’t know anything about deadlines. In that role, Megan Gay communicates a fine degree of spite: an ill wind from the old hostility between journalism and academia.

If that tension was actually in play, it was nothing on the hate and fury Arendt confronted when her articles were published, followed by the book that was made from them (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil). Refusing to demonise Eichmann, taking him at his own word that he was an obedient functionary (the man who checked on the paperwork, made sure the required numbers were locked in the cattle trucks and the trains running on time), insisting on his dreadful ordinariness, she was in trouble. In her New York world, the population of German-Jewish immigrants and survivors couldn’t bear to see Eichmann and his ilk as anything but monsters. She was in even more trouble with her allegations that certain Jewish leaders had collaborated, giving the Nazis, in detail, the required information against their own communities. For this she was attacked furiously and very publicly. Blücher, and a tight group of friends, kept her afloat.

The embattled conviviality of that group, “the tribe,” is vividly choreographed here, with Janet McTeer as a cheerfully acerbic Mary McCarthy. Under pressure to take leave from teaching, Arendt carried on, ostracised by colleagues; here she is looked at steadily, in middle distance, in the college refectory, eating lunch alone. Then she is lecturing her students on the necessity of thinking, finding the distinctions between beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. That eight-minute sequence is a tour de force; lectures aren’t generally supposed to be the material of cinema, but the sustained energy of Sukowa’s performance holds us watching, as it is seen to hold the students.

Arendt’s critics were never silenced; in later generations, the attacks go on, and there are those today who continue to argue that her insistence on “banality” dishonoured the Jewish people’s suffering in the Holocaust. They thought, in short, that Arendt let Eichmann off the hook. It was not so; she merely asked them to see that his mentality was not exceptional. That was too much to ask; it was shocking.

Thus the film bears freight to be unpacked. It asks us to turn the famous phrase around, and look at the evil in banality. The banality, for instance, of long, futile days in island detention centres, the banality and destructiveness of boredom; the banality of “the market” as a ruling central idea, and then the extreme banalities of knights-and-dames and operation-sovereign-borders: roadblocks to thinking, remembering, imagining. Von Trotta’s film asks us to shift the roadblocks, to grow up in our own time and place, to remember what was at stake in Arendt’s life and projects. She demanded that we understand the consequences of unthinking obedience: Eichmann’s kind of obedience.

IN UTTERLY different cinematic terms, Rithy Panh’s French-Cambodian documentary essay The Missing Picture communicates similar messages; but while the backstory to Hannah Arendt is well known to Euro-centred Australians, Cambodia’s ordeal in the later 1970s, recent though it is, is still a cloudy patch in the field of general knowledge. This astonishing, small-scale film affirms the ethical demand that the very worst of times – in this case, the four years of the Khmer Rouge – must not be forgotten; it enacts and displays the need to work with memory, to transform it. It also overrides the notional boundaries between documentary and fiction; it is theatrical, in the best possible sense.

With infinite care, the hands of an invisible sculptor are seen refining a small block of clay, using a knife and then a paintbrush, until it becomes the figure of a man. A population of such figures emerges, to represent the Cambodian people as they lived through a time of brutal oppression, a regime amounting to enslavement. They are so devised that each of them, a blunt, squat dwarf, suggests a dehumanised state while somehow managing to be human, and humanly expressive.

The narrating voice is hypnotic. The story seems to be the film-maker’s own, telling us how memories of his childhood and adolescent years pursue him into his middle age, refusing to be silenced; his father and mother, and other mothers known to him, demand to be remembered. There were parents who chose to sink into death rather than accept the wretchedness being forced on them; one was accused by her nine-year-old son of stealing fruit, made a criminal for it, and taken off into the jungle to die. There was the labouring young woman, who died in great pain because she was too weak from hunger to give birth. There were those who ate rats and insects.

There are images of jungle leafage, corn, rice fields, green growth rippled by wind, interlude moments when the screen is filled by thrashing waves. Behind foreground movement, there is archival film – grainy, splintered black and white – showing lines of peasantry toiling in the fields, and glimpses of huge rallies in which Pol Pot and his cadres harangue their people. Under and through the traces of actuality, with images of endurance in the humble clay figures, there are long sounds from double bass and percussion, probing and searching. In the present, digging the earth in the old pits, they find the skulls, and hard labour goes on and on. The storyteller recalls that it’s supposed to be good to talk, and he lies down among his witnesses; there’s a large photograph of Freud above the couch. But while one person may learn to live with his memories, the music and the incoming sea tell us that the losses have been immeasurable.

Rithy Panh did some film training in France; clearly, he knows his Chris Marker and his Godard, masters of the film-essay; but his goals here are his own, and perhaps Cambodia’s.

IN THE DECADES since the publication of Robyn Davidson’s best-selling travel tale Tracks, there have been several proposals for film versions. Luckily for the story’s persistence in the general culture, the one we have now was directed by John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Any More, The Painted Veil), with a script, by Marion Nelson, sticking closely to the book. Back then – and I remember reading it in 1980 – it seemed like a great cure for the general straining after hyper-sensitive literariness, and we could welcome Davidson’s energetic refusal of the liberal cant of her day. Now, as perspectives shift, it becomes a vivid Australian document out of that time, and not least a book about people and animals.

The film doesn’t transmit Davidson’s fierce, incessant self-questioning; it does give us great performances, and in Mandy Walker’s splendid cinematography, stunning images of the desert in its ranging variety (although my Central Australian friends protest that the South Australian locations were untrue to the story’s map). Mia Wasikowska fully inhabits the nomad’s role, and makes understandable Davidson’s fierce drive to make her odyssey on her own. That being so, it is a feat of acting and direction that Adam Driver’s gentle Rick Smolan wins his own share of sympathy. The camels and the dog are superb performers; the older women, battlers of the tracks, are fine portraits by Felicity Steel and Carol Burns; and John Flaus does a highly enjoyable job as Sallay the camel man. While there’s a bit too much of Garth Stevenson’s music, the fragments of 1970s pop help place the tale in history; and when we reached the last sandhills and the sea, we could go with the orchestral upsurge – it was earned. The director is American, but this film is still an Australian object to value, a lyrical treatment of an important and quite un-lyrical book.

PAOLO SORRENTINO’s The Great Beauty is still running after many weeks, a tribute to its charm and perhaps to the sharpwitted presence of the unsinkable Toni Servillo as Jep Gambardella, the has-been novelist who rambles through Roman society, never able to repeat his single star performance, and wearied in the round of flirtation and seduction. His sixty-fifth birthday party, thickly populated by beautiful people, works as a wake-up call, but he doesn’t know how to go on from there. What should a Gambardella do with all his luck and privilege, what does it mean to inhabit the one per cent? What do you do with the knowledge that the great love of your long-lost youth has died? There’s a vanishing giraffe, a knowing female dwarf, a 104-year-old nun who crawls up a great stairway – she looks disconcertingly like Mother Teresa – a parade of prostitutes, wild young dancers, the sculptural glories of the city, and a lovely, dreaming tour of the river.

Repeatedly, commentators have seen this film as a revival of Fellini in the mode of La Dolce Vita, with Servillo doing a Mastroianni kind of alienation; this misreads both director and performer. Sorrentino has more fun with that world than Fellini ever did; while the main character may be jaded, the film in total is not. The writer may find his way back to writing; he may even need a road away from Rome. I know people who loved this whirling circus so much that they went back three times; but I think Sorrentino’s trip to America, This Must Be the Place, was really more interesting. As with Hannah Arendt, the foreign gaze sees otherwise, sometimes seeing more. •

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THE WORD has been going around that Asghar Farhadi’s The Past (Le Passé) is somehow a lesser work than this director’s superb A Separation, in circulation last year. Begging to differ, I’d say: take a second look. The Past, family-centred like the earlier film, is not inferior but different, at once more extensive and more complex. It could sound like trite melodrama: a beautiful woman is on the way from her second marriage to her third, with children and stepchildren caught in the middle. We have a sullen, alienated adolescent making mischief with emails, a vulnerable, perceptive five-year-old, an almost-successful suicide attempt, and a whole network of threads linking the wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo), her daughters, her ex-husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) and her lover Samir (Tahar Rahim), the latter’s small boy, an illegal Iranian immigrant and the fatherly neighbourhood cafe-owner, the benign watcher who knows them all.

The film is very much more than that list, and more than the weavings of the action. Farhadi’s skill, clarity and commitment are not so much to the tale as to all those we meet in its telling, and to the dynamics of their day-to-day lives. The centre shifts as we travel; the needs and desires of each emerge, become palpable, less in statements than in interchange, spoken and unspoken. The dialogue is not in Farsi now but in French; this is happening in a downmarket area of Paris, where the visible workplaces are a dry cleaners’, a pharmacy and Marie’s messy, cramped little house. The mess, the material details of weather, streets and windows, dishes and pans and bedding, crowd the narration, eloquently. Ahmad has come back from Teheran to be present, as required, when his divorce from Marie is finalised; he is immediately drawn into the roles of mediator in the struggle between Marie and her older daughter, and, comically, that of husband-handyman; he’s the one who can fix the blocked kitchen drainpipe.

He is also the Iranian immigrant who was drawn from Paris back to Teheran. Here in the West, he didn’t belong, but his return visit is catalytic. Samir is like him, but a little younger and simpler; he too is in the grip of an earlier story, and its force becomes apparent only at the end. In the shifting angles of vision, there are moments when the children own the story – Pauline Burlet’s Lucie, emotional heels dug in deep; Elyes Aguis as five-year-old Fouad, who knows so clearly what he doesn’t want, and where he doesn’t want to be; Jeanne Jestin’s Léa, who at seven knows that adults like her mother can be impossibly childish. Nothing is concluded, nothing wrapped up and tied off; that is the film's distinctive modernity. These lives will go on, all but one of them in a Paris where it seems to be raining forever.

This is a great film, from which a lot is asked of the audience, and a lot is given back.

IT’S NOT so often that a documentary fills two cinemas in one place and goes on filling them for weeks, and not so often that you get the film and its maker – some kind of phenomenon in himself – dividing audiences and setting off email debate across the globe. John Pilger is a stirrer. To put it less kindly, he is a preacher, a sermoniser, an evangelist. He’s dead sure he’s right, and he speaks as though no one else has been speaking, filming and writing on race relations in Australia, on Aboriginal suffering and resistance, through the past half-century; as though the many works of Langton and Pearson, Reynolds, Ryan, Cowlishaw weren’t abroad in the world. On film, there’s nothing in Pilger’s Utopia not already conveyed in the films of Warwick Thornton, Ivan Sen, Beck Cole, in Rabbit-Proof Fence and the documentary work of several decades. But with all that said, Utopia has cut through the silence and indifference of the present, setting off new arguments and new, defensive hostilities.

These were made plain in the barrage of online responses to Adam Goodes’s impassioned support for the film in Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald; go check. One respondent wrote that “films like this do irreparable harm. They promote victimhood and breed animosity.” Likewise, but more gently, the film-maker John Hughes – director of After Mabo, among much else – had one quiet, annihilating word for it: “counterproductive.” Another film maker I know, a documentarist who has fully paid his own dues in social exploration, walked out after half an hour, galled by Pilger’s incurably sanctimonious tone. Their view is shared by some Aboriginal viewers and thinkers; here he comes again, they say, old misery-guts himself.

Others, both black and white, are saying yes, but it doesn’t matter that it’s another Pilger sermon; he’s telling the truth, and it’s time to tell it again. In the years since the National Apology, they’re saying, Australia has gone back to sleep; this film is a necessary wakeup call. The critical question is whether it can really work like that. The film begins with a vox pop ramble on 26 January 2013; Pilger asks a few nonplussed tourists around Circular Quay why they imagine that for Aborigines this can be taken as a day of mourning. Their answers are so crass and ignorant that I wondered whether anything better-informed might have been cut; but I also wondered why Pilger didn’t seem to know that for many years now, Sydney Aborigines have marked the day not with a ceremony of mourning but with a terrific open-air concert, now called Yabun, which celebrates survival.

Director and crew go forth into central Australia, find the galvo-iron shanties and the women squatting on old blankets in the bush. A bloke who badly needs new teeth shows Pilger the wreck of an asbestos-riddled shack which, he says, is still home for seventeen people – the images here are like those in the opening sequence of Samson and Delilah. Under a succession of national governments of both stripes, some hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated for Aboriginal housing in remote Australia. Where has that money gone? Pilger turns it into a whole fusillade of questions and accusations fired at Warren Snowdon, the responsible minister at the time when filming began more than two years ago. Later, there’s another fusillade for Kevin Rudd, who seems to be getting off a bit more lightly, but that sequence is frustratingly cut short. We revisit the death in custody of young Eddie Murray, meet his parents, and move through a country graveyard: you can’t but be moved by these who, old and innocent, died still asking for justice. Pilger revisits the most horrific death in custody, that of “Mr Ward,” who was cooked to death in fifty-degree heat in a prison van; and in the film’s most pitiless interview, he skewers the former minister Margaret Quirk, on whose watch that unforgiveable murder took place.

Much of the film archive called into service will be familiar to many, perhaps over-familiar: the men in the chain-gang, the uniformed and regimented children, the stories like Nanna Fejo’s of forced separation from mothers, bleak, institutionalised adolescence, lifetimes hollowed by loss.

Some have emerged saying there was nothing here they didn’t know already, but the force of the polemic is a demand that we don’t slide into believing that it’s just the way it was; Pilger is telling us, with unabated ferocity, that it’s still the way it is. He honours the survivors and leaders, like Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Patricia Morton-Thomas, and not least Robert and Selina Eggington of Perth, who set up a healing room at Dumbartung after the suicide of their son.

At the film’s end Pilger reappears to remind us that until we properly acknowledge Aboriginal nationhood, we cannot claim our own. Like Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, he is calling for a treaty. On that – to say the least, after two centuries and more – they’re right.

OTHER parts of this month’s dispatch on cinema will appear soon. Meanwhile, I commend Margarethe von Trotta’s excellent Hannah Arendt, which will run in limited release from next week; not a biopic, but an essay in which the wonderful actor Barbara Sukowa plays the philosopher as she dealt with the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and gave offence to many in the radical way she theorised “the banality of evil.” •

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LARGE claims have been made for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, one London critic believing that here the director attains the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Take a breath, rewind; think back to this director’s Goodfellas (1990); there if anywhere the accolade had merit, with a film of balletic classicism, a great range of characters, and a drama in which at least one woman (Lorraine Bracco’s Karen) is assigned agency, memory, motive and presence. Such is not the case with the present work, which assaults the rise and rise of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) with undoubted Scorsesean energy. His two wives (Cristin Milioti’s Teresa, Margot Robbie’s Naomi) are little more than trophies. Even in the hands of DiCaprio, Belfort is no more than his appetites: for money, power, sex and cocaine. Working from the real-life Belfort’s memoir, Terence Winter’s script has sharp-edged moments; some of the best come when Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) delivers mentoring advice to the young Jordan: never forget that nobody, but nobody, knows where the stockmarket’s going to go, up, down or sideways; never forget that your business is to move the money into your own pocket, and the best interests of the investors you’re phoning and harassing come last.

There’s a lot of coke-sniffing, and as for sex, the simulated bonking is as uncommunicative as it generally is. When Belfort becomes abject, Naomi’s sexual taunting is very nasty stuff, pointlessly so. The cavorting in the trading room takes in games of humiliation, with a girl accepting $10,000 to have her head shaved in public, trained dwarves being thrown violently against targets, and a discussion among the young brokers about how far those victims can be regarded as human. Having learned quickly, DiCaprio’s Belfort rants and raves, trying to get his troops to go after the great whale, the American myth, so that each can become, as he says, “Captain fucking Ahab”; but while he knows his Melville, they don’t know what he’s talking about; he’s hauled them up from the bottom of the urban heap, but not into a domain where success has anything to do with reading books.

Hollywood’s attention to dramas of money and power goes back a very long way, at least to 1925 and Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. The threads go through the 1930s, the Depression and Frank Capra’s comedies; and along the way there is, inescapably, Citizen Kane. That great fable can be felt haunting the Wolf’s domains, with salutes and echoes like the dancing girls, the lion and the monkey. This whole exercise calls up, irresistibly, one of the great lines in Kane, as spoken slowly by Everett Sloane as Bernstein: “There’s no trick to making a lot of money – if all you want is to make a lot of money.” That being so, The Wolf of Wall Street could have been more interesting than it is. Sometimes – when the billion-dollar yacht is getting swamped in a Mediterranean ocean storm, in the screaming fight with Naomi over the kids, and when Belfort’s writhing around on the ground after an overdose – life threatens to break in on make-believe. In the storm sequence, I thought: we’re going to get the judgement of the gods; but no way – the gods are missing in action. The FBI finally invades the huge raucous trading room; what took them so long?

Kyle Chandler’s agent Patrick Denham, recurrently seen peering narrowly into Belfort’s affairs, is one of the film’s few really enjoyable performances; another comes from Joanna Lumley’s cameo as the rich English aunt. Jean Dujardin (The Artist), as a highly sophisticated Swiss banker, is sheer pleasure to watch; he lights the screen. Jonah Hill, as Belfort’s principal protégé and sidekick, gives the film’s funniest moments – and there are quite a lot of laughs, all at the Wolf’s expense.

The finale is a kind of reprise; many will be taken back to the end of Goodfellas, with Henry Hill, on witness protection, coming out to pick up the morning milk. In the context, the banality was devastating; all he knows, looking back to the days of criminal mayhem, is that that was life, and this is not. We find Belfort, much diminished, still trying to do what he knows to do, and this is neither Shakespearean nor tragedy; those terms require a sense of loss, of the might-have-been, and there’s not enough to Jordan Belfort for that. The work is closer to Fellini than to Shakespeare, Fellini in the mode of La Dolce Vita: an extravagant, sprawling charade, too far inside its own targets, barren and empty at the heart.

THE Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, a very good film indeed, can be taken as an odd kind of answer to The Wolf. This is a film about a man who owns nothing much except a good-but-not-great singing voice and a serviceable guitar, with fast-diminishing cred for couch-surfing and cash loans with old friends and lovers. His main disadvantage, however, is that he deals in folk just a bit early for the revival; this is 1961, and Bob Dylan’s star has still to rise – he is glimpsed, and briefly heard, at the end. Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) has lost his musical partner, Mike, to whom we catch conversational references as someone distinctly missing. It becomes clear well into the story, when Llewyn tells a stranger, John Goodman’s deeply inured jazzman Roland Turner, that Mike had jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Turner responds that nobody does that; if you’re serious, you jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Llewyn has a sister Joy (Jeanine Seralles) who, because she’s perfectly sensible, won’t give him much house-room, while their geriatric father sits speechless in an old folks’ home. He also has an ex to fight with, Jean; she, in the hands of Carey Mulligan, deals out unsparing punishment and judges him a longtime loser. Her new partner in music and life is Jim (Justin Timberlake), who writes, sings and provides the necessarily sane contrast to Llewyn’s apparently incurable self-absorption and gloom. Out in the Midwest, Llewyn tries out a song with the club-owner Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham); a terrific song, the ballad of Queen Jane, who died in giving birth. As with the other songs through the film, this one is played and sung, superbly, right through. Grossman sits impassively; then, after a second’s beat at the end, says quietly, “I don’t see any money in it.”

That exchange takes place in an empty clubhouse, a desolate, crowded perspective with empty chairs stacked upside down on the tables. All the film’s settings are eloquent, like the smokefilled club and the rubbish-littered laneway outside it where, for no obvious reason, Llewyn gets mercilessly beaten up at the film’s beginning and its end. In between, his struggling comings and goings are accompanied often by the story’s most engaging character, a marmalade tabby cat who keeps on turning up, escaping through half-open windows, along corridors, in trains and on streets. His owners, respectable academics called Mitch and Lillian, forgive Llewyn his occasional very bad behaviour; and it becomes oddly apparent that they need him much more than he, occasionally, needs their spare bed.

Llewyn’s sadness isn’t only to do with the loss of Mike, the impossibility of putting things together with Jean; it has to do also with his failure – once, perhaps twice – to be a father. From the first moments of the film, as he sends “Hang me, oh hang me” resounding into the shadowy reaches of the club, Isaac’s performance is orchestrated with the music and the story’s visibly dark, wintry elements – they say New York was freezing that winter. It also has to do with what surrounds and penetrates one particular life; it’s about America, its desperate individualism, the compulsive success–failure psychosis. It is also about America in the time named: the verge of the space age, the depth of the Cold War, the looming-up of Vietnam; the audience is asked to look back through the intervening decades. The fog in the cafe, the menace in the laneway, leave us with everything still to think about. The best films are like that; in the consciousness of the audience, they go on working.

All the more so when, as in this case, we can soon pick up the soundtrack; and all the more so again, as we remember Pete Seeger, who led the way from a long time back. With each of the Coens’ films, the literal story pulls its undertow of myth; the links between the songs and the journey are profound. Llewyn is on the road, driving into the dark and whirling snow; he’s trekking the icy streets; this is an odyssey, in which all arrivals are temporary, all meetings about paths that briefly cross, and the best company is the cat – whose name, as we don’t find out until near the end, is Ulysses.

Oscar Isaac is an actor of enormous range; some commentary on this film described him as “up and coming.” Not for some Australian audiences; we saw him five years ago in Robert Connolly’s remarkable, much-underrated Balibo, as the young José Ramos-Horta: a very complex performance, with a sense of much held in reserve. Robert Connolly had seen Isaac’s showreel, and travelled a long way to engage him. He said that Isaac “was wonderful to work with,” bringing to bear “a rigorous methodology and a fierce intellect” and quite prepared to travel to East Timor for the sake of a demanding role in a comparatively small film. But we didn’t know then that he could sing.

WITH apologies for the delay, I will soon discuss Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. Without apologies, I will also comment on Utopia, John Pilger’s most recent essay on his home country, currently in wide non-theatrical circulation. •

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THE silly season condemns thousands of us – parents, grandparents and offsiders – to long, long hours of Peter Jackson’s misconceived treatment of Tolkien’s Hobbit, to say nothing of the expenditure on popcorn and fizz. Tolerance was in order for The Lord of the Rings, which in book form was highly inflated to begin with, but The Hobbit deserved sharper focus, truth to the truth of its fiction. The kids get restless, need toilet breaks, and squabble over giant cartons of junk. Their elders take some pleasure in Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, but find Bilbo Baggins rather missing in action between dragon and dwarves in the vast landscapes. Then, looking round for grownup diversions in the cinema, they find limited satisfactions in realist melodrama; both The Railway Man and Philomena announce their sources in real events.

The Railway Man is likely to remain a key text on post-traumatic stress disorder. As Eric Lomax, Colin Firth (he who was born to play Darcy) superbly communicates a pathology of bound-up, reined-in pain and distress, and the irrational ways it can surge into daylight; the tale of true love surmounting its obstacles would be less interesting without Lomax’s outbreak of rage when his new wife, Nicole Kidman’s all-too-sedate and gentle Patti, rearranges the furniture. Behind all that is the burden of memories that can’t be dealt with, the Thai–Burma railway and the Japanese prison camp. The younger Lomax is very convincingly played by Jeremy Irvine, and Stellan Skarsgård gives a fine, gentle version of the companion, Finlay, who can see a cathartic way through psychosis: a meeting with the Japanese torturer (Hiroyuki Sanada), now a guide for tourists visiting wartime sites. The meeting happens, with the patient wife as witness; there is a ritual of apology and forgiveness.

Thus the film is an array of performance around a history, the history told in Lomax’s book, and like the book it censors and rewrites; Lomax’s long first marriage, his first wife and their daughters, have no part in it, despite their share in postwar suffering. So it wasn’t only wartime, but also its later penalties, that the Lomax of this version worked hard to bury; not only the pain suffered, but the pain inflicted as well. Behind and around the narrative a question lurks: taking up the story, why did the director, Jonathan Teplitzky, not question those choices? A larger question presses: when will the film industry cease to call on the second world war as an automatic guarantee of seriousness?

As a history film, Stephen Frears’s Philomena does somewhat better, despite its ramblings. Frears is a fine risk-taking storyteller, here as in The Queen and others. He’s no stylist – the relations of past and present are conveyed in glib and rather clumsy flashbacks; but Judi Dench is stunningly convincing as an elderly woman seeking the son she lost as a teenage mother of the 1950s; she is naive and worldly wise at once, devoutly loyal to the church and yet fully awake to its tyrannies, spouting Mills and Boon storylines to her travelling companion, and quite irritatingly prepared to forgive the unforgiveable. Her child was first institutionalised, then adopted by wealthy Americans. One of the twists in the appalling tale is that the Catholic orphanage actually sold the children of the girls who, in payment for shelter and atonement for their sins, slaved away in its laundries. Another twist comes with Philomena’s late discovery that her son, as an American adult – raised in a solid Republican family, prospering as an adviser in the Reagan administration – had gone back to Ireland in search of her; the Catholic authorities had kept this information from her and denied him any means of contact.

Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), the journalist who is pursuing her story for the popular media, becomes properly enraged by the church’s inveterate cruelty; at some professional cost, he makes Philomena’s purpose his own. He’s dealing with a hard-headed editor (Michelle Fairley) whose focus is determinedly on the sob-story elements. While Dench’s performance has been widely admired, seen as carrying the film, Steve Coogan deserves equal credit for his communication of scepticism and sympathy working together. Philomena is also a film about journalism, one in which the lone-wolf reporter is also an ethical human being. Sixsmith did write his book about Philomena Lee, and it’s not a very good one, being mostly given to a fictional account of the lost son’s career in Reagan’s America; but Dame Judi Dench’s foreword is worth having. She tells us how the real-life Philomena helped her build the part, and thus gives special evidence on how a great screen performance can develop.

American Hustle doesn’t lean on history (“some of this really happened”) but it has a lot of fun with elements of the 1970s, not least those seriously ugly clothes for blokes – you might remember the wide collars and flares. Looking over David O. Russell’s building career as a director, some found Silver Linings Playbook more enjoyable, but this one is more elegant and complex, with a tangling of pursuers and pursued that would regale John le Carré. Russell calls again on Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, and gives Robert de Niro less to do as the one really bad man in the balletic ensemble of con-men, con-women and agents of the law. At the centre of the dance Christian Bale, with a lot of extra weight and an unreliable hairpiece, plays Irving Rosenfeld, a grifter of essential goodwill, divided between the airhead seductress Rosalyn (Lawrence) and the stylish trickster Sydney (Amy Adams), a girl who wants to be just about anyone other than who she is. This isn’t farce; it’s high comedy, in a network of traditions where, obviously, you can see how Scorsese laid the ground in Goodfellas. Before Scorsese there was film noir, both American and French; long before all of them there was Restoration comedy, and then it’s back as far as you like to whenever storytellers first understood the endless tangled intimacies between vice and virtue, wives and mistresses, winners and losers, cops and crims.

IN THE continuing, scandalous absence of a properly organised cinémathèque, Sydney still manages its cinematic moments. Many of these are provided by the curatorial work of Robert Herbert at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where major exhibitions are supplemented by (free) film programs linked to the paintings; thus the current American exhibition has allowed viewings and re-viewings of John Ford’s late and wonderful The Searchers, Clint Eastwood’s high-classical Unforgiven, and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, from Edith Wharton’s novel. The last is one of Scorsese’s crowning glories; even those of us with built-in resistance to costume drama will gratefully see it again. Still to come in the series are, among others, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, and Ed Harris’s Pollock. •

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LAWRENCE Johnston’s feature documentary Fallout, seen in much-too-limited release, is a most curious shape-shifter. It is dominated by an impassioned anti-nuclear polemic; then, inside the wide historical field marked by the story of the atom bomb and the growth of nuclear armaments, we find an odd piece of film-cultural history, the making of Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959) from Nevil Shute’s novel; and linked to that, we follow a few tracks along the biography of Shute (1899–1960), aeronautical engineer and – almost in spite of himself – highly successful novelist, the Bryce Courtenay of his day. The film begins with a fragmentary quote from John F. Kennedy on the nuclear threat as a Damoclean sword overhanging humanity, and then revives crucial elements of public memory from 1945: the Manhattan Project, the day it was unleashed, the mushroom cloud over Nevada, the terrible glaring light; J. Robert Oppenheimer’s reflection on what he saw as mankind’s newly attained domination of nature. Helen Caldicott appears, reminding us incisively that against the scientists’ calculations, the wind from that first explosion carried malign radiation right across America; we get images of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the appalling information that the scientists, probing the vast sites of wreckage, sought human bodies not for aid or healing but strictly for research.

The Shute story is carried in archival film and still photographs – most typically showing the writer as aeroplane enthusiast and fast car driver – and by narration and commentary from two experts, Shute’s daughter Heather Mayfield, and the writer Gideon Haigh (whose essay “Shute the Messenger: How the End of the World Came to Melbourne” appeared in the Monthly for June 2007).

We’re told that at the outset, Shute regarded writing as a bit of “a pansy occupation,” but was drawn into it because his adventure stories began selling very well indeed. After settling with his family in Australia after the war, and buying pastoral acres in Gippsland, he lived the writer’s dream – four hours at the desk in the mornings, time outdoors as a gentleman farmer in the afternoons. Several books were filmed; Shute would sell the rights, let the work go, and never give the resulting movie another thought – until it came to Kramer and On the Beach. That one he really cared about, and we’re shown a fragment of an indignant letter to Kramer on the ways in which Shute saw the film as a betrayal. For one thing, it wasn’t his style to suggest that his story’s lovers actually went to bed. In the film’s version, sex is treated quite discreetly, but it’s there. What else would an audience expect, when the stars were Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner? The commentary reminds us that at this time Gardner had just broken up with Frank Sinatra, and thus locates the whole film in the world of stardom and make-believe, playing against the doomsday story of the bomb. Shute’s premise was that after World War Three and all-out destruction, Australia – the further end of the planet – would be the last place to succumb to radiation, and Melbourne the last city to be emptied of population. Lingering sufferers are issued with suicide pills. There’s an image of Bourke Street, emptied, with one stationary tram.

Johnston uses his witnesses brilliantly, Heather Mayfield remembering the adventurous Shute parents with pleasure and humour, and the stunning Karen Kramer, widow of Stanley, bringing old Hollywood glamour to the exercise. Gideon Haigh’s concern is to show how profoundly the nuclear threat took hold of the conservative storyteller, and why – after decades of regarding movie versions with absolute nonchalance – he cared so much about this one, so much angered by its departures from the novel that he refused to attend any of the premieres, which flared across the globe to saturation publicity not long before his death. What the film needed was a clearer framing in Shute’s own story, so that the Manhattan Project and its terrifying consequences can be seen again as that quite unpretentious writer saw them at the time; he wanted readers and viewers to imagine doomsday from here, and to act accordingly.

Film industry veterans, mostly older than Lawrence Johnston, will see some of their own political history in this film. Here we are, back then, with Australia as a location, Australian actors and film workers in smaller parts, audiences and public only too ignominiously grateful. Here was the full Hollywood caravan, Peck and Gardner and Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins all in top billing, and the wonderful John Meillon, Harp McGuire, Lola Brooks and Guy Doleman in credited bit parts, and Peter O’Shaughnessy and Graham Kennedy, no less, in the uncredited list. It all happened again the next year, with Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners, from the Jon Cleary novel; there Robert Mitchum, Deborah Kerr and Glynis Johns tried for Australian accents, Chips Rafferty had a decent stereotypical role, and an Australian, Lex Halliday, got to be second-unit director. Those who were properly angered by our cultural-colonial status were incited into a long campaign, and in time they won. In certain contexts, cultural nationalism was and is forgivable.

WARWICK Thornton’s compilation of ghost stories, The Darkside, has attracted very small audiences, and a good deal of hostile comment for the way it gives room to the Aboriginal religious domain. Some of that surprised me; do honest Western secularists and atheists need, at this point in history, to hold others’ mythologies in contempt? People are haunted; rewrite their hauntings as memory or trauma, as you will. Deborah Mailman sits on a verandah, retailing the evil apparently done to her family by a wandering ouija board; Marcia Langton is there in a background corner, out of focus but unmistakable, playing solitaire and casting stern, intolerant glances at Mailman as she speaks. The camera is dead still, the point of view holding steady as in almost every other sequence in the film. There is space to credit the characters, and space also to doubt their ways of understanding. A Thursday Island woman, who insists that she is a Christian, tells us how she ejected a wandering demon. An unseen man tells us how he experienced an eclipse of the sun; all we see in this one is a black circle on a white ground. Jack Charles – swigging beer as he goes, sitting at a bar in garish yellow light – recounts an episode on a haunted hill; Bryan Brown, as a white man cruising a billabong, tells of seeing a vivid young, female Aboriginal ghost who – just to complicate things further – was wearing a very clean, patterned contemporary dress. At the end a young woman (Shari Sebbens) goes through the story of an infant niece’s few precarious months of life, her death and its link to that of a departed grandmother. For the girl, the grandmother is an indisputable presence as the baby dies; with her, the young aunt makes bearable sense of what’s both senseless and unbearable.

As another white character, Claudia Karvan dreams and hallucinates her way into a spectacular Aboriginal fire dance; emerging, she says she feels greatly honoured to have been received into another way of being. In the most complex sequence, Romaine Moreton takes us into the depths of the National Film and Sound Archive to look at early twentieth-century anthropological film on Aborigines, viewed at the time as possible specimens of the mythic missing link; she recounts her shock, and the way her research path diverged to follow tracks she hadn’t foreseen. There is no intimation here of after-life or invisible dimensions; Morton’s ghosts are precisely history, filmed history. We don’t see her; she is the guiding voice.

Neither she nor the others invite identification or empathy. Thornton is using a quasi-Brechtian kind of modernism to take us to a blurred, fractured kind of boundary. Aboriginal thinking and feeling reach to its further side, which the storytellers apprehend if we do not; we follow them in their states of belief. Those states are not for sharing, but for watching, for learning something more about cultural difference and distance.

Writing of these two films, I am aware of advancing the claims of work you mightn’t be able to see, on the big screen at least; if this seems unfair in one way, it also matters to speak about just those films which haven’t been promoted on the circuits, but should be better known. The Darkside especially goes to meet a cinematically sophisticated audience; they ought to know it’s there.

OLIVIER Assayas’s After May (also named Something in the Air) has been found enjoyable for its wildly energetic transmission of youth on the rampage in post-’68 Paris, where the immediate inheritors of the legendary insurrection are seen jumping around, trying to revive its spirit, and especially to make guerilla war, through sloganeering and firebombs, on the police (de Gaulle, for some reason, isn’t mentioned). There is a large cast, mostly of the beautiful and young, in seventies gear that hasn’t really gone out of date, a seductive musical lineup, and intermittent news footage of real struggles in China and Laos; but it’s a long two hours, mainly because the director doesn’t seem to have any more idea than do his characters of where you can go from privileged, individualistic urban rebellion. I’ve been as romantic as any other fellow-travelling Australian veteran about May ’68; but nostalgia is out of order, if indeed it was ever in. What matters is to remember how the upsurge unblocked flows of energy in ways the exuberant students couldn’t have predicted; what the links were with the factory outbreaks and really important strikes; what kind of difference was made to France, politically and industrially. It was delivered a timely shock; and then Gaullism returned, resoundingly, and it matters now to remember too what that time meant elsewhere in Europe, in Prague and Budapest, and what kinds of repression the liberationist movements were calling down on their leaders’ heads. Blithely indifferent to all this, Assayas’s pretty exercise is a bad film in one important way: by default at least, it’s lying. •

Sylvia Lawson’s Demanding the Impossible: Essays on Resistance is published by Melbourne University Publishing.

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Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road is a Western which observes the conventions of its genre: conflict of law and lawlessness in a remote setting; visible wide landscapes; a central character, the man who rides into town with a mission, a man who holds experience and emotion in reserve; a climactic shoot-out; laconic dialogue all round. Seen from behind, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan has a John Wayne kind of walk; and this film, like many Westerns, looks outward across a realm of historical loss.

But it’s not about the domains of pioneers and frontiersmen, we’re not in Monument Valley, and the lawman isn’t on horseback. Horses do appear, but as the prized possessions of David Field’s wonderfully poisonous Sam Bailey, one of the story’s thriving villains. The detective drives an unpretentious sedan. The music is significantly unheroic: a few barely noticeable passages of long-held electronic lament in low and higher registers. Like the cinematography and editing, the music is Sen’s own; there is a sound-design credit, well deserved, to Lawrence Horne.

You notice the music only if, on a second viewing, you’re deliberately alert for it. In those sounds, however, the sadness is unequivocal. Detective Swan has returned after ten years to the small town of the film’s main action. He and the film are silent on his past in “the city,” a place which, like the town we’re in, goes unnamed. In his unfolding relations with his fellow-policemen and the locals, “the city” works as the absent source of his superior authority and skill, and also as the reason why he must be thwarted, choked-off whenever possible, taken down a peg.

At the place of the first murder, he asks the local sergeant (superbly performed by a wry Tony Barry) why the area hasn’t been roped off as a crime scene; the answer, a rebuff, is that this kind of thing just happens around here, no big deal. This victim, like the next one, is a black girl, and the question hangs: how different would the response have been if she’d been white? The town is mostly an Aboriginal community, and Jay Swan’s Aboriginality is at the psychological centre of the story. If there’s going to be any sort of an investigation, he’s an essential presence; at the same time, his status makes him a traitor among his own kind, since he’s going to subject them to the white man’s law. The word coconut isn’t used, but the accusation is actively in play.

Another charge hits him harder; he has failed to be a father to his daughter Crystal, who understandably doesn’t want to talk to him; nor do her friends, and Crystal’s mother Mary gives him no quarter when he tries for a conciliatory meeting. Sticking implacably to her routine, beer and the pokies, she tells him that she at least knows who she is. They all know more than they’ll tell him about the drug circuits, and about the girls who, it is said, “go with” the truckies for their supplies. Among the police, Hugo Weaving’s Johnno taunts him; Johnno, self-described as “a sad case,” is always one jump ahead with the dealers and informers; he is inveigling, mocking, complex, and a part of him would like Jay to get the case together. Weaving could be a great Hamlet, indeed an Iago.

As Crystal and Mary, young Tricia Whitton and Tasma Walton give performances of equal subtlety. Aaron Pedersen finely negotiates Swan’s double aspect, the wordless personal unease beneath the intent professionalism on the job. His character too is generic; the mean streets of the classic detective tale become these long, forking dusty roads and the grid of the town, seen in aerial shots as his car makes purposeful turns in pursuit – of just what, we’re kept unsure. As a Western, this is also a thriller; from the dark opening on the road, with the long track along the culvert underneath, the tension is extreme.

The uncertainties, the silences and broken-off exchanges, the crazy set-pieces in which Jack Thompson does dementia and Jack Charles does the scheming old know-all, all compose a world in which nothing’s going to be wrapped up. There will be the ominous passage with the roo-shooters, intimations of evil right out of Boorman’s Deliverance. There will be moments of lightness, even of promise, with the kids playing in the dust, and in the comedy of Swan’s strung-out negotiation with the boy who found a lost mobile phone. There will be the second murder, while the great rigs, the Titans of the outback world, go thundering along the highway; the speed and noise are relentless. Here, as in Beneath Clouds, the roaring juggernauts signal the forces against which the people of this town – any town – can do so little. As they loom up, drug dependence, petty trafficking and beer-soaked idleness make a terrible kind of sense; this account doesn’t even let in the struggling schoolteacher whose kind we saw last year in Sen’s Toomelah.

In that film, too, a small town has its place on the drug trails, a network criss-crossing outback Australia; Ivan Sen is giving us parts of a map we would rather not recognise as our own. It has been said that within every strong feature film there’s a documentary, the whole film’s grip on the world, and it’s true of Mystery Road. Some commentators have found it lacking for leaving those loose ends, the open gaps in Swan’s and the audience’s knowledge. If you pay close attention to the final quarter of an hour, there aren’t in fact so many gaps; but in any case, the kind of detective work that wraps the case up completely, with all the ends tied off, belongs with Agatha Christie and Poirot.

Tight plots can be part of cinema, but the richest and most interesting cinema makes doubt and silence visible; Ivan Sen has acknowledged the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky. (Those who want to see what he means should head for Brisbane immediately; all Tarkovsky’s films are playing in that city’s international film festival, until 24 November.)

The town in Mystery Road, not far from Massacre Creek and Slaughter Hill, belongs in Australian history, past and present. It inherits – and with the two murders indeed continues – what Henry Reynolds has recently named as “the forgotten war” between black and white, and the destruction of Aboriginal society over two centuries. The banal desolation of the town, with its untended yards, littered interiors and boredom, is wreckage from exactly that war. Some will say that this response calls into the film too much that lies outside it; but it’s exactly the inconclusiveness, the supposedly unanswered questions, that hold the story open on to history: consider those huge skies. This film is a small masterpiece. •

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TIM WINTON’s short stories, with their Chekhovian mini-dramas and overarching recreation of a particular geography – the southern coast of Western Australia – are almost shooting scripts in themselves; you look through the page at the film you feel this needs to be. The producer-director Robert Connolly acted on his responses, and the outcome is The Turning, an omnibus film event for seventeen stories and eighteen directors, including the animated prelude by Marieka Walsh, a brief and beautiful treatment of the lines (“Because I do not hope to turn again...”) from T.S. Eliot. Inevitably uneven, The Turning is still a much more fluent and unified work of cinema than we might have hoped. It also needs rescuing from the privileged mode of its release as a special event: few outlets, expensive tickets, no free list – us journos pay up, $25, $23 concession like everyone else. You get a glossy booklet, which describes the stories and gives messages from Connolly and Winton, but doesn’t include a full list of cast and credits.

Some of the best pieces, like “Big World,” directed by Warwick Thornton, draw voice-over narration from the story, and offer drama without synchronised dialogue; like that one, “Abbreviation” (Jub Clerc) and “Aquifer” (Robert Connolly) have everything to do with their locations – the long roads, the beaches, thick bush and still water. The separation of words from imagery works powerfully; it makes a space in which the working of memory and the atmospheres of place – essential strands in the book – become palpable. Other segments, using spoken and enacted drama, work more conventionally; these, particularly including the violent title story (directed by Claire McCarthy), are imaginable as good TV drama. Jonathan auf der Heide’s “Fog” does include dialogue, but using cinematic scale, it’s crucially about peril in the bush, and it’s properly terrifying.

Hearing of The Turning before seeing it, I couldn’t imagine how the anti-realism of the casting would work, with a lineup of different performers taking the main roles from one story to the next. In the outcome, it’s astonishingly right; the father is performed at different times by Hugo Weaving and Dean Daley-Jones, who could hardly be less alike. That’s one of several instances where a role is inhabited by black and white characters equally; in this mapping of a broken-up world, it works.

Gravity looks like a simple case, a two-hander set about 600 kilometres above the planet, with great views of the lights and seas of earth, an array of techno-wizardry inside the orbiting craft, and nothing at stake except the survival of the astronauts. Their shuttle has been damaged by debris from an exploded Russian satellite; 3D intensifies the resulting chaos, without overdoing it – you don’t feel bombarded by flying gadgets. Clashing sound breaks to sudden, total silence, while Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) tumble and weave around in black vacancy, with Kowalski admonishing Stone to take care of her oxygen supply. Their presences tantalise, faces partly seen through their helmets; the story requires people, and these two will only be partly known. Ed Harris provides the voice of mission control until that voice, and the astronauts’ link to each other are lost. From there, Stone has it on her own; it’s her first time in space, and she has to remember which of the illuminated buttons to push. It doesn’t help that her monologue becomes sentimental, even banal. She just might reach the International Space Station, get into a recovery capsule and make it back to splashdown. The suspense is terrific.

The Mexican director, Alfonso Cuarón, has dealt before with desolation. He made the bleak and rigorous Children of Men, from P.D. James’s dystopian novel about a coming time in which, suddenly, women can’t have children any more; there seems to be no human future – another way of being lost in space. With Gravity, argument is incited by the confident figure of Kowalski in his role as a mentor, teasing a bit flirtatiously, telling old anecdotes; and then Russia caused the trouble in the first place. George Clooney has become the reliable face of American liberalism; on plot-level, it looks like so much propaganda. But with the shell of the capsule, plot is drowned. Hands grope in wet sand. We’re a long way from the techno-mystical ending of Kubrick’s 2001; this isn’t about infinity. If it’s about anything other than Cuarón’s delight in the aesthetics made possible by a very big budget for CGI and lightshow, it’s surely about the end of the space race, and the needs of the planet we’re on.

AT ONE point in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett’s half-crazed Jasmine drops her handbag; her bits and pieces spill out, and she must interrupt herself, in a life already wildly out of control, to gather them up. This repeats a moment in one of Allen’s finest efforts, Husbands and Wives, and there it was Judy Davis scrabbling frantically around. This director of profoundly serious comedy is concerned, always, with the impossibility of keeping personal worlds under control within the greater chaos. Jasmine is one of the most exasperating characters he has created in recent times, but his and Blanchett’s skills work so that with all her self-delusion, she calls on pity and tolerance rather than dislike. Her line of descent from Blanche Dubois has been widely noticed, but Tennessee Williams’s ruling world was the family; here the framework has more to do with money, property, and the off-screen framework of corruption. This is a post-GFC fable, and a very good one. Every so often film reviewers will talk of Allen’s “return to form”; but however light his divertissements (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris?) I can’t see that he’s ever been away from it.

In a sense, the conceptual range of Sarah Polley’s excellent Stories We Tell is narrower; the story is bounded by the notion of family, and its strength is in the way “family” is actively called into question. This work is billed as documentary, and (yet once more) the question presses: where do film-fact and film-fiction begin and end? Seated at a huge recording console, Polley is interviewing her half-siblings, her long-supposed father Michael, and her actual biological father Harry Gulkin, among others. In the present of the film they play themselves most engagingly, with actors performing them in earlier stages of their lives; Rebecca Jenkins plays Sarah’s long-dead mother Diane, a beautiful and restless creature. The witnesses consider who it was that Diane really loved; each of the contenders emerges vividly, so we can take that question as futile. Documentary? The images of Diane mimic those of blurred and wavering home-movie footage, but it becomes clear that home movies are not what we’re looking at; the device is rather a way of signalling toward what’s really impossible, getting answers from the dead.

ONE of my fellow-reviewers considers Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing a masterpiece – he gave it five stars out of five; another colleague, for whose judgement I have much respect, said that wild horses wouldn’t drag her back to see it again. I have rather more sympathy for the latter; but this unwieldy piece of work, also documentary of a kind, should be considered in its contexts of production and reception. Taking up the history of Indonesia in the mid 1960s, and the massacre of at least a million communists, ethnic Chinese and others, Oppenheimer moved into a territory where anyone might fear to tread; he invited the surviving perpetrators to turn their memories into drama and engage in re-enactment, using any popular film genre they liked – musicals, Westerns, thrillers. Bringing this history back into daylight was clearly risky for the Indonesian crew; numerous roles in editing, production management, cinematography, sound and wardrobe departments are billed as Anonymous. We may gather that this chapter of recent history, a murderous rampage less than fifty years back, isn’t being taught in Indonesian schools.

Oppenheimer wanted, he has said, “to shed light on the darkest chapters of both the local and global human story, and to express the real costs of blindness, expedience, and an inability to control greed and the hunger for power in an increasingly unified world society. This is not a story about Indonesia. This is a story about us all.” One difficulty for that large, naive ambition is that the elaborate stylistic mélange produced by the group, with all their visible pleasure in unashamed replaying of their deeds, becomes conceptually incoherent. Almost every segment is too long by half, and it’s a long trudge to the partial unfolding in which the central character, Anwar Congo, begins to feel the stirrings of conscience.

What we haven’t received along the way is the crucial history itself; this story is one of which both Indonesians and Australians of present generations know virtually nothing. We’re watching here and now. We see a new prime minister, ours, addressing Indonesian powers with unqualified grovel. Any criticism of today’s tyrannies is dismissed as grandstanding. Some real documentary, made with attention to the archives and to the present in West Papua, would be a really good idea, and it would involve quite a bit of work for Anonymous. •

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It is often said that when a film pitched in an area of major conflict draws disapproval and argument from both sides, they must be getting something right. What, on the other hand, can we conclude when both sides actually approve the representation of the struggle in question? This seems to be the case with Dror Moreh’s superb feature documentary The Gatekeepers, which presents the retrospective thinking of six former directors of the Israeli intelligence organisation Shin Bet. Its functions have been (and still are?) like those of ASIS and ASIO, the CIA and FBI combined; counter-terrorism, counter-espionage. The evidence from the six eloquent talking heads should set John le Carré fans off into an ecstatic spin: take these and these tracks into problem-solving, and you become part of the problem in no time flat.

As documentary, the film deploys a conventional range of tactics: the interviews, which take up most of the film’s time; archival film from many sources; and air-surveillance footage, with sights sliding and wobbling as a vehicle moves on an urban grid far below the helicopter, and then a fix on a suburban house, with fragmentary dialogue on the intercom: take them out or not? How much collateral damage? Still shots from the archive, and eloquent moving footage from the Six-Day War: never has that much-referenced chapter of recent history seemed so real. Footage of the Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin moving round, deliberating and arguing, in the days before his assassination on 4 November 1995, letting us see that he wasn’t so saintly; and his busy presence in the huge, surging pro-peace rally in the moments before the event. Here, I’d have liked more on the mentality of the assassin, Yigal Amir, and the part played by religion in impelling his action (he’s still there, jailed for life).

The assassination is the film’s pivotal moment; before it, The Gatekeepers takes in snapshots of the history, including the famous hesitant handshake on the White House lawn, with Yasser Arafat as the more willing of the two, and Bill Clinton (surely intent on his own role in the drama) standing back and between. These registrations of history provide the field in which each of the Shin Bet leaders speaks reminiscence and evidence, beginning with the first in sequence, Avraham Shalom. He’d be quite endearingly elderly, in check shirt and braces, if it weren’t for his unabashed ownership of Shin Bet’s tactics. One of the film’s chapter headings notes that it’s a story of tactics without strategy, a point reinforced by Shalom’s and his successors’ accounts; in supporting the settlements on the West Bank (and failing to comment on the overwhelming oppression of Gaza) they have a lot of trouble reaching the conclusion that – as I once heard a Jewish Australian mildly concede – “yes, the Palestinians do have a case.”

The other, younger witnesses are somewhat more ready to recognise the claims of the dispossessed; and speaking out as they do from privileged positions in the Israeli political establishment, they offer hope against hope. Shalom sees the future as dark; if there’s any light it can be glimpsed in the manifest honesty of the last speaker in the sequence, Ami Ayalon. With his lean, troubled face, he emerges as the most searching of all these highly intelligent operatives; as a presence, he could have been cast by Ingmar Bergman. Moreh gives him the last devastating line: “We’ve won all the battles, but lost the war.”

That clear assessment is the framework for the film’s making, and its circulation. Across the Western world, the recognition of the rights of the Palestinians and the extent of their oppression has been gathering force through the past decade. Thus the film’s appearance assumes a degree of receptivity in the audience; but when it comes to the Australian audience, a question floats around, as it were in the air in the cinema; how many understand what’s happening here? How many see and feel how startling it is that a film thus allows Israel’s agents to answer for their own record? The audience can only do so if they know Middle Eastern history, at least in outline, for the time since 1948. There have been many films; we can retrieve, among others, Paradise Now (2006), Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008); then this year’s The Other Son and The Attack, seen at the film festivals. All these filmmakers get beyond the obvious terms of conflict (and there’s one book I know that lengthens the view invaluably, Ilan Pappe’s History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples). The struggles in this arena are everybody’s business, not least when we too belong to settler societies; and more than ever in this particular moment here, when one unmerciful government is followed by another which seeks to apply always colder and harder forms of examination, exclusion and surveillance to the strangers within the gates.

YOU may have experienced the delights of the much-awarded The Rocket at the film festivals; they are worth revisiting now that this modest local film is on the circuits, not least its evidence of anthropology transformed as cinema. Entirely suitable for children from nine or ten upwards, it carries political freight, legibly but lightly; when governments and rulers, of whatever political stripe, determine on major construction projects, and small sustainable villages are swept away, who really benefits? A boy of ten, Ahlo, contemplates a giant dam, from the base of its wall and then from the walkway above. He goes swimming, and finds drowned statuary, pieces of a lost culture. A second dam will be built; Ahlo, his family and their neighbours will be dragooned away, and chivvied from one campground to another in the mountains of northern Laos. The filming of the settings, the forests and pathways, the beautiful open timber structures which are not quite houses, has both conviction and poetry; these places are well and truly known, and we can therefore be taken a long way into them.

The producer and director team, Sylvia Wilczynski and Kim Mordaunt, were there earlier for their documentary Bomb Harvest (2006); some of that film’s political elements are registered here, when we see that these forests are still littered with lethal ordnance. The story of a lone boy’s high aspiration is a very old one, but here it is stronger because Ahlo’s ambition, and a good deal of his screen time, are shared with his sane and determined little girlfriend Kia; both are motherless, but they have attending angels in Ahlo’s father Toma and Uncle Purple, who is something like a magician. The two kids are wonderfully played by Sitthipon Disamoe and Loungnmal Kaisano – and for them, the film leaves a trail of questions: what next for them? will other films be made in Laos? They should be; these filmmakers have opened a trail into a landlocked, poverty-stricken country which could well be better known. If The Rocket is something of a fairy-tale, there’s documentary bedrock underneath it. •

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Sue Milliken moved into production-management and producers’ roles from early days in secretarial work and radio. Gifted with insight, imagination and great practicality, she became part of those projects which issued in The Odd Angry Shot, The Picture Show Man, Roadgames and – disastrously for her and others – Burke and Wills; that particular story yields its cautionary tales. Milliken blames an undisciplined, self-indulgent director for the way “a grand opportunity, a once in a lifetime chance to tell an episode in Australian history filled with more dramatic turns than a Dickens novel, [became] lost in a vision which somehow went awry much as the original expedition went awry.”

On those projects, working with a small company, Sue Milliken had the crucial but thankless role of completion guarantor, whose responsibility is to the investors, to get the film in on budget and preferably on time. In that role, she notes “you have to be sensitive to the creativity of others” but there’s no space to exercise your own; it’s all about “people management, logistics and pressure.” Later, as a full-fledged producer, she worked on three films with Bruce Beresford, The Fringe Dwellers, Black Robe and, outstandingly, Paradise Road. She looks back soberly on the first of those, a film that was always contentious, with white personnel directing an almost-all Aboriginal cast in a time when Aboriginal control had become an issue. From that point on, Milliken has been an advocate for Aboriginal film work; and her recollections here remind us that The Fringe Dwellers, long underrated, is one to see again.

So especially is Paradise Road; Milliken has a whole array of stories about that shoot, in Penang and North Queensland. While she doesn’t moralise, her accounts of the accidents, obstacles and moments of serendipity yield a clear philosophy, a deeply professional ethics. As it emerges from her memories and comments, the creative producer’s role is very clear; it involves intensive knowledge of script and concept, but minimal intervention; it means a proper focus on casting, and clearing the path for the director. She wants mutual respect among the various roles on a crew. She wants the necessities of the shoot, schedule and budget, to be fully respected by the biggest names to the smallest, and the needs of the film to be set above the clamourings of any performer’s ego.

On that score, the anecdote on Graham Kennedy’s demands on The Odd Angry Shot can be relished, with indulgence from the many who love him; and Glenn Close goes up in our esteem with the tale about her housing for Paradise Road. On the other hand, Milliken’s account of Dino de Laurentiis’s antics in his brief Australian adventures (Total Recall) is fine material for schadenfreude if you’ve suffered from that side of the global business. The book is valuable cultural history; and Milliken reminds us of how art and commerce can be entangled, recalling how when the Menzies government – never sympathetic to the cause of Australian film – was establishing the structures for local television, it was decreed that all TV advertising should be locally made. That factor, along with government-made documentary, kept the crafts and skills alive through the years when there was no real film industry. It was re-established, with the inception of the Australian Film Development Corporation, in 1971; there followed a remarkable upsurge of creativity, and Milliken’s main enthusiasm is for the many features of the seventies and early eighties. (There are numerous titles here on which I can’t agree with her, but that takes nothing from my pleasure in the book.)

Every film shoot is an adventure, often quite a lot of them. I remember how when Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night appeared, telling a rather gentle tale of drama behind the camera, a number of local film-makers commented that all that was kindergarten – where was the grown-up strife on the shoot, with mayhem and blood on the floor? I remember too how once the industry got going in the early seventies, those most centrally involved would tell you that with all the melodrama and struggle for money, all they ever wanted was to be out there, doing the jobs on set or location, getting it into the can. There’s the magnetism of it; and mainly by sticking to her own particular memories, never laying on more colour than she needs, Sue Milliken communicates the magnetism, and the magic.

The book has an index, but – regretfully quibbling – I do wish her publishers had required endnotes and a filmography for the writer herself, taking in the features, documentaries and miniseries on which she has worked; from the finely reserved way she tells her own story, there’s more than you might think. •

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THE small cinema is packed for Satellite Boy, and that in itself is of interest; these days the urban middle-class audience takes it for granted that its movie-going will include works centred on Aboriginality and remote Australia. In a few years, the screen has widened further. The impact of Samson and Delilah, with its vivid energy, was decisive; and if The Tracker, Ten Canoes, Beck Cole’s Here I Am, and Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds and Toomelah were all smaller successes, they also extended viewing imaginations, the sense of which country we’re in.

Satellite Boy was written and directed by Catriona McKenzie, who shares its authorship with Geoffrey Simpson. Simpson’s cinematography brilliantly delivers the grandeurs of the Kimberley; in its forest the film begins and ends. As the seats empty, fragmentary discussions break out immediately – the plot was a bit thin, the land outside Wyndham isn’t like that, surely those caves are hundreds of miles from where the kids were supposed to be, wasn’t it a bit disconnected, that satellite dish came from nowhere. Other voices come in, saying But – and those voices struggle: in immediate responses it’s hard to find words for the merits of a film like this, very simple on its surface – easily saleable, in fact, as a kids’ film – while towing too much history in its depths. A boy and his grandfather emerge in the landscape; they’ve been hunting, and the old man Jagamarra (David Gulpilil) is shouldering a large goanna. The boy, Pete (Cameron Wallaby), is taking in lessons about his connection to country, a connection which is under threat. There’s a mining company around, threatening to evict the small family from its living place, a stretch of land around a disused drive-in cinema. Its skeleton stands there, bizarre and useless, a sign of abandoned modern enterprise. Pete, aged around ten, will go off with his mate Kalmain (Joseph Pedley), find the mining company manager and tell him they’re not going to go. Kalmain is fleeing the prospect of detention in a boys’ home; they spar when he taunts Pete about his absent mother – she doesn’t want him, she’s never coming back. Pete insists that she is, and that they’re going to open a restaurant.

The substance of the film is their trek: as they travel, there are no realistic links between one geography and another. Drying mud flats; grasslands; open bush; a great gorge; a tract of parched desert, with an abandoned satellite dish – like the drive-in screen, a fragment of failed modernity. There’s the long road, where the boys lose their bikes and their shoes. There’s the running river – but Pete can’t swim; here, for once, it’s Kalmain who has the skill they need; there’s the giant earthmoving machinery and the hills of red dust, there’s the ancient artwork on the rocks. There’s the town, where Pete does find the errant mother, Lynelle (Rohanna Angus), who is not after all doing hospitality training; she thinks it would be nice to take Pete off to a suburban house in Perth. She buys him a white shirt; with that object, the symbolism resounds too heavily when he leaves her (“You have your dream, I have mine”) and, in a violent gesture, throws the shirt away. His dream has changed; the restaurant ambition dissolves; “country” requires something else. The authorities catch up with the rebel Kalmain, and they’ll take him away, but the boys swear that they’re “friends forever.”

A kids’ film? Yes, but also one for grown-ups; one caught in an expanding network of stories in which easy resolutions are refused. McKenzie’s narrative strategies are modernist, working in concentrated segments. Some knowledge is presupposed; the film banks on an audience that knows some history, and has grown respect for profound cultural difference. This Indigenous director has worked in television, with episodes of Redfern Now and The Circuit among her many credits; the shift to cinema is a move away from structured, realistic drama. There are distant echoes of Walkabout, filmed when David Gulpilil, brilliantly performing at its centre, was sixteen (even then, there were people chattering that he had to be one of the best actors on the planet); echoes too of the end of Luhrmann’s Australia, where he was the venerable authority figure King George, to whom the child returns at the end; and here his character is given a name echoing that of the mythic Kimberley warrior, Jandamarra. Pete, painted with white clay in the course of initiation, dances with his own.

This is not a fairytale; the child won’t defeat the mining company, and there are no sentimentalities here about young Aborigines taking the best from both worlds. It’s rather a fable; Gulpilil’s complex presence, and the images of the sky full of stars, signal that from the beginning. David Bridie’s music bridges the narrative gaps, tracing Pete’s wandering orbit; doing superbly what film music exists for, with light counterpoint following the trek, the score intensifying – human voices mingling and echoing with instruments – when the story darkens. It’s not the first time that Bridie’s music has served a story of marginalised people; it is of great importance, for example, in Charlie Hill-Smith’s Strange Birds in Paradise, one of very few documentary treatments of the West Papuan struggle (and one worth ferreting out). Now, in the knowledge that Satellite Boy was a long time in development, I still seek from Catriona McKenzie and her co-professionals a different but related story: one in which there’s a girl, along with a mother or grandmother, at the centre of the ethical quest.

ALEX GIBNEY’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is a seductively ingenious documentary, its tale of subversive revelations on post-2001 warfare rendered in a fast-moving, brilliantly edited compilation of graphics, archival film, news footage, text on screen and interview. We are entertained, but should not accept this account as an adequate history. To the crazy-brave WikiLeaks project, we owe that essential video fragment tagged “Collateral Murder,” showing the needless deaths of Reuters journalists Saeed Chmagh and Namird Noor-Eldeen in New Baghdad, and recording the horrifically matter-of-fact dialogue from the hovering Apache. The worldwide dissemination of those sounds and images discredited, forever, the mythology of the “free world” against the Middle Eastern rest. It also showed that with a degree of motivated cunning, our penetrable information systems are not titanic monsters; they can be made to serve the world as instruments. For that we are in permanent debt to the rebel hackers, Julian Assange and his initial cohort. The punitive authorities – Swedish, British, American – may finally entrap Assange. However narcissistic and vain he may now be, one hopes not; but even if they do, a whole flock of genies are out of their bottles, and transparency must now be demanded of governments as once, pre-WikiLeaks, it was not.

Gibney’s film does well to open to wider knowledge the dilemmas of the brave, gifted and pitiable Bradley Manning; but in its nastiness about Assange, it loses the main plot. Gibney couldn’t resist the individual drama. The young man’s evident vanity and paranoia, and his sexual adventures, are of absolutely no importance in comparison to the main issue of access to knowledge about what governments and national military forces are getting up to, and what they’re doing to populations in the process. The United States still operates malign fantasies about the usefulness to national security (whatever they think that is) of lethal operations with drones in situations where the question of who’s getting killed is left horribly unclear; the only point is to go on killing. That, so far as we can tell, is where we are now. WikiLeaks has broken up, but electronic detective work by its inheritors (OpenLeaks, Anonymous?) can be of great value in pushing the world a few centimetres forward.

SOME weeks ago I promised discussion of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, which – after saturation promotion and ubiquitous exposure, with all sorts of tie-ins and spinoffs, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s intense gaze demanding your attention at every bus stop – has now retreated to the corners of the suburbs. In this journal Brian McFarlane has written eloquently about the value of adaptations, that is of major novels for cinema, taking the films as developed responses to the originating books. That’s a more productive line of thought than the old conventional wisdom, the line that the film should be taken in its own terms, however much the novel in question may have been traduced in the process. Then there was the opposite response: thanks but no thanks, I don’t need my literary classics illustrated; with the novels that matter, the reader’s visual imagination shouldn’t be usurped.

All that said, with this one there’s no getting away from Scott Fitzgerald, since in every promotional interview the director came back to the book; he clearly wanted to do it some kind of justice. The question is whether he, the stellar cast and designer Catherine Martin have between them made a real piece of cinema, one that serves the book and sends us back to it.

Not really, I think. What they’ve made is a show, and it’s moment-by-moment enjoyable; not least for those wonderful clothes, which Catherine Martin has recreated from (for my money) the most elegant period of that century. This film will last for a time as a version of the book, but only because with all the swooping and swirling, glitter and excess, several characters are very intelligently created. DiCaprio gets Gatsby’s fantasies, his loneliness, and his eventual knowledge that he’s wrapped himself in illusions. Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway is the searching outsider, and the best thing in this version, taken as a story, is the way a real relationship is communicated between these two, a growth of understanding across the social gulf. Carey Mulligan makes Daisy something a bit more interesting than the rich and exquisite princess; Elizabeth Debicki gives a Jordan Baker with her own dry perspective on the dizzy parade, and Joel Edgerton makes the brutal, racist Tom Buchanan a plausible reason why Daisy, always hedging her bets, will cross the water to Gatsby – if only for a visit. It’s better in general than Jack Clayton’s heavy-handed 1974 version, which had Robert Redford in a surprisingly dull performance. There was just one thing that Clayton’s film got right, the role of Gatsby’s old father, Mr Gatz, very finely played by Roberts Blossom in the story’s aftermath.

That episode is ignored in Luhrmann’s version, which also fails to make sense of the neighbouring desolation, the industrial ash heaps. That was where Scott Fitzgerald took us to the edge of his dream of the jazz age, and pointed toward the nightmare outside the mansion’s gates. •

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It was a strange little film from the beginning; now, as I write, it is almost sixty years old. Once upon a time, as a newspaper cadet — picking up a free ticket which nobody else in the office wanted — I sat in the Shell company’s Sydney theatrette and watched, with complete astonishment, a story about an outback postman taking mail and supplies across the Central Australian desert: a production from the Shell Film Unit, but hardly a film you could describe as promotion for a brand of petrol.

Its visions of space and desert had a kind of radiance, and so I came out from that screening feeling a new kind of connection with Australia, or rather with a new idea of Australia, the country I was born in, and a country I didn’t know. Though I’d taken in some lively documentaries in student film society screenings — a few things like Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s wonderful Night Mail, and Fires Were Started, Humphrey Jennings’s great wartime poem on London under the blitz — I didn’t expect anything really engaging from Australian documentary; I thought it was all mere information (how they make paper, how they built bridges, the life-cycle of the koala).

The strangeness of the work I’d just seen had to do with an extraordinary orchestration of document with re-enactment, and with the storytelling offered by its characters. Through many viewings since, John Heyer’s The Back of Beyond keeps its emotional charge, even while it changes with history and distance, seeming to connect differently each time with the moment in which I’m watching. I don’t know how often I’ve seen it, through the decades of its life and mine; I’ve used it in both adult education and university classes, in courses with names like Film and Politics and Images of Australia.

I watch it again in January 2012 with an acutely critical companion, who first saw it as an immigrant schoolboy sometime in the early 1960s. Now he finds it astonishing, and wonders why anyone ever took its images, its version of things, for granted; and both of us stare into the film’s date, 1954. We say: but this was the last minute before television! and the date matters; a few years later, The Back of Beyond would have been impossible — or at least, a very different project. The documentary tradition which shaped both its visible perspectives and its spoken language (the overriding, voice-of-God commentary) was coming to its end.

The pre-television documentary genre matches visual with verbal poetry; takes care of pictorial values, considers composition in every shot, and looks at individuals and society with a careful, humane benevolence. When Eric Else wrote in 1968 that The Back of Beyond was probably “the last of the great romantic documentaries” he was looking back across the technological and cultural divide to the British poetic documentary movement of the 1930s and 40s, and such films as Coal Face, Night Mail, Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started, and perhaps further back to the early work of the American pioneer Robert Flaherty in Nanook of the North and Moana.

That tradition, which was absorbed and taken seriously by John Heyer, has often been called Griersonian, in salute to the lasting influence of the founding father whose purposeful social ethic and instructional style had shaped British documentary from the early 1930s. John Grierson, running film units within government bureaucracies, practised a definite, teacherly philosophy: the documentary was to be promoted and pursued not for its own sake, but for democracy and social betterment, and especially for the sake of international dialogue and understanding. Grierson’s sisters, Ruby and Marion Grierson, were also documentary film-makers, whose work should be better-known.

But founders and teachers are often left behind; in the most vividly enduring films from Grierson’s group, ethics and aesthetics come together, and the instructional intent drops away. Like those, The Back of Beyond is a crafted essay, a highly planned exploration. From the outset, it was intensively written; Heyer’s wife Janet, herself an artist, had a hand in the script; so did two eminent Australian poets, Douglas Stewart, then literary editor of the weekly Bulletin, and Roland Robinson.

While the film is centred on one person, there’s no interest in psychology or biography; we take our truck driver as we find him, as he is. The Griersonian director doesn’t probe. Nor does he (it was almost never she) trade in politics; the liberal values of civil society, with consensus round the twinned ideas of democracy and progress, are always to be assumed.

My viewing companion observed that John Heyer was interestingly apolitical, that he was aiming for a broad human picture, and that in consequence the Aboriginal presence in the film’s story was something calmly taken on: as the film sees Aboriginal people, they belong. They’re not seen as involving “social problems” (in the language of that day), nor as desolate and marginal; they share the world of the Track, and most of the time they’re sharing its work.

In that particular respect, the film upsets our stereotypes of the 1950s. It offers a special field of vision, and within its framework it is not racist; that very fact is part of its eloquence over the long term, its potency for us in the twenty-first century.

Decades on from that first viewing, screening The Back of Beyond with students, I faced a startling mix of responses. Some loved it, while others thought it was truly awful; heavy-handed, inflated like a sermon, out of date. The sense of elocutionary strain in the re-enactments doesn’t help. At those points the students laughed at the film’s awkwardness; and when the solitary snake winds across the moonlit sand they said hey, that one was let out of somebody’s hessian bag for sure. They laughed quite differently at the surreal comedy in the camp, when Tom dances with the headless model. I had to do some talking then about pre-televisual styles in documentary, about the inheritance from Grierson, about the love of intensely calculated “composition” in images and highflown spoken commentary — always in ABC/BBC male voices. In all that I had to learn something more myself about what it means to be watching film historically. It means not only watching in the knowledge that the lives we meet along the Birdsville Track are being lived in the early 1950s, but also that the film-maker’s ways of seeing belong in that time as well.

At the 1954 Venice film festival, The Back of Beyond won the Grand Prix Assoluto, the award for the best film across all categories; it was praised for “the perfect blending of words, sounds and images.” In the same year, as a documentary offered not as a support but as a feature, it was part of the first Sydney Film Festival, joining Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fête and René Clair’s Sous les Toits de Paris: all revelations, all extending consciousness of the range and possibilities of cinema. David Donaldson, the festival’s founding director, remembers:

We knew that he [Heyer] had been away a lot making it, indeed had given up chairing the festival committee. We had little idea what the film might be, certainly no thought of what it would become in release. Heyer kept being not quite ready with a print, week after week. I understand that at Supreme Sound he made thirty-three, or perhaps it was thirty-six, trial prints to get the best settings. The final, and marvellous, result came to hand with only days to spare.

There were more prizes, diplomas at festivals in Edinburgh, Capetown, Johannesburg and Trento, and a first prize at Montevideo in 1956. In Australia it was seen by some 750,000 people in its first two years, and by schoolchildren everywhere for at least a decade after that. The film scholar Brian Shoesmith — who also was an English immigrant then – remembers how he had not been in Australia very long as a child when

suddenly the school was closed down so we could all trot off to the local shire hall in Bunbury [WA] to see The Back of Beyond… So it was circulated as an exemplary text for children to see to understand something of this nation. It was a very strange experience for a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old English kid to be suddenly pulled out of school to partake of this national ritual.

On its first appearances, large claims were made; it was praised for unforced humour, for balancing poetry, imagination and realism. The philosopher Alan Stout, one of the most energetic proponents of Australian film, called it “a landmark in Australian documentary” and the Manchester Guardian went further: “one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made.” An unnamed reviewer in the BBC’s weekly, the Listener, wrote that documentary “has rarely been less self-conscious or more enthralling.” “Once more,” wrote Dilys Powell in the London Sunday Times, “the Shell film-makers revive faith in documentary.” She also wrote that the film showed “a landscape where man is always solitary, always on the defensive against Nature.” The Sydney Morning Herald’s anonymous reviewer wrote that the film “is bound to rank as an Australian masterpiece [while] the message… is by no means one of unrelieved horror and pessimism. There is much hopefulness in the unaffected courage and the humour it finds among the people who live along the Birdsville Track.”

That local comment might have been intended as reassurance for suburban audiences who might find the desert story confronting. Watching and reading now, the most interesting of those early comments is the Listener’s:

The final effect is a wholly convincing search for truth and much skill in presenting it… A vividly fascinating film which sheds a forbidding light on Australian realities and darkens one’s suspicions of the universe…

So The Back of Beyond established itself as a film always to be taken as a key moment in Australian film history in general, not only in the special register of documentary. It also remains alive in those spaces where film is understood as bearing on wider histories, as a story and a group of images that count in national self-understanding; and so it became a film that people love and remember. Much of what’s being delivered is — after all — an array of reassuringly ordinary, knowable human figures; and yet we’re still looking at the foreign country of the desert in mid-century, and at moments it seems immeasurably distant.

In the documentary canon, it retains its status, and it’s because of this film that John Heyer has been called “the father of Australian documentary.” He was born in Devonport, Tasmania, in 1916, to a certain level of privilege; his father was a doctor, and he was educated at Scotch College, one of Melbourne’s high-ranking private schools for boys. He seems to have been a cinephile from the outset; while serving an apprenticeship to a firm of scientific instrument-makers, he went to night school to learn film projection and sound-recording.

At eighteen, he worked briefly for Efftee Films, Frank Thring’s company, which went out of business in 1935; Heyer then joined Cinesound Productions, and in the following two years worked as a camera assistant and assistant sound-recordist on three features, Charles Chauvel’s ambitious but unsuccessful epic Heritage, Ken Hall’s Thoroughbred, and Edward G. Bowen’s White Death. In 1940 he was one of the four-member camera team for exteriors on Chauvel’s best and biggest enterprise, Forty Thousand Horsemen, with Frank Hurley, Bert Nicholas and Tasman Higgins (the principal cinematographer was George Heath). In 1942, he married Dorothy Greenhalgh, who was always known as Janet; they had two daughters and a son.

Then, in 1944, Harry Watt made him second-unit director on The Overlanders, and the experience was decisive. Heyer went with his cameraman 2500 kilometres along the Murranji track, from Western Australia across the Northern Territory and into Queensland; with the footage from that journey, he said, Harry Watt “was able to exploit one of the most cinematic of themes — Man against Nature,” and so “gave himself a sweep of the country that ranged from open grass plains to rugged valleys and that typified by its hard, bright light and endless horizon, by its slender ghost-gums and eroded hills, the shapes and forms that are the essential Australia.”

Thus in his early career Heyer worked with the small, beleaguered Australian industry’s most esteemed professionals; and film was his intellectual world as well. With his close friend, the great cinematographer Damien Parer, he read film criticism and theory in such journals as the American Experimental Cinema and the English Close-Up, Monthly Film Bulletin and the rigorous, wide-ranging Penguin Film Review. He was active in the then-thriving film society movement; he was president of the Sydney Film Society and also of the Australian Council of Film Societies, and he argued strongly for government involvement in national film production.

The film was launched nationally; Shell did much more than run screenings in Sydney. A new theatrette was opened in Brisbane, where The Back of Beyond ran for a year; town halls and school halls were hired; tickets were handed out at the company’s petrol stations everywhere. In consequence, a production which was non-theatrical, in the sense that it had no presence on the commercial cinema circuits, was received and reviewed all over the country. The Tumbarumba Times commented that after taking in the film’s account of the desert roads and tracks, the gibber plains and merciless heat, readers should understand that Tumbarumba “wasn’t such a bad place after all.”

Guardians, Chronicles, Expresses, Heralds and Advertisers from Broken Hill to Innisfail, from Echuca to Northam, from Cairns to Kalgoorlie, all noted and commented on the screenings of The Back of Beyond in their school halls and local cinemas; they still had them then. From the commentary then, in the film’s own day, it was clear that audiences reacted to the film’s double aspect: the dimension figured by the desert in both visual and verbal poetry, the dimension of loss; and on the other side the balancing reassurance, centred on Tom Kruse, the women at the radio, their wholeness and ordinariness.

Through them, the outback was almost domesticated for audiences whose schooling had taken in the exploring sagas from the nineteenth century, and with them ideas of the desert as terrifying; “the great Australian loneliness” in the words of the popular travel-writer Ernestine Hill. The “vanishing race” was marginal; the major figures were pioneers and explorers. Everyone knew how the naturalist-explorer Ludwig Leichhardt had been lost forever, gone to an unknown grave; everyone knew the more terrible history of Burke and Wills, so tantalisingly close to survival when they met their deaths. In 1957 Patrick White’s Voss — a stunning transformation of the Leichhardt mystery — intensified those stories, to the point where history and myth become entangled. In that framework, The Back of Beyond made the outback a more bearable presence; part of a known Australia for those who were never likely to go there, but who still wanted to carry a sense of their own country as one stretching away beyond the suburbs into difficulty and adventure.

Grounded in its local meanings, the film moved off into the world, which was also the world of the Cold War. Public discourse was pervaded by the notion of the Communist menace. Behind the sunny, expansive landscapes being offered to postwar Australian society, there was the backdrop of political threat, intensified by the nightmare spectre of atomic warfare, the imagery of roiling mushroom clouds. And those were quite close; not long after The Back of Beyond came into circulation, the atomic tests began in the South Australian desert at Maralinga and Emu Field, sites far southwest of the Track, but still not too far outside the film’s horizons.

For that reason, too, its images of good humour and resourcefulness, the small triumph of Tom’s arrival in Birdsville, made it even more welcome to its audiences in that time; a kind of normality was affirmed. •

This is an edited extract from The Back of Beyond, part of the Australian Screen Classics series, edited by Jane Mills and published by Currency Press.

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FILM festivals are many things, not least moments of agreeably chaotic social life in the queues at the George Street complex and the foyers of the State. (“Great to see you, we must catch up” – and they probably won’t, or not till next year.) Increasingly, spaces are made to think about cinema as well as taking it in; but in the always expanding audience, as the whole event gathers cachet, there are those who don’t allow for the intellectual dimension; they just want more and more of the movies. At this year’s excellent retrospective of British film noir in the art gallery’s theatre, the guest curator, Quentin Turnour of the National Film and Sound Archive, was busily telling us about Joseph Losey’s Time without Pity when someone in the second row heckled: cut it short, he said, let’s get on with the movie. Quentin battled on – and in that particular session, his offering of film history was arguably more important than the film. The best thing in that series was the superb new print of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) in which the young and beautiful James Mason plays a doomed Irish rebel on the run; and such excellent items as Val Guest’s Hell Is a City (1960) and Peter Yates’ Robbery (1967) showed us again that the undeservedly forgotten Stanley Baker was one who really understood the subtleties of screen performance. Robbery, for the record, takes off with one of the best car chases in memory.

The retrospective strands and moments are among the best things any festival can give us, particularly in a city without a real cinematheque. So we were given back Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which some would place above the much applauded Vertigo as the old master’s very best; and then, for one quite uproarious evening, the refreshed print of the best Australian film of 1981 and indeed of many other years, Wrong Side of the Road. Along the boundary between documentary and drama, this work of thirty-two years ago is stunningly new and alive. Two Aboriginal bands, Us Mob and No Fixed Address, take to the South Australian roads. They find welcome in extended-family houses, and aggressively racist exclusion in a pub they planned to play in; they do hard rock and reggae and song, and play for an Aboriginal dance where the cops assemble outside, determined to find trouble where in fact there may be none. One musician, a young man once adopted by white parents, uses the trip to try tracking down his birth mother. Another, pale-skinned, deals with advice from a cop to keep clear of those no-good black folks. A girlfriend waits outside a jail, and once inside, tries to deal with the suspicion and unease of the young man behind bars. All this was filmed, with actors playing out roles close to their own life stories, years before the royal commission into black deaths in custody, before Paul Keating’s landmark Redfern Park speech of 1992, before we began speaking about stolen generations.

On 14 June Wrong Side of the Road packed out one of the larger George Street cinemas, and the responses – especially from younger people who’d never heard of it – were wild, and some of them couldn’t believe it wasn’t made yesterday. The producer and director, Graeme Isaac and Ned Lander, with the survivors from their cast, met a new audience, along with quite a lot of us from the first time around. This film, said Ned Lander cheerfully, “is rough as bags.” True, and the roughness is its life. I remembered how in 1981 some of us, bloody-minded as we were, had a good time explaining to our students why we held it a better film than that year’s too much revered, tasteful, conformist Gallipoli.

Among the festival’s old hands, there are some who don’t care for the way the event has changed; they think it’s lost an element of idealism, and they believe too that the main program should be more clearly dominated by non-commercial films which won’t find outlets otherwise. That was the story once, when the festival was a struggling enterprise in tiny temporary offices, with a voluntary committee and paid employment for part of the year only; Sydney’s culturati held cinema in comparatively low regard, and for the distribution–exhibition trade the festival was suspect, likely to deplete their audiences. Over time and against predictions, it has become a solidly grounded institution with a board of directors, a small permanent staff and a whole (very congenial) army of advisers and volunteers; not-for-profit, depending on government and corporate sector partnerships, and an entirely co-operative relationship with film trade and industry. Potently too, the event has unquestionable glamour, with beautifully designed bunting all over town, and a widespread sense that it’s not to be missed, even if you make it to only a few of the principal offerings.

Many of the mainstream features, both in competition and out of it, were in effect previews of films likely to get commercial release before too long, and this has drawn the criticism that the festival is now – as I heard it said – “only part of the market.” But that can be contested; outside the headline list, the program extended into a great range of documentary, short films, animation; there was room for bizarre and disturbing items like The Act of Killing and The Search for Emak Bakia; there were all the music films, taking up every genre from rock, postpunk and bluegrass to the Warumpi Band in Steven McGregor’s Big Name No Blanket, and then, far across the musical universe, the splendid Becoming Traviata; there were talks, workshops and industry masterclasses. A special section (Screen Black) was given to the work of Indigenous film-makers, and the question arises: after the wide ground broken in recent years by the works of Warwick Thornton, Beck Cole and Ivan Sen, should these films be taken as parts of mainstream Australian production? Everyone should get a look at Dylan McDonald’s Buckskin, the first film I know of to take up the issue of threatened Aboriginal cultures and languages. Buckskin won the prize for documentary; the competition was stiff, with Big Name No Blanket in the contest, and Juliet Lamont’s truly lovely Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls, on the first girl band in a rapidly changing Burma (and thanks to the program writers for not calling it Myanmar.) Another in that lineup, the regaling WikiLeaks documentary We Steal Secrets, should come soon to your local cinema.

There were too many films I didn’t see, and a few choices I regretted; but my only real problem with the festival is the impossibility of being in more than one cinema at a time. Two documentaries in particular demand the widest circulation: Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45, and Andreas Moi Dalsgaard’s The Human Scale, on the way we use urban spaces and don’t, and the liberating ideas of Danish urban planner Jan Gehl. Dalsgaard and Gehl survey the globe, from the desperate worlds of Dhaka to Copenhagen and post-earthquake Christchurch, Times Square in New York, the laneways of Melbourne; and they’d love to fix Sydney. The general idea is to make cities into places for humans, and put all those cars somewhere else. If this excellent film returns, I’ll write more about it; and also, I hope, about Ken Loach’s historical essay on Britain’s postwar Labour government. Loach looks back to the distant day, nearly seventy years ago, when there were political leaders who thought the end of the war should necessarily mean the end of rockbottom poverty, the provision of healthcare, schooling and housing; they had some quaint outmoded ideas about social justice, and went to work accordingly on transforming Britain. This film is fierce, vivid, heartfelt, using archival film brilliantly to its purposes. I wasn’t the only one who said that every political and civic leader in this country should be chained in their seats and made to watch it, twice.•

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THERE was a sharp irony in the opening of the 2013 Sydney Film Festival on the evening of 5 June, a classy, glitzy, dressed-up event exhibiting conventional glamour, with red carpet entry, bright lights and roped-off walkway for important and well-recognised persons: the sort of first-night event you might expect for, say, The Great Gatsby. But then, as a first-night special, in Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road – a miraculous latter-day Western with a police-procedural twined into it – we got the kind of cinema that subverts everything red carpets are about.

This film is to reach the commercial circuit in mid August; I’ll try to do it some critical justice then. For the present, it is perhaps enough to say that Sen has taken off from the High Noon sort of Western, the isolation of the principled gunman who alone knows the enemy’s objectives and devices. At the same time, in the film’s cop-show aspect, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan inherits Bogart’s Marlowe in a Raymond Chandler plot. “Down these mean streets a man must go...” It’s something new to have the mean streets replaced by dusty back-country roads, a depressed small town of squalid, neglected houses, overgrown yards and endless flat horizons; and the man, “who is not himself mean,” is an Aboriginal Australian. Socially and atmospherically, he’s in a fictional place not too far from the Toomelah of Sen’s last feature film; fictional, and also intensely real.

To that place and that film, I hope to return. On from the opening, the festival burgeoned into 192 films playing on six, sometimes seven screens; the program is a tantalising network of clashes and overlaps – and that’s no criticism of the programmers, great jugglers that they are. From the score of films within one viewer’s limited compass, I comment here on those I and others enjoyed the most; many of these, happily, are booked with major distributors and are therefore likely to reach accessible outlets. One of those is Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, much anticipated after last year’s superb A Separation; another is Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda, which should have got a prize for its courage, both within its depicted story and outside the frame. It comes from Saudi Arabia, where the cinema is forbidden, and where women are denied places in the public world. Al Mansour, once a student of film in Sydney, told us how she had to direct action from inside a van, using a microphone, in places where she could not be seen at work on the street. Nor can girls or women be seen riding bicycles; therefore the ten-year-old Wadjda, already swathed in black, wants nothing more than her bike and the freedom to ride it. The best thing about this fluent, lively film is that it loses nothing in symbolic resonance for its close grip on a particular Middle Eastern story. Rebellious girls, Al Mansour believes, are among the major agents of history; and even there, in a regime her Western audiences find intolerably and incomprehensibly repressive, she and her cast communicate joy in the struggle. Wadjda is a treat; it was wildly popular with the festival audiences, and people came out predicting – wrongly – that it was set for the Sydney Film Prize.

The festival is always virtual travel, and not only to other physical geographies; we are also taken into realms of poverty and destitution well outside ordinary Australian knowledge. It’s somewhat as though these audiences were known to be privileged, known to be in need of excursions outside their comfort zones. But whatever virtue there is in looking at images of the shelterless and hungry, they won’t work to extend understanding unless the film has clarity, structure, organised energy, direction working with performance. I saw some rather bad examples; White Elephant wanders an Argentinian shanty-town, where two priests and a beautiful social worker try to do some good, but the utter conventionality of the love story reduces the significance of the milieu. That contrasted with the more vivid and effective probing of community in Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s marvellous Grigris. The French cinema goes – one might think compulsively – to Francophone north Africa, to the former colonies and so to places where the secular Western world meets other faiths and customs. Here, in French and Arabic, we follow a lithe but crippled Chadian dancer (Souleyman Démé) into night-club success, family troubles, dangerous entanglements; he is a stumbling innocent at large. If he’s to be rescued from disaster, it will be because of a community around him; in this case, it’s a vivid, raucous, defiant band of women. Again, and to its benefit, the French feature film inherits ethnography, in a line of descent going back to the great Jean Rouch.

Wadjda and Grigris were two of the twelve features in competition. The one Australian entry in that list was The Rocket, with which the producer Sylvia Wilczynski and director Kim Mordaunt go back to Laos, where they made the documentary Bomb Harvest in 2007. Their commitment to place and people shows; this too is both ethnography and drama, and like Wadjda centred on a child’s ambition, projected against the fates. Ahlo is a surviving twin, and therefore perceived as accursed; we’re necessarily on his side from the outset to the fine, elating finish. We’re also kept conscious also that the fictional story has strong connections with present tough Laotian realities. There was therefore huge applause when the producer announced from the platform that a fund is being set up for the continued education of the gifted young actors in the film. (Nerves were touched elsewhere as we thought of other films, set in other parts of the planet: what happens on a provincial location when the high intensity of the shoot dissipates, the temporary jobs cut out and the caravan rolls on?)

The competition list included one documentary, the bizarre and demanding The Act of Killing. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, with input from Danish, Norwegian and British sources and a long list of co-workers all named Anonymous, this is centred on Anwar Congo, an amazingly insouciant member of the Indonesian death squads of the mid 1960s. Around his unrepentant recollections there’s a messy, piled-up sequence of re-enactments, Hollywood mimicry with dancing girls lined up, confessions in dark spaces, blood and gore in the jungle – everything except the transmission of history which seemed to be promised. You don’t forget Anwar, but that story of which his deeds were part has been too much buried in the general knowledge of our region; with this ambitious but incoherent filmic conglomerate, it’s buried all over again.

This year’s great documentary was Nicolas Philibert’s La Maison de la Radio, in which the director ofEtre et Avoir (To Be and to Have, 2002) among others, follows the personnel and production-work of the major national broadcaster France Inter through almost twenty-four hours. That’s like tracking Fran Kelly, Eleanor Hall, Phillip Adams and the cohorts of workers around them from Radio National Breakfast to the closing words and notes of Late Night Live; I can only wonder whether the ABC would allow a film-maker this kind of access. In a masterly weaving of strands, Philibert lets the personalities of producers, conductors, presenters, musicians and minor performers develop, unforced, before us. The minor crises of any media day erupt, unfold, subside; news items claim headline status and lose it; energies gather and dissolve. There is a palpable, calm generosity on each side of the camera; the director and his team, with all those radio journalists and technicians, share the double task – getting on with their usual work and at the same time making this film.

Is documentary an adequate word for it? The director Sophie Fiennes and the irrepressible philosopher-comedian Slavoj Zizek together gave us a sequel to The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema (2006). The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology is every bit as enjoyable, with, as we might expect from Zizek, a good many stings in his free-swinging tail. The film is at once wildly funny and horrific; at its end (in which Zizek the cinephile brilliantly mocks the close of Titanic) the complacent Western left-liberal cinephile gets away with nothing; she will emerge from the cinema with intensified discomfort for the mendicant homeless with their cardboard-printed pleas, the beggars on their upturned milk-crates, and all the uncollected rubbish along the nasty end of George Street.

AT A PREVIEW before the festival, I watched the Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, which unfolds ponderously in a red-lit Bangkok club interior. This film, concerned with murder, revenge and mysterious kinds of gangland criminality, grinds and groans with pseudo-significance; Ryan Gosling fails to give the tale a believable centre, while Kristin Scott Thomas, garishly blonded, is supposed to embody maternal power and purpose. When she gets hers, not even the prosthetics of gore are credible. It’s a long ninety minutes, and I wouldn’t have written a word on this work if it weren’t that – somehow, absurdly and incomprehensibly – it was awarded the Sydney Film Prize. That decision discredits this important contest, the festival and the city. Well may they say that only God forgives; I for one will not.

More on the festival’s offerings soon, and on debates around The Great Gatsby – the movie, that is. Do read, or re-read the book; it’s wonderful. •

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THE French film Le fils de l'Autre, currently in circulation as The Other Son, has been dismissed in various critical quarters for reasons which are of some interest in themselves. Because of its reservedly hopeful view of Israel–Palestine relations, it’s been put down as a superficial, feel-good exercise; Slant magazine’s respected critic Chris Cabin wrote that while there might be hope for peace with younger generations, “another sentimental film made by a blatant outsider doesn’t make this hope any clearer or convincing.” He misreads; he also fails to listen to the film, in which dialogue is conducted in four languages, Arabic, Hebrew, English and French. Lorraine Lévy’s winning lightness of directorial touch isn’t sentimentality; the intractable problems are not shortchanged. If there’s a smear of soap at the end, a certain comedy rescues it. More importantly, she is not an outsider. It could be argued that when it comes to the Israel–Palestine conflict, nobody is; the tension is registered in one way or another in every Western community. In this film, however, France is recurrently present offscreen; with Israel and Palestine, it works as an operative third term. One of the two young men at the centre of the story has been studying in Paris; returning, he brings in the consciousness that there are wider worlds from which to think about his life as a Palestinian – or an Israeli – and he has to work out which of those he is.

The film is built from the ancient plot device of switched identities – go back to The Comedy of Errors and its sources in antiquity. Two male infants, born in Haifa on the same day in 1991, are evacuated during a Scud bombardment, then handed back to their supposed parents; the Jewish couple’s son is raised in a Palestinian family, the Palestinian child by Israelis. When they reach eighteen, and the supposedly Jewish son must prepare for military service, a blood test triggers investigation; the truth comes out, and all concerned must deal with it. Here we’re called on to suspend disbelief, as the fable solidifies into realism in real settings. In the tense, austere sequence in which a doctor brings the two couples together and offers the hospital’s inadequate, long-overdue apology, the film takes off from its moorings. The doctor sets out to explain in Hebrew, but the Palestinian couple won’t understand; he continues in English, which is the language generally used by both of the young men (“you’ve got my life – don’t mess it up”).

Thus two decent, ordinary families, cast by history as opponents in a seemingly deadlocked struggle, must engage with each other through their children. Nothing could be harder, since they are quite literally on opposite sides of the fence, the massive concrete wall that cuts through communities, separates workers from workplaces, friends from friends and kin. It is seen recurrently in the film, not to force political points but as a grimly inescapable part of the environment. The stages of the story are marked by passages through the checkpoints, where the guards treat Israelis and Palestinians rather differently. Israeli teenagers disport happily on a beach, where we can see the Tel Aviv Sheraton in the background; there, Joseph (Jules Sitruk), the young Palestinian who has grown up as a Jew, moves away from his contemporaries to struggle with the news. The depth of the problem, and the force of Jewish identity, emerge in his interview with the rabbi (Ezra Dagan). The Palestinians’ supposed son Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi) returns from study in Paris to discover that he is in fact Jewish.

The French–Israeli mother, Orith (Emmanuelle Devos), is seen running her medical practice, and, when she wants time to think, walking out on a pier to watch the waves: images of freedom and authority unavailable to her Palestinian counterpart, Leila (Areen Omari). They make friends, however, with an ease that’s impossible for their husbands, and despite the manifest inequality of households and living conditions; we’re given a strong sense of the ramshackle lanes and cramped quarters in the homes of the West Bank. The Palestinian father, Said Al Bezaaz (Khalifa Ntour), is an engineer who can’t get professional work inside the fence, and consequently works as a car mechanic. Sharing an uneasy social visit with Orith and Alon (Pascal Elbé), an Israeli military officer, Said breaks into rage; the word occupation is used. Later, the men move into a stop-start process toward co-existence – there’s little prospect of friendship. They’re seen sitting, in wordless discomfort, over coffee. That emotional gulf; the men’s struggle to deal with it; the anger of Leila and Said’s older son Bilal, who feels not only the loss of the brother he thought he had, but also a deep sense of betrayal – all these build an account in which none of the problems are softened or abbreviated.

The mistranslation in the title becomes pertinent: Le fils de l’Autre (with a purposeful capital A) means not “the other son” but “the son of the Other,” and that’s rather different. It sets the viewer in a strange double position, a kind of suspended ambiguity; she must try to look on that otherness from both sides, and also from within its force-field of questions. She is sitting in an audience in this Western country where pro-Palestinian expression, even when it comes from respected academics, can incite charges of anti-Semitism and quite vicious abuse; where Australians of Middle Eastern origin are subjected to taunting and violence; and where the first Australians themselves are – still – marginalised, impoverished and derided. The film invites a liberal, humane response, and some proper discomfort as well. We note, repeatedly, that there’s no way you could sit on that fence; it’s topped with coiled razor wire from end to end.

MIRA NAIR’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was written, in part, by Mohsin Hamid, whose novel was the film’s groundwork. In a cafe in Lahore, handsome young Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed), caught up in a high-profile kidnapping, sets out to tell his story to an American journalist, Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). The privileged son of an esteemed Pakistani poet, Changez found his way through Princeton to a financial world mentor (Kiefer Sutherland) and thus to a promising Wall Street career. Sutherland does a great job projecting the certainties, and the half-masked unease, of the masters of the universe (from his part of the story, go back and take another look at the documentary Inside Job; it’s around on DVD, and very much worth having). Then the twin towers fell, and as a Muslim abroad, Changez found himself harassed, arrested on no pretext but his appearance, strip-searched and humiliated; and his American girlfriend (Kate Hudson) disastrously underestimated the effects of anti-Islamic stereotyping. Here, a certain sexism threatens; she is guilty of American cultural blindness, while it’s the young man who takes the ethical journey. As he must; in the present of the film, Changez is back home, entangled in events, teaching and questing, a kind of prodigal son.

The central dynamic is in his complex interplay with Bobby in the cafe, where each has reason to doubt the other’s credentials; perhaps Changez really is, or could become, a terrorist; perhaps – a lot more likely – Bobby is really working for the CIA. The Lahore marketplace mills around them, vibrant, overcrowded, vivid; in stark contrast, the New York offices are glassy and cold. All a bit simplistic, too much of us-and-them, and it’s not surprising that American critics have attacked the film for heavy-handedness. With Islamic religious fundamentalism in play, Nair poses the notion that there’s another kind of fundamentalism, that of capitalist money markets; Changez has refused that one too. The suggestion of a conceptual symmetry doesn’t really work; the worlds are too far apart. But the film is still a noisy, commanding entertainment. Mira Nair films from the Indian diaspora, looking across and back from west to east; it’s a very powerful storytelling position.

IN THE Portuguese Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, story and allegory entangle in beautiful black and white. In the first section, “Paradise Lost,” aged gambling addict Aurora (Laura Soveral) is found in terminal illness and distress; her long-ago lover appears to return; her vanished daughter will not. Here, in present-day Lisbon, there are strong presences around her, a black African servant called Santa (Isabel Cardoso) and a concerned neighbour, Pilar; the latter, for whom Aurora’s plight supplies her need for a role, is made a particularly interesting character by Teresa Madruga.

“Paradise Lost” was shot in 35 mm; the second section, “Paradise” comes from further off, in 16 mm, and therefore has a different kind of beauty. There’s a crocodile watching in a river, and an African estate below a mountain named Tabu. The old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo) recalls the story of his adulterous love affair with the young Aurora (Ana Moreira); his own younger self (Carloto Cotta) evokes all the stories he belongs to, wearing pith helmet, old-time explorer’s gear and an Errol Flynn moustache. Music and natural sounds are heard, while dialogue is silent. Memory and history take over; we don’t get back to Lisbon. It’s as though the end of colonialism meant the end of Portugal too, and Portugal is condemned to remember.

Tabu has divided the critics, not all of whom are cinephiles. Some saw it as so much overwrought home movie; they fail to imagine how the lengthening past of cinema can be called back to serve new perspectives in the present. In a rather struggling interview (seen on ABC1’s At the Movies on 21 May) Gomes seemed to me to be explaining his aspiration for a cinema that reaches through the visible to the invisible, one that has to do with memory, both its vitality and its possible deceits. If that was the goal, he has reached it; this is cinematic poetry and fable, release from realism into reimagined reality. •

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THE main credits open onto an image of the planet, a curved section hanging in a dark sky, and for a second, the whole globe. Those shots will have delayed impact; at the end of the film, almost half an hour later, we’ll know why they’re there. Almost immediately then, we’re in the bush, in Kakadu, looking through the trees at a vast rock wall, while a woman’s voice – a friendly, humorous, matter-of-fact kind of voice – delivers a memory of time there. Nugget, says Meredith McKinney – meaning H.C. Coombs, widely known as Nugget – always wanted to show this place to her and to Judith Wright, his lover and Meredith’s mother. Judith is then quoted; she said, as Meredith remembers it, that the high wall with the ancient rock paintings was “far too sacred” a place for her; she would meet them at a bench along the path.

One of the many gifts of John Hughes’s short, lucid and wonderful film essay, Love and Fury (first seen last week in the ABC’s Artspace slot) is to give us back the wry and earthy Judith Wright, otherwise known as poet, conservationist and activist-visionary. Of her time driving round Central Australia in a red Mini Moke with Nugget, she could say “what fun!” and much later, toward the end of their days, could say again “it’s been fun!” Their best times, as Meredith remembers, were at Edge, her house near Braidwood; thinking, discussing, writing, always putting another log on the fire and drinking good red wine. Later, trying to cheer Nugget as he confronts the penalties of ageing, she thinks it’s not a bad idea to remain a little drunk. She is seen moving through the bush around “Edge,” furiously typing in her study in conscious, deliberate philosophic transit from the literary life to the political one, and telling the world in so many words that the wider battles – for Aboriginal rights and for the environment – are more important now than making poems. She says that the poems still visit, like butterflies fluttering around her; she turns them away.

For some in the literary world at that time, the 1980s, this was heresy; and that view – that art and politics are inherently at odds – is still lurking around. It is at the heart of cultural conservatism; and John Hughes’s film-making, from the 1970s to the present, confounds its proponents. His cinema is at once crowded, detailed, elegant and absolutely lucid; at the same time, it is shot through with political and historical understandings. In Love and Fury, the documentary sources are visible and palpable; Hughes finds the precise, dynamic angles for interviews so that information is always more than that, bringing close the minds, bodies and personalities that offer it. The principal witnesses to Wright and Coombs, with McKinney herself, are Fiona Capp, Nonie Sharp, Tim Rowse (Coombs’s biographer) and John Hawke, a scholar of Wright’s work. Each of these emerges as a character, present, fully believable, alive. Their evidence flows, along with the visible traces of the Coombs–Wright correspondence over twenty-five years, in written script and typescript.

“Documentary” is an inadequate term when the film’s logic involves the sight of a spider’s web, a blackbird on a bough, a flight of ducks over water in Kakadu, voices entering and receding with a popular love-song. The links are intuitive, subterranean – and submarine as well, when we come to Wright’s polemic for the Great Barrier Reef, The Coral Battleground. The argument, she said, must be felt as much as told; there’s a politics here all right, but no smear of moralism. Carried by her words in a late interview – “the world is such a bloody wonderful place” – the film brings us back to the planet. The impact from these eminent lovers’ shared values (and the profound ethical disconnect from those presently informing the polity) comes not as argument, but through a fusion of feeling, image, sound and vision. This is cinema.

AND SO, in an utterly different register, is the Chilean Pablo Larraín’s marvellously rambling essay No. This is the third of a trilogy centred on the Pinochet regime and its ending; it would be excellent to see the three in a row. Here Larraín’s strategy is to pull the audience back into the televisual milieu of the 1980s; the film is shot on video, a long-gone mode of video at that. The use of the old U-matic camera produces a shallow field of vision, constant blurring and blinding with shooting into the light, the main identities emerging bit by bit from general crowding and confusion. Much of what we see is archival television, and you’d say it hasn’t worn well if it were not that the film gains so much, as a treatment of history, from this immersion in the medium of its day. Some critics have been harsh on Larraín’s rough, lively stylistics; I think we get far more of that now-distant tumult through them than might have come out of a neatly costumed, tightly cast period-piece.

The fiction is sewn seamlessly into the archive. It gives us a young adman serving the No case in the 1988 referendum which, democratically, ended Pinochet’s cruelly anti-democratic rule; a win for Yes would have kept him in power for another eight years. René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal) persuades the No faction that peddling a list of the tyrant’s atrocities would be a losing strategy; the suffering population is now dangerously inured. He leaps smartly from soft-drink promotion (the fizz is called Free) into serious politics, while also juggling life as a single parent and ex-partner of a wild-haired radical named Veronica. He insists on lively, insouciant jingles, on song and dance, and slogans like “Happiness is on the way.” With the child in peril, he manages to dodge murderous pursuits by thugs on the other side. Some of this is history; the No vote won. In real life, however, there was more than one Saavedra; there were two leading activist admen in the No campaign, and a whole movement around them. Larraín concentrates the tensions; Saavedra’s boss at the agency, Guzmán (Alfredo Castro, in a subtle, compelling performance), is on Pinochet’s side. García Bernal, though rather too softly handsome, has a fine, steady way of staring through the mess and falsity around him.

There is high energy and elation in this version of the struggle; it summons up Brechtian tactics of defiant performance, resistant mockery in bad times. Perhaps there’s something here for those worthy, struggling militants who are now busy circulating the Institute of Public Affairs’s ominous program for the Coalition (scrap Medicare, trash public broadcasting, de-fund arts, sport and you-name-it): forget the gloom and doom, try well-scripted mockery with dancing in the streets, and keep it going relentlessly.

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Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone (De Rouille et d’Os) has been the French film of the season. It has been saluted especially for Marion Cotillard’s compelling performance as an amputee who must find her way back into life after losing both legs. The story’s initial catastrophe is the violent breaking up of a shoddily built platform at a marina near Antibes, where beautiful girls in diving suits conduct performances by trained killer whales; Cotillard’s Stéphanie, called Stéph, has been one of them. At the beginning the animals, computer-generated or not, are a great spectacle, and their splendour matters to the story; the orca that caused Stéphanie’s maiming wasn’t enraged, only playing himself. Later in the film, crippled, she stands outside the glass wall of the giant tank and reprises the training gestures, as a huge marine beast responds. It’s a very powerful moment of cinematic ballet, rescued from sentimentality by its brevity and silence.

The film’s account of Stéphanie’s rehabilitation – first with the stumps of her limbs, then with the kinds of artificial legs made familiar in images from the Paralympics – is cunningly and convincingly done; here digital devices yield rewards in drama. The harder psychological journey is followed in Cotillard’s extraordinary face, scrubbed clean of makeup (or apparently so); pale, clear-skinned, with bruised eyes, she looks nothing like her version of Edith Piaf. She creates the rocky, halting ride from deep depression and indifference to engagement in an uneasy relationship, and through that into another kind of life.

The double-centred narrative begins with Alain, called Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), and his five-year-old son Sam (Armand Verdure); they’re in a train, travelling away from problems, which are never quite unfolded, with Sam’s mother. The child is hungry; Ali scrounges food. It’s clear that his parenting skills are somewhat underdeveloped, and that he’s hardly grownup himself. His relationship with Stéphanie begins randomly in a dance hall; later, she rings him on impulse, and sets off the remarkable sequence in which she manages a swim in the sea. She also instigates sex, letting Ali know that she wants to make sure of her continued capabilities; he obliges – no problem, since his love-life has evidently been, up to now, a matter of one-night stands.

On that score, she calls him to order, insisting that if it’s going to go on happening for them she wants some respect; they’re not going to be, she says, “like animals.” The film’s way of following their paths to adulthood is cautious, discreet, glancing in other directions. Ali must also get real with his battling, down-to-earth sister Anna (Corinne Masiero), to whom he has come for shelter and a family place for Sam. Anna works as a cashier; blundering around, Ali inadvertently gets her sacked. While the film is in no way parading politics, we are made aware of precarious lives; no one in this milieu has a secure job, housing or professional status. Ali bounces between unsteady work as a security watchman and bare-knuckle public fighting, with gambling attached (there’s a long list of credits for the stunts). Stéphanie watches with rising fascination, and we fear for the child – who in time (getting the audience properly below the belt) becomes the centre of the story.

Melodrama? On plot level it is: the family surrounds, the family is broken, the family is restored or re-made. But in the hands of Audiard and his co-writer Thomas Bidegain, Rust and Bone cuts loose from its genre and takes flight. They are assisted by a wonderful cinematographer, Stéphane Fontaine; and while this is no travelogue on the Côte d’Azur, his treatment of sunlight and water – flashing in here and there, blurring edges, permeating the locale and the movement of people around it – lightens the whole experience. So does the music of Alexandre Desplat, and the songs that belong in the milieu. The credits include a special thanks to Bruce Springsteen.

The arguments around the Kathryn Bigelow–Mark Boal thriller Zero Dark Thirty – now finishing its run, but still to be found in the corners of the suburban circuits – have been arguably more interesting than the film itself, agreeably gripping as it is. Those arguments were alive at the outset; I emerged much as I might from a late Ford western or a 1940s film noir – directed, say, by Nicholas Ray, and starring Humphrey Bogart – with the sense that this exercise was a lot of fun, giving the pleasure excited by sheer expertise, precision and coherence, truth to the appropriate conventions. But then, questions raise their heads. This is about a manhunt; the man must be found; he has committed mass murder, he struck a great blow against the whole United States, and so the nation, the victims and their families must be avenged. One particular very smart CIA operative, Maya (Jessica Chastain), figures that if Osama’s couriers can be tracked, his hideout will be identified and the troop of Navy SEALS can go in. She is one small woman in a cohort of powerful men, and before all’s done she has to get them to believe her. Behind the fiction, there has evidently been a female CIA officer something like this.

The casting is precise, for Chastain communicates not only a quick, nervy intelligence, but also the fragility of a professional absolutely wrapped up in her role. In the opening episode, when a supposed Afghani spy is subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” and then forced into a suffocating box, she is impassive, and quite merciless in the face of the man’s pleas. Later, over a meal, the same man, Ammar (Reda Kateb), helps her with a clue in the quest. The implication is that the experience of torture induced him to yield a piece of vital information. That connection has been vigorously denied. In another sequence, three of Maya’s male colleagues watch Obama insisting, on TV, that “we don’t do torture.” Her face remains blank; the viewer can map on to it what she will.

Through the first half of the movie she has a friend, a colleague played by Jennifer Ehle; as they share a hotel dinner, there’s a passage of actual human communication. Hasn’t she anyone close, no boyfriend around? These CIA career girls are in their thirties. Maya has time to say no, there’s nobody, before a bomb goes off and the hotel dining room is destroyed. Not much later another bomb goes off at the base camp, and Maya’s friend is killed; from that point, her obsession is even more intense. We see her pursuing clues from old footage on her computer, looking at detainees and interrogators, hearing fragments of talk among the men. There’s a meeting around a long table, where she is patronised by the Agency’s director (James Gandolfini). She has to fight for the validity of imagination and intuition, as well as procedural work and research. When it is known that bin Laden is not in some remote mountain hideout, but in a large compound in Abbottabad, she wins. In an extraordinary twenty-five-minute sequence, filmed for maximal tension in the foggy green light allowed by night-vision goggles, the SEALS invade, pursue the quarry from room to room; we get glimpses of women and children, likely to be collateral victims; and then, for what it’s worth, America’s arch enemy meets his fate. We see very little of him, alive or dead. When the body bag is unzipped, Maya identifies the corpse with no more than a nod.

Then, small and alone, she’s on her way back to Washington, a solitary passenger in a huge USAF transport. Critics have deplored the final moment, in which tears roll down her face. She has been frozen in her role, to the point of something like autism; then there’s a last-minute breakthrough into quite helpless humanity. Take it as you will; I thought it could be read as a recognition of the ultimate uselessness of the entire massive, decade-long project.

What’s been surprising, in the array of public responses and in discussion at large, is the number of those who’ve read the whole film as somehow constituting pro-American propaganda. Among those, locally, have been the excellent journalists Antony Loewenstein and Waleed Aly; each has condemned Zero Dark Thirty as a defence of US strategies and tactics in the “war on terror.” In general I share the politics of both these commentators, but I can’t see their arguments here. This film was never propaganda; American interests and projects are not being promoted or defended – you could in fact argue the contrary. Its purposes are those of entertainment, and as such, on one viewing it works: a genre thriller, and like The Hurt Locker, from the same team, a tight weave of history and fiction. If it were entirely fiction, there’d be no argument. But in concocting it, we’re told that Mark Boal found his way into much classified information. Given that, I’d have felt kinder to the outcome had it been made with attention to that information – in short, as unvarnished documentary. From the very first moments – a dark screen, with sound evidently composed of actual voices coming out of the twin towers as they exploded and fell – history is identified and dated. Once named, history should be told and probed; analysis is called for. The worry is not about propaganda, but about a project in which the makers call on recent lived actuality, and then claim the privilege of fiction, trying to have it both ways. In for a penny, in for a pound. •

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THREE months ago, on 28 November, the ABC staged a modest kind of public launch in Sydney for a lengthy and wide-ranging online documentary, The Opera House Project, which has been produced to mark the coming fortieth anniversary of the building’s official opening on 20 October 1973. As the date approaches, this remarkable film may be accorded some fanfare; it deserves it. It works on several tracks, and each of those splits and branches at your will, offering some twenty-six hours of history and commentary.

Click, for example, on “Performance and Events,” chapter 3 on the main menu, and you will be roaming around recent theatre history, and a wider field of public memory. There’s nothing bland about this account, and it’s worth remarking since this, after all, is an account of one major cultural institution by others (it began with an approach to the ABC from the Opera House Trust). It could have been anodyne; and in this chapter you might have got a harmless montage of operatic and balletic moments, grand gestures, an anthology of official culture. But the section is anything but predictable; the choices of segments from Bell Shakespeare, and Joan Sutherland’s appearances and her own commentary, are alive and thrilling, not only because a passage from La Stupenda singing Norma is pretty exciting in itself, but because of the energy with which the archival elements are set in motion again.

Reflections from John Bell, John Gaden, Yvonne Kenny and Moffatt Oxenbould revive other cultural pleasures; Gaden, Jacki Weaver and Robyn Nevin deliver theatre memories for their critically important generation. James Waites and others argue the merits and defects of the Opera House’s Drama Theatre. The librettist Dennis Watkins, the dance critic Jill Sykes and the designer Brian Thomson – all highly expressive and knowledgeable witnesses – intensify the sense of the difference the Opera House has made to a city and a country. And here again is that sight on the morning of 18 March 2003 when shocked city crowds around the Quay saw the words NO WAR in huge scarlet letters at the top of the highest arch. Those two brave and romantic activists couldn’t have found a more powerful signpost anywhere.

Here we also get film of the opening of the building by the Queen, whose brief speech memorably included the line “I understand that its construction has not been completely without problems.” Nor, in fact, was her own participation. Ten years earlier, during her second visit to Australia as monarch, she and her husband had been given a tour of the building site; next day the building’s designer, Jørn Utzon, and his wife Lis were among their guests at lunch aboard the royal yacht Britannia. In 1973, the Queen must have known about Utzon’s forced departure from the major task of his life. We know it’s part of her job to stand apart from politics; but was she compelled to endorse that deeply political hostility which ensured that throughout the opening program the exiled architect’s name wasn’t mentioned once? At the royal lunch, the Utzons met Patrick White, who had said that the Opera House design made him glad to be alive in Australia at the time. Not one for public occasions in general, he turned up regularly at the events organised in later years to support Utzon and bring him back.

Chapters one and two revive and rebuild a story that has been inextricably part of Australia’s for close on fifty years. Those who know it, even in outline, and who are aware of the deep clash between inside and outside, have reflected that it’s a case of symbolism that is only too valid. On the outside, exhilaration and hope; within, timidity, compromise and decoration – dated kitsch, in fact – concealing honest, functioning structure. What should have been there, an assemblage of coloured plywood ceilings (Chinese red in the larger hall, blue and silver in the smaller one) designed by a great geometer to make sense of a near-impossible brief, is something tourists and audiences can’t see. This documentary opens the building to its fourth dimension, history; we’re given back the voices of the dead, and of some still living as they were when very much younger. Justice is done to the great population of workers – 10,000 of them, speaking over thirty languages – who got those great vaults, with their magical tiling, from the ground into the air.

Depending on your choice of path through the film, with its many tracks, you may well end with a sense of gratitude for the building as we have it; you may also be confirmed in a sense of loss, and a toughened appreciation of intense cultural–political conflict. The early segments capture the near-incredible idealism of the project at its inception, when the NSW Labor premier John Joseph Cahill, an unpretentious, conservative Catholic, managed to grasp the visionary plan of a gifted, inexperienced young architect and commit his state’s machinery to its realisation. There’s a factor in that part of the story that the film-makers didn’t know – the way the Labor Party’s women’s conference voted, en bloc, to support Cahill in his political struggle to vote the Opera House project into existence; their role was vital. That said, Cahill emerges as one of this history’s several heroes; at the beginning of the story we’ve already witnessed the martyrdom of another, the conductor–composer Eugene Goossens.

CAHILL died in October 1959, seven months after helping Utzon lay the foundation stone. The building of stage one, the massive podium, went ahead, while plans for stages two and three, the vaulted roofs and the interiors, were still years from completion. Many, including Ove Arup, chief of the engineering firm that was the principal contractor, believed that construction had begun much too early; but Cahill believed, with good reason, that if building wasn’t begun while he was still premier, it might not be started at all. The film tells how Cahill, on his deathbed, enjoined his minister for public works, Norman Ryan, to keep the Opera House alive; Ryan had said that he didn’t understand the project. But in ways not shown in the film, he became more sympathetic to it in the years that followed. Utzon won him over, and not just by charm. Through the early months of 1965 Ryan – a former electrical engineer, intent on the practicalities of things – pored over the architect’s documents until he became convinced of the soundness of his methods. He then promised Utzon that if Labor won the May 1965 state election he would release the funds needed for the building of those prototypes from which plans for the building’s interiors would be derived. Labor lost; so did the architect, and we all lost the building that could have been.

With Davis Hughes installed as the Liberal–Country Party minister for public works, Utzon hadn’t a chance. Hughes had wanted control of the project from its outset, and he didn’t understand that the Danish architect was working in a European, craft-centred tradition in which planning connected, cooperatively, with manufacturing and building. The project also depended on three-dimensional geometry and the mass production of elements, thus requiring only small teams working on design. The film shows a very clear example of the approach, when the engineering principal Jack Zunz – standing beside Utzon while they’re interviewed by the ABC in 1962 – picks up and displays a model showing the segmented concrete ribs which form the structure of the roofs, a specimen of economical, repetitive geometry. In a stiff, polite, early ABC TV sort of way, that film clip also shows architect and engineer working coherently and amicably together.

As for a time they did. Utzon’s way was holistic, collaborative and multi-disciplinary, using what organisation theorists describe as “strategies of concurrency”: the work of design moves step-by-step with that of the contractors, engineers and manufacturers. In the Australian professional context of the 1960s this was audacious, radically different from the dominant practice in which the architect works apart from others and above them in status, producing detailed working drawings with the help of larger teams, and handing them on for tendering. In the struggle with the government, Utzon got no support from the NSW chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, though he had dutifully joined it, been made a fellow, and had designed for the president a beautiful chain of office. Some gibed that it was made of thirty pieces of silver. Had the RAIA shown solidarity – for example, by determining that none of its members should agree to take over Utzon’s job – the government could have done nothing. Solidarity of that kind is not, however, in the traditions of the profession.

For that reason, there are those close to the story who hold the RAIA more culpable than the NSW government in Utzon’s forced departure. To make things worse, the architect had lost the support of the principal engineering contractors, Ove Arup and Partners; the initial strong rapport had broken down, and as this film shows clearly, they were talking past each other. Arup’s principals were concerned about their positions in the control of the project, to which Ove Arup himself – now ill and ageing – had committed major resources. Territorial issues were sharpened; as history, the film does an invaluable job in presenting the spoken viewpoint of Michael Lewis, Arup’s director of work on the site. Unlike Ove, unlike Jack Zunz, said Lewis, he couldn’t fall in love with Jørn – and that understates it; in the memories of Utzon’s team, he was implacably hostile, and entirely ready to support the government’s version. On the evidence yielded by the film, however, he was a reasonable, pragmatic engineer who got on with Utzon well enough for a time; they lunched together on several occasions, and Lewis, among others, tried to persuade the architect not to threaten resignation in his dealings with Davis Hughes.

The immediate cause of the crisis was money. On coming to office, Hughes had made the architect’s regular payments conditional on productivity as he understood it – and it should be remembered that funding for the Opera House did not come out of the government’s general funds, but from the proceeds of a dedicated lottery. For no good reason, Hughes kept Utzon strung out on an emergency pay claim in February 1966; the money, long delayed, was desperately needed for staff, for consultants and for Ralph Symonds’s plywood model-building, for which specific funding had been persistently delayed – first by Norman Ryan, then after the election by Hughes. Utzon set a mid-February deadline, and when by 28 February the minister hadn’t delivered, he sent a letter which was meant to work as an ultimatum. Utzon’s staff urged him to seek legal advice; he refused to do so, and his wording was unstrategic: “you have forced me to leave the job… I have therefore today given my staff notice of dismissal.” Hughes took the letter as a resignation, and called in the press immediately. There were frantic attempts at damage control, but although Utzon – always charming and cheerful with the press – refused to take the matter as concluded, Hughes and the government had all the ammunition they wanted.

The government installed its own consortium of architects: Hall, Todd and Littlemore, or HTL. Like other members of the profession in Sydney, those three had no idea how far the planning by Utzon and his team had gone. While questions of cost and efficiency had been raised constantly against Utzon, HTL was allowed all the time and money it wanted for research, planning and consultation for the interiors that were built. The film is merciful to Peter Hall, who did not accept the position of design architect until he was sure that Utzon was going; but Utzon’s supporters, within and outside the profession, continued to see him as a traitor, and he carried that burden for the rest of his life. In this film, his position is lucidly analysed by Anne Watson of the Powerhouse Museum (whose extensive work on the history appears in the splendid collection of essays she edited for the Powerhouse, Building a Masterpiece).

The film makes much of the shock to HTL’s principals when, in taking over, they found that there was no legacy of usable working drawings. They had expected to pick up where Utzon and his team had left off, radically underestimating the difference between his way of working and the dominant practices in which they had been trained. Their dismay is recalled in the film; what isn’t told is that Hall pleaded to Utzon’s associate, Bill Wheatland, to “get the man back,” and that he told the minister that the job couldn’t be done without the principal architect. Hughes’s response was to call Peter Hall to order and send him off on a tour of the world’s opera houses. On that trip, it’s unlikely that he saw many auditoria built to accommodate both concerts and opera. In general, it doesn’t happen; but that was the difficult requirement laid on Utzon and his team in the original, badly developed brief for the Opera House.

It wasn’t until after Utzon’s departure that the ABC – always destined to be the building’s principal user – advised the government that the major hall should be organised for concerts only, with the minor hall set up for opera, and live theatre confined to the smaller spaces in the podium. But through all the years after he won the competition, Utzon’s central purpose had been to achieve a concert hall fit for variable acoustics. This was expressed in the stepped plywood interiors he and his team planned for the major hall, and most importantly in the unit of moveable stage machinery to be installed in the vault of the highest arch, thus making fully functional sense of that spectacular element. By 1966 the machinery, providing for variable kinds of performance, had been built and set in place; with the change of architectural leadership and the abandonment of the dual-purpose hall, it had to go. I heard that the scrap-metal merchant who was contracted to remove and demolish it found himself gripped by a great sadness, knowing that he was dismembering part of an absolutely remarkable project. That machinery wasn’t all that went to waste; so did years of design, research and experiment on the far cutting edges of architecture, engineering and acoustics.

But as the spoken evidence in the film shows clearly, Utzon’s partners in the enormous task didn’t know what he was doing from one point to the next, and he didn’t make it easy for them. For those concerned with the entanglements of politics and culture, the most important part of The Opera House Project will be the second set of tracks, “Engineering and Construction.” Here’s the blood on the floor. There were utterly different ways of thinking at work; look at the sections where Ove Arup and Michael Lewis deliver, each at length, the engineers’ absolutely reasonable viewpoints. In Arup’s case, the breakdown of communication with the architect was a matter of tragic personal loss; he had believed that in Utzon he had found the ideal architect-collaborator, and there was something of a father–son affinity.

Then look at the long passage from Peter Luck’s 1973 interview with Utzon; this particular retrieval is perhaps the present film’s most important gift to us. The conversation was filmed for the ABC on a rocky island off the coast of Sweden, a place where the architect and his family took holidays. Utzon had insisted on the location; Peter Luck was clearly amazed by the man’s intense concern that such a conversation should take place in a setting of natural beauty, and one remote from everyday working life. Sitting on a rock above a pebbled beach, gently windblown, Utzon gives his own explanation of the fatal rift, and his commentary on the outcome, in which the building’s interiors have nothing to do with the outside and no harmony with it. He sees massive waste; he claims that the final cost of the building could have been some $30 million less than it was. As the interview closes, he wonders a little sadly why he hasn’t been offered another commission in Australia, a country he enjoyed living in and, he says, a wonderful country for architecture.

He hasn’t a bad word to say about anyone; but when he met Peter Luck, he had evidently lost sight of his own intractability in Sydney, and the way he had cut off communication with all but a few; he refused to have a phone in the studio to which he retreated at Palm Beach for most of the working week. People say there’s always a gulf between architectural and engineering mentalities, but it isn’t clear that in this case it should have been unbridgeable. The nastier elements can’t be ignored; as Joseph Skrzynski, a former chair of the Opera House Trust, bears eloquent witness, Davis Hughes carried a deep, irrational malice towards the architect. Skrzynski’s evidence is reinforced by the unpleasant few minutes of “Davis Hughes in his own words.” Such enmity bears consideration, and it wasn’t the old story of the artist versus the state. The conflict was within the state, which had backed the architect in the first place; it was about control, and the way Utzon, the foreigner, couldn’t help giving offence. In his ways of working, he assumed a kind of freedom which no politician of Davis Hughes’s stripe could stand for. He’d call the team away from the drafting tables to look at the shape of a cloud; what could the bean-counters do with a man like that?

IN THE months following his departure, serious attempts were made to get him back. There was the rally and march; committees were formed; there were difficult, conflicted meetings of the RAIA; there were telegrams to the government from the biggest names in architecture across the world – the film displays them: Félix Candela, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn and Walter Gropius among others. In mid February 1967 the theatre academic Philip Parsons, with the young critic Francis Evers, filled the Australian’s broadsheet pages over three issues with a series of long articles explaining the architect’s methods and exposing the extent of cross-cultural misunderstanding. Three months later the intrepid bookseller and publisher Colonel Alec Sheppard – never one to back away from an honourable fight – published a pamphlet by the town planner Elias Duek-Cohen, with contributions by Donald Horne. Utzon and the Sydney Opera House: A Statement in the Public Interest made the facts and issues very clear indeed, with a lineup of ironic cartoons by George Molnar. The best-known of those appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, and is reproduced in the film. It is captioned with the rhyme “As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.” Meanwhile in Denmark, Utzon carried on, intrepidly working on the building’s interiors, naively certain that before long they’d have to call him back.

On 19 February 1968, 1500 people turned out for the last major protest in Sydney Town Hall. The speakers included Norman Ryan, who never ceased to repent that he’d held out on Utzon’s funding for just too long; but what held the audience riveted was a taped message from the architect, affirming his ongoing command of the remaining design problems, and his desire to return, offering complete good will (“I stretch forth my hand to you, Mr Davis Hughes…”). No one who was there forgets it. Premier Askin, or Hughes, issued an annihilating statement in response: “The government knows of nothing relating to the completion of the Sydney Opera House that requires Mr Utzon’s attention.”

Their voices have died on the wind. Thirty-three years later the NSW premier Bob Carr, to his enduring credit, initiated moves towards the architect’s eventual return and re-engagement – not that he might come back physically, but with his son Jan he was contracted in 1999 to draw up a set of principles for the conservation of the building, to design the exterior colonnade along the western side of the podium, and to design also the broad, seaward-facing multipurpose room above the opera theatre. This splendid space (which I’ve experienced as a participant in public discussion) is the only internal area in the whole complex which Utzon actually designed, along with the stunning tapestry along its inner wall. The passage called “The Return,” which concludes this main chapter of The Opera House Project, is peculiarly moving. It unfolds a strange kind of happy ending for the architect, a late reconciliation for the last decade of his life, which ended in November 2008. He was ninety, and he’d outlived the whole pack of them.

THE Opera House Project is an enormous feat of research and teamwork. Sam Doust was the principal writer and director, and co-producer with Gabrielle Shaw. Tim Bosanquet wrote and directed “Performance and Events.” Lucy Bell’s way of delivering the narration is at once dispassionate and empathetic; there are moments when the run of the voice, over dense, flowing imagery and information, makes me think of certain works by the French film-maker Chris Marker. Music – piano works both gentle and profound from Satie, Schubert, Chopin and others – underlies and connects the elements in the chapter I have looked at here; it sets them down in time.

Utzon said once, “I like to be very modern. I like to live on the edge of the possible.” When you see the building from the middle distance – say on a ferry, or from the outer harbour looking west – you look at such an edge. On a headland, I heard a visitor say, “But no one could have built that.” Against all the odds, they did. •

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EMERGING from such current political thrillers as Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, people credit them with toughness; here and again are the machinations of the CIA; here is the destructive power of those who, supposedly, are working against the evil in the world, and we their allies had better take it on. In Amour, Michael Haneke delivers something tougher than all of that, and it’s as much in the point of view being exercised as in what we see. Almost everything happens in a tranquil, civilised Parisian interior; by the end of the film you could almost draw a floor plan of Georges and Anne’s book-lined apartment, with its baby-grand piano, armchairs, polished floors and paintings.

These two, now in their eighties, are retired teachers of music. We get the end in the beginning, when firemen break open the flat to find an old woman’s body among wilting flowers; then we discover the couple in the middle of the audience at a concert. A former student is playing that night; later, when he comes to visit, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) has been disabled by a stroke, and she can play no longer. She begs Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) not to commit her to a hospital, and he therefore becomes her carer; as she deteriorates mentally and physically, the burden becomes unbearable. Their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) visits, and tries to talk to her completely uncomprehending mother about her concerns with real estate and property values; that sequence is grotesque. So is Georges’s argument with a rather nasty part-time nurse. He must deal not only with Anne’s physical dependence and many attendant indignities, but also with her degeneration into animal incoherence, her total loss of self. One thing I liked a lot: Haneke’s refusal to sentimentalise Anne’s music, to use it as consolation. Georges is allowed a memory of her playing Schubert, along with another kind of memory in which she’s moving round the kitchen, doing the washing-up.

There’s no compensation, no final gleam of recognition, gratitude or love, though perhaps her last utterances “rage against the dying of the light.” But this too is a thriller, a very dark one; the enemy in pursuit is simply time. We’re made to feel its relentlessness by Haneke’s steady pacing of the story, by the way it’s held in the calm, ultra-civilised setting, and the way the two principals steer their courses; everything depends on the way they hold together characters for whom everything’s falling apart. The story’s grip is very tight; I’ve seldom sat in such a tense, unmoving audience. Questions trail away at the end, as they do in all Haneke’s films; think of the deeply enigmatic Caché, and The White Ribbon. He leaves you with a lot to think about afterwards, one mark of what really counts as cinema.

IT HAS been suggested that Lincoln and Django Unchained should be seen one after the other, as contrasting perspectives on the historical facts of slavery; I’d recommend against it. For the second, Quentin Tarantino has his usual fun with history and its grand parades; tongues are well back in cheeks, everything’s in heavy quotes, and the plot is not the story. This bizarre, highly literate concoction is wildly enjoyable, thanks to the concentration of narrative and to several precisely geared performances: those of Christoph Waltz (he was there in Inglourious Basterds) as the bounty-hunting Dr King Schultz, and Jamie Foxx as the freed slave Django who becomes his partner (“How do you like the bounty hunting business?” “Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?”) There are also Leonardo Di Caprio’s merciless plantation-owner; Samuel L. Jackson, nearly unrecognisable in prosthetic overweight, as his retainer; and Kerry Washington as Django’s dignified bride – stolen, enslaved, freed and recovered as the tale unwinds. There’s mayhem before the end, and some viewers recoil from the spurting blood. But it isn’t blood; Tarantino is a master-conjurer, and this is another box of tricks, with the wholly appropriate moral falling out at the end.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, on the other hand, is a serious telling of history, grounded by its writer Tony Kushner in the revived researches of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. The time covered is early 1865, the last few months of Abraham Lincoln’s life. At this time in the Civil War, the southern Confederacy is suing for peace – and well they might; we catch images of devastating mass murder on the battlefields. But it’s mostly a film of dark brown interiors; within them, Daniel Day-Lewis’s sober, wry, burdened president won’t agree to end the war unless and until the House of Representatives votes in his thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, the law abolishing slavery.

It is, as widely reported, a great performance: complex, mobile, wry, calling up its inheritance – particularly from Henry Fonda in John Ford’s superb Young Mr Lincoln (1939); again Lincoln is repeatedly seen from the back in silhouette, moving out from everyday life into history. Day-Lewis gives us Lincoln’s storytelling in a weary, rather reedy voice, and his slow, stooped ways of moving round – Quixote-like, he’s always too tall for his horse – communicate the private burdens; one son has died young, another (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is insisting on his right to enlist. Sally Field does an anxious, matronly and overwrought Mary Todd Lincoln, who wants that enlistment forbidden; the resulting marital screaming match is at the centre of the film. Very powerfully, she reminds Abe of what’s at stake in the exercise of power, though he never looks likely to forget it. Taking in the anxieties of the appealing youngest son (Chase Edmunds), visible up to the moment of Lincoln’s death, this is one version in which public and private are shown as thickly entangled.

The man’s earthiness, and his grasp of realpolitik are major elements in the story; if, as it’s said, he was “the purest man in America” he also knew what kinds of dealing and trading had to be done to win. Among his aides, David Strathairn’s William Seward and Tommy Lee Jones’s limping, cranky Thaddeus Stevens are rewards in themselves. The political struggle inside the House is great choreography, and marvellous verbal battle as well; the franchise for African Americans is foreshadowed as a threat, and what next – “votes for women!”? That outlandish possibility incites collective gasps.

There’s a lot of resonant, even high-flown dialogue, with the autodidact Lincoln irresistibly calling on Shakespeare whenever the fit takes him. There are elements of properly Spielbergian pageantry, stars and stripes aloft with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” all blowing in the wind after the vote has been won. But Lincoln is not material for author-centred analyses, unless you get some fun out of recalling the heroics from Indiana Jones and the rest; what matters here is the cinematic transmission of history. For a critical audience, the end shouldn’t invite triumphalism. The win for the thirteenth amendment was one step on a very long trek; there was another century of struggle toward civil rights, and almost another half-century before they got the first black president. Perhaps with Lincoln the American audience is being invited to claim a moment of national honour, consciously inheriting that story in a time of confusion; they’ve now spent a full decade fighting two completely useless wars.

Some of that confusion is registered in the film called Zero Dark Thirty. I shall comment soon on that film and others.

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LIKE its spreading, leafy campus and the leisured young people who move around it, Liberal Arts is very pretty and seductive; it’s also, for a change, a whole, fully devised comedy about people who read books and think about them. Not as funny as Woody Allen’s brilliantly literate early works, but it’s part of their family; with the anxieties around literary taste in the college dorm here, we’re not too far from the world of Annie Hall. Sharply written and directed by Josh Radnor, who also plays the central character, it’s a multi-stranded exercise which – I can’t help thinking somewhat cynically – is more interesting than it actually meant to be.

The ground of that thought is a degree of narrative imbalance. The plotline follows Radnor’s thirty-five-year-old student counsellor Jesse through his literary enthusiasms and his uncertain love life; he’s his own questing hero, seeming to invite liking and sympathy to the point where you have to refuse them. But there are more engaging stories off to the side, and more interesting performances than Radnor’s own; those come especially from Allison Janney and Richard Jenkins. The latter plays Peter, who once taught Jesse, and who is now retiring; gripped by worry about his farewell event, he phones Jesse in New York, asking him to attend. Reservations about Jesse set in right then, when he tells his former teacher that in order to get there he’ll have to “shift a few things around.” Nonetheless he makes it back to his alma mater, and meets an eager-beaver nineteen-year-old student called Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), who’s hooked on vampire novels, and wildly determined to pitch into grown-up romance. She wears micro-shorts and floaty Indian shirts.

Selfish as he is, Jesse has enough sense of reality to deflect her aim, and offer further reading instead. Outside academia, he finds one friend who’s eloquently crazy, and another whose life is in disastrous breakdown; reality crashes in. Along the way, he consents to be seduced by Janney’s Professor Fairfield, who once taught him the romantic poets. The script here is great – after sex, she kicks him out abruptly, with instructions to “put some armour round that gooey little heart of yours.” But I jibbed at the sexism in the concept: must a middle-aged, single female scholar necessarily be lonely and embittered? Allison Janney, a marvellous actor, had more fun in The West Wing.

Meanwhile, we don’t find out just what happens to Peter, who has pleaded with the dean of the faculty to let him reverse his retirement, and then been definitively refused. Jenkins’s performance is superb, but Josh Radnor doesn’t know as much about humiliation as (say) Woody – or Ingmar Bergman. This was, potentially, the best part of the story; just what does it mean for a teacher to cease teaching? More, if the teacher has been held in the bonds of the institution for almost forty years, what can it mean to him, or her, when the bonds unravel? Identity is at stake. (Curiously, this Ohio university doesn’t seem to include adjunct and honorary positions, in which the retiree can stay connected – and loaded, if not indeed overloaded, with PhD supervisions.) The film raises the question: what does it mean to live as an intellectual, a reader, thinker, communicator, inside the institution or out?

ARGO arrives in a straight line of descent from All the President’s Men, The Manchurian Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, Syriana and the TV series Homeland. Again, the CIA is jarred by the finer instincts of the honourable individual, one of its own. This version is undeniably fun, a highly enjoyable thriller that has something – but not everything – to do with the recent history it names, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–82. Ben Affleck directed, from a witty, incisive script by Chris Terrio; Affleck also takes the Robert Redford/George Clooney role (and for this one, Clooney is named among the production credits). Affleck’s Tony Mendez is the operative who must get six imperilled American diplomats out of the country when the Iranian revolution breaks out. Enormous crowds beat on the gates of the US embassy; the six find shelter with the Canadians. Everything hangs in the balance while Mendez devises the scheme whereby the six become a movie-making team at work on a sci-fi thriller – something like the Planet of the Apes. Lester Siegel, the (fictional) Hollywood uber-producer who decides to back the charade, is wonderfully played by Alan Arkin; there’s a real script, the six get new names and biographies and passports. Because this is a white-knuckle thriller, they’re very nearly found out when ultra-skilful Iranian sleuths (played as a rather likeable lot) reassemble shredded photographs from the abandoned embassy. That process, shot fast at very close quarters, typifies the film’s style; it has great speed and rhythm, and never lets up.

Thus history is shortchanged; in Argo’s version of the events in question, the crucial part played in that rescue by the Canadian embassy is somewhat underrated. The remarkable spectacle is in the way the CIA is (again) the entangling monster the hero has to fight, while he remains on its payroll, depends on it for professional identity, and relies on the network of operatives: a maze of interacting paranoias. The mythic power is shaken when you consider recent darker versions: Fair Game, in which Naomi Watts’s Valerie Plame insists (as in reality she did) on sticking to the Agency’s rules at the expense of human fates; and J. Edgar, a study in the grey banality of evil.

AFTER that there was a malfunction in the cinematic antennae, and I went to see Susanne Bier’s Love Is All You Need. Some I know really enjoyed it; one reviewer called it a fine specimen of “bitter-sweet romantic comedy”; another found it “candid” on the after-effects of treatment for breast cancer. It’s frothy, nicely costumed, and very slow-moving. Despite the English title, John Lennon is nowhere around, while “That’s Amore” plays on the soundtrack. The Swedish title translates as The Bald Hairdresser, a title that promised something stronger than we get. On the score of candour, the central character Ida (Trine Dyrholm), supposedly undergoing chemotherapy after surgery, appears improbably young, healthy and unscathed. She and Philip (Pierce Brosnan) play the parents of an intending bride and groom. They’re fine performers, and like many of the cast, the Mediterranean scenery is beautiful; but this pretty, expensive package isn’t really about anything, least of all breast cancer.

OVER four weekends in November and early December, the fourth Palestinian Film Festival came and went in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Unlike other annual programs coming from national communities – like, for example, those linked to the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute – this event has no institutional support, depending entirely on donations and voluntary work; it’s always worth having for the sake of extending understanding as well as cinematic pleasures. I couldn’t be there, but with the help of friends in the organising group, Cultural Media, was able to view some of the program online.

Man Without a Cell Phone (director, Sameh Zoabi), the most popular item on the program, is a markedly good-humoured comedy around a family olive grove inside Israeli territory. A mobile phone tower has been set near the olive trees and put under guard by the authorities, thus infuriating the elderly Palestinian whose land it has been. His son is lively and insouciant; he doesn’t care much about the olive grove, nor about the politics involved, but he does want to pass a test in Hebrew, get into university, and talk to his girlfriend on a mobile. Power is undercut with mockery, and there’s a visible way ahead.

Like that one, Fix Me deserves much wider exposure; it’s something rare and special, an intellectual and political exercise which also works as entertainment. Set in Ramallah, it centres on the film’s director, Raed Andoni – or on a part convincingly played by him – as he tries to deal with a seemingly incurable headache; medication doesn’t help. In long dialogue with a psychotherapist, whose face we never see, it becomes apparent that the headache is really about the Israeli occupation. The patient insists on complicating things; the dialogue is wry, edgy and sometimes hilarious, and the boundary between actuality and drama dissolves in the interests of truth. Last Days in Jerusalem observes a mutually alienated couple – older man, beautiful younger woman – who have resolved to leave Palestine for France. There is little dialogue; they are seen each dealing with personal struggle, visible worry and conflict, as they arrange things, make farewells, go through passages of doubt on the way to departure. What is the gain, when they can’t leave Palestinian identity, or their own relationship, behind? There are things, people and places they hate to leave, and they can’t help each other. This film’s esteemed director Tawfiq Abu Wael – he won the international critics’ prize at Cannes in 2004 – has looked at lots of Antonioni.

For many in its audiences, the most important film of this program was the guerrilla documentary Tears of Gaza, which surveys the toll on the civilian population of the 2008–09 Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip (“Operation Cast Lead”). It is directed and produced by the Norwegian team Vibeke Løkkeberg and Terje Kristiansen; thwarted by Israel’s refusal to let journalists and film-makers into the Strip, they managed to smuggle film and instructions in and out. Amateur footage, shot at close quarters, gives images of the bombardment itself: smoke and rubble, kids wounded and dying in an emergency shelter, people stumbling about, trying to recover their lives in the middle of wholesale destruction. If those images could come out of any war film, they are linked here to the more controlled and structured interviews, conducted after the events, with three child survivors; one wants to become a doctor who can heal the wounded. This film has been criticised for its omission of historical context, and accused of being no more than “propaganda for Hamas.” One response could be that other films can be made, offering other kinds of evidence; meanwhile, I’d love to know what’s happened to those kids who spoke up at the time •

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LAST week England’s most senior director, Ken Loach, declined his award for lifetime achievement from the current Turin Film Festival, and announced that he wouldn’t attend the screening of his new film, The Angels’ Share, winner of the year’s Jury Prize at Cannes. Loach’s reasons, at first unclear, had to do with protests against pay cuts by the workforce of the Turin film museum, principal sponsor of the festival. The screening was cancelled, so the film lost exposure; but Loach’s demonstration of solidarity was consistent with his lifelong politics and with the sympathies played out in all his films. It will be remembered that he pulled his last film, Looking for Eric, from the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival program when he learned that the festival was supported by funds from Israel (among many other sources). That was the Melbourne festival’s loss, as this year’s principled decision by Loach is Turin’s.

Going in to watch The Angels’ Share, I know from its repute that this time Loach, with all his grip on politics and human misfortune, will let us down lightly. It won’t be another Kes, nor another of The Wind that Shakes the Barley, where he took on the weight of history in the Irish troubles, and steered us through a gruelling struggle that set brother against brother. But even in his most cheerful outing, Loach will still be dealing in gritty realism and taking risks. Some critics don’t feel that this time he and his frequent writer-collaborator, Paul Laverty, have got away with their uneven mix of rough horseplay, comic capers, and long-range echoes of Whisky Galore; I think it comes off, and that’s a matter of orchestration, and the array of sympathies in the casting. We know from the start that the young, delinquent Robbie (Paul Brannigan) will blunder toward an outcome that gives him half a chance – maybe no more than that; it will be precarious, and there will be a very cautious kind of hope.

Guilty of a violent assault, Robbie has to face his victim, and the victim’s family, in court. The milieu he shares with his feckless mates is at once palpable and understated: under-education, long-term unemployment, the dreariness of public housing; it’s Glasgow, of course, not Edinburgh. When the little gang is on a trip to Edinburgh, its least-gifted member, Albert (Gary Maitland) fails to recognise the castle. Their benign supervisor, Harry (John Henshaw, in a wonderful performance) says gently, “Is there no shortbread in your house?”

Thanks to an energetic defence lawyer, who swears that he’s mending his ways, Robbie is let off a prison sentence and committed to community service. His girlfriend Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) has their baby, and demands some responsibility from Robbie, who discovers feelings he never dreamt of, and promises his son a better life. The forward path takes him and others on an educational trip to a distillery; it is discovered that he has a gift, a rare discerning nose for the refinements of single malt. (The film’s title, we discover, names the 2 per cent of the barrel which evaporates during maturation.) In the tour of the distillery and the high-toned spiel of the whisky expert Rory McAllister (Charlie MacLean), Loach maps the world of privilege which usually closes out the likes of Robbie and his kind; and the comic turn here is in the way Robbie turns the tables. He’s not headed for standard respectability.

All that is legible and enjoyable; along the way, however, we need subtitles for a good deal of the very thick Scottish brogue. That said, The Angels’ Share is a model of the small-scale feature film that can be developed when writer and director assemble the elements from a recognisable community. Whatever the older Loach has left behind, he’s kept his cunning.

AMONG current offerings, The Sessions has been highly praised for its treatment of a very difficult issue, the sexual needs of someone who is very seriously disabled. Mark O’Brien, a poet, was also a polio victim; in his mid-thirties, knowing his life would be curtailed, he sought the help of a professional sex surrogate so that he wouldn’t die wondering. After their regulation six sessions, with their unintended consequences, were over, he wrote about the experience, and Ben Lewin’s film is based on O’Brien’s article.

John Hawkes plays O’Brien, Helen Hunt the sex therapist Cheryl, and William H. Macy, with long hair, the liberated new-age Catholic priest and O’Brien’s regular confessor. When it comes to sex outside marriage, the priest has a perceptible struggle with himself before deciding that God will have to give Mark “a free pass.” The unintended consequences were the way sex became love, of a certain kind, between Mark and Cheryl, and how the developing tenderness must then include their way of letting go. Along the way, the other performances are entirely rewarding: the improbably named Moon Bloodgood as Vera, one of the several carers who get Mark from A to B on a gurney; Adam Arkin, as Cheryl’s husband Josh, who has to sort out a whole tangle of emotions, and nothing’s made easier because, as she tells Mark, Josh is a philosopher who lives mostly in his head. The most complex performance and the most interesting character, however, is Macy’s Father Brendan; in the margins of Mark’s and Cheryl’s story, he has one too. It’s readable only in eloquent fragments; you want to put them together.

MY APOLOGIES to readers of Inside Story who, for reasons beyond my control, got no film article in these columns for the past two months. The same reasons prevented my attendance at this year’s Palestinian Film Festival, which has now had its runs in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, and is still to run this weekend in Brisbane. I hope to retrieve at least some of these films, and will comment on them if that is possible. In the meantime, I thank Hal Wootten for discussing the program with me.

In the past, Palestinian cinema has offered stories in which the protagonists negotiate divided identities, sometimes within the Israel-Palestine territories, sometimes outside them, and the drama is in the resolution, or perhaps its impossibility. That seems still to be the case. The conflicts are played out most obviously in Romeo and Juliet love stories, but no less in docu-dramas like the demanding Heart of Jenin (2008), in which we followed a Palestinian father on a gruelling peace mission, as he went visiting the Israeli families whose children had received the organs of his young son, killed by an Israeli sniper. Of that one and others, find the DVD if you can; and – probably not so difficult – revisit Hany Abu-Assad’s very fine Paradise Now (2006), which made the commercial circuits at the time, telling of two young men who struggle with and against their supposed duty to become suicide bombers. It would be an excellent thing if we could also find those films from the Israeli left, particularly the documentarists who oppose the occupation and transmit friendships, dialogue, complexity and comedy across the boundaries. I’ve seen a few of them – but only outside Australia. •

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THE annual film calendar is marked by national film festivals, so-called – French, Italian, German, Lebanese, Arabic, Israeli; sometimes, if we’re lucky, a Palestinian program. These events are promotional, held to remind us that these industries are alive and functioning; mostly the lists consist of the current year’s new features, with a few gems and more than a few mediocrities. The current Russian event is called Russian Resurrection, so that you wonder what dimly remembered crucifixions are being farewelled: Eisenstein, Vertov, Tarkovsky? There is always the implication that liberal, creative film culture flourishes despite politics, despite whatever you may hear of the present oppressive autocracy, of protests against it, of rebellious youth and disappeared journalists. So as we salute Elena, Silent Souls and How I Ended This Summer, and take in the profound sadness in each of them, we can see a double-edged excellence; cinematic craft, emerging from long inherited traditions, working to communicate something close to despair for a broken, corrupted society.

But this time as others, the Russians offer their special kinds of escapism, with slapstick comedy as well as costume drama, and at the time of writing there is much more to be seen; it’s running through September in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Perth. I don’t know why Adelaide misses out, nor why Canberra, unlike other centres, doesn’t get a screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental 1967 version of War and Peace. You can get it on Amazon, a three-disc set, but it’s better seen in the middle of a spellbound audience. The marathon runs for close on seven hours, with three breaks for tea, coffee and sandwiches; it’s still to come in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and in those towns, do find the time if you can. In Sydney the queues were long, the Chauvel close to full. It’s worth every minute, and there are forty taken up by the battle of Borodino; that involved a cast of 120,000, with 800 horses – and in 1967 nobody had heard of computer-generated imagery. The Russian cultural foundation’s notes tell us that it cost $560 million, in today’s money; and why, we must ask, was it worth it for the post-Stalinist but still totalitarian Soviet Union? The short answer may be that in the 1960s, with Europe changing fast, identity and inheritance required new affirmation.

No CGI, but Bondarchuk does great things with back-projection, and we emerge with a properly Tolstoyan sense of vast landscapes in tumult, counterposed ironically with the forced sedateness in women’s domestic lives, and the jewelled formalities of ballrooms. Vision is matched by performance; as Natasha, the swan-necked Lyudmila Savelyeva does remarkable things in her way of communicating moral and emotional conflict, not simply in silence but with it. As Prince Andrei, Vyacheslav Tikhonov is handsome, conflicted, driven; but Bondarchuk’s own Pierre, the tormented looker-on, is the film’s central performance. Like the huge novel, the film offers fiction as a path into history (and it’s not bad to do without Tolstoy’s philosophic meanderings). In the end the personal story is swallowed in the burning of Moscow, the pointless executions of the innocent, the long, miserable retreat of the French; and we remember from distant schoolbooks that nobody actually won those Napoleonic wars. If the audience is palpably tiring by then, so was Europe. It’s the greatest possible war film, and by that token one of the greatest anti-war films as well.

ONE possible path into twentieth-century Russian cinema goes via France and one of Chris Marker’s great film essays, The Last Bolshevik, aka Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1993). There he tracks the work of the Soviet-era director Aleksandr Medvedkin (1900–89), whose films, notably Happiness (1934) made Stalin laugh and managed not to offend his successors; he survived far too many regimes to be counted a cinematic saint or hero. But he became a friend of Marker, who fashioned The Last Bolshevik around four posthumous, questioning letters to Medvedkin, the director who once took a ciné train around the Russian countryside, filmed ordinary people and their problems, processed and edited the films on the train, and screened them to the subjects. In a 1971 interview with Le Monde, Marker saluted Medvedkin’s inventiveness, his gifts for elegant composition, bold montage and ellipsis, and wild, full-on comedy. He also found something like cultural tragedy in the way his friend had strained and stretched his stories to keep up affirmative views of the Soviet system; Medvedkin wanted to keep on believing in the utopian dreams of the 1917 revolution, the dreams played out in May Day parades. Tracking his life, Marker picks up images from the Soviet past, rewinds, reverses them so that the dreamers are remembered benignly, while nobody can forget how little their dreams were worth, nor how cruel the outcomes. Like much else in Marker’s sixty years of film-making, The Last Bolshevik is complex, multi-layered, witty, orchestrated in the run of voices over archival imagery. He tells us how Medvedkin said, when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, that he wanted to live five more years, just to see how things turned out. As his camera moves to look at Medvedkin’s grave, Marker delivers one of the funniest lines in modern cinema: this, he says, was the only five-year plan that ever worked out.

Marker – born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on 29 July 1921 in Paris – died six weeks ago, close to his ninety-first birthday. He was filming, photographing, recording, arranging and rearranging images into his later eighties. During the second world war he worked in the Resistance; he published a novel, poems, critical journalism; then, turning to film, he collaborated with industrial workers to film their daily lives, their struggles and strikes. Often, into the later 1960s, his work was anonymous, absorbed within that of activist collectives like SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles). He began working on 16mm film and super-8mm from the early 1950s, on video and CD-ROM as soon as they came to hand, for cinema, TV and gallery installations. Travelling incessantly, he made films on Cuba, Siberia, on Israel in the years of its establishment, and on Japan (The Koumiko Mystery, 1965). In Level Five (1997), he returned to a near-forgotten history which obsessed him, the massacre of the islanders at the 1945 battle of Okinawa, and the memories of the survivors. The best-known of his films in wide circulation are La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983); these can be found on Amazon and in certain enterprising stores. You can look for the wonderful, late Remembrance of Things to Come (co-directed with Yannick Bellon, 2002), and the interactive CD-ROM Immemoire (1998). With luck, you’ll find The Last Bolshevik and the long essay on the decline of the European Left, Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge (1977) – rendered in English, with a salute to Alice through the Looking-Glass, as A Grin without a Cat.

Marker was rarely interviewed, and almost never photographed; he made films about other artists – his friends Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, and Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky; for himself, he preferred to be known only by his work. His films are prowled and haunted by animals, wolves, owls, and especially by cats; if asked for a photograph, he’d usually send an image of his cat. A great and inimitable master of cinema, he was also a devastating cure for the inflated cult of authorship. •

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HOW much of Woody Allen, I have to wonder, circulates in Russia? Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena, which arrives trailing a load of festival awards, evokes memories of Crimes and Misdemeanors; here too, they get away with murder, and the moral complexity is in the directorial viewpoint. But while Allen told a dark story about power and privilege in America, this one is darker. We are invited to think it could happen anywhere, since the account of the family is rigorously classical, and with Elena it’s the family, not the polity, which overhangs. There I disagree with the numerous reviewers who have rushed to interpret the film as an assault on the Putin regime; although the wealthy older man of the story, Vladimir, could perhaps be dubbed an oligarch, the elements of this tale are all there in Dostoevsky and Chekhov.

For the partners in a late-life second marriage, parental bonds are stronger than whatever it is between the two of them. He wants to buy the love of his alienated daughter, while her major object in life is to sustain, if possible rescue, her jobless layabout son and struggling adolescent grandson; her few moments of visible happiness are found with the baby of that family. At those moments Elena smiles; and there’s one other smile, when Vladimir breaks into sexual teasing and leads her off to the bedroom. Most of the time, she’s held-in, dutiful, impassive; doing kitchen duties in the comfortable city apartment she shares with Vladimir, accepting the wife-servant role; then taking up the other role, the grandmother’s, which is plainly more real to her. Nadezhda Markina surely merited her best-actress awards, with heavy bodily movements and a closed face that says nothing and contains everything. Andrey Smirnov’s Vladimir is equally interesting, letting slip his jealousy of the son and grandchildren, looking out from his hospital bed on to incomprehensible emptiness.

In its opening moments the film is about well-appointed living spaces, and a great, bare winter tree outside the apartment’s large windows; then Elena travels by public transport to her son’s messy, crowded flat in a grim suburban wasteland. If the contrast of environments were dominant, the film might be schematic; but it’s complicated, going off in tangents, breaking style to handheld camerawork, pursuing the grandson’s gang on a rampage; stopping, during Elena’s train ride, to look at a horse killed on a rail crossing. We’re not given linkages or reasons; we are given more to think about later on – even more, that is, than the entrapment of Elena, whose understanding of her motherhood puts almost everything outside her control. Behind the banality there is a kind of horror closing in; Philip Glass’s pounding score marks its advance.

After that, Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? brings a surge of properly feminist relief. Somewhere in the Middle East, a large group of black-clad women – some with headscarves, many without – comes along a dusty, stony road toward the camera, swaying and chanting. Their movement has been triggered by the arrival of a communal TV set; this brings in the news of strife in the world outside the village, a place not identified. It’s not even clear that we’re in Lebanon, although Labaki has said that her own country’s endless tangling with wars outside and within its borders made this film necessary for her. Watching, we can remember that Lebanon has common borders with both Syria and Israel.

The women have congregated to keep their men out of sectarian clashes between Christian and Muslim within the community, and to stop them from getting into the wars outside. It’s not exactly Lysistrata; the circles of marriage and family hold, the dynamics of the couple persist, but the women maintain a high-spirited, defiant solidarity. They devise a hilarious cooking party in which the cakes are laced with hash to keep the men subdued; they confuse proceedings by engaging in busy multilingual talk, French, English, Arabic; they get a busload of Russian strippers tangled into the community, with grand disregard for customary modesty. Their drive and invention blow stereotypes apart. This is very intelligent political comedy, worth seeing twice.

Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, by contrast, is intelligent farce, and once will do, but it’s worth your time and ticket. Sex toys have probably been around as long as sex, while the earliest novels tell us that there was never anything in the mythology about inherent female inability for pleasure; but the Victorians did have their problems, and this elating entertainment takes off from them. It’s not really about vibrators; they are literally plot machinery. The story has to do with class and education, wealth and poverty; there’s a wave to Dickens, and several waves to social issues in medicine. It is elegant, beautifully designed and costumed, and performed with clear enjoyment by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy, Jonathan Pryce and Felicity Jones among others. Gyllenhaal makes the most of a highly defiant, social-reforming feminist named Charlotte. She wins, morally and politically, because that’s the kind of movie it is. Her Charlotte doesn’t look like needing a vibrator; but the closing credits are decorated, charmingly, with many varieties of that benign invention.

THERE can’t be too many film intellectuals who, in considering the complex allure of Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas, will be reminded of what Lenin thought about Tolstoy. In his essay “The Sirkian System,” Paul Willemen recalled Lenin’s remark that Tolstoy had, uniquely, dramatised the contradictions within Russian society at the time when neither Tsarism nor the revolutionaries could have won a battle between them. Sirk, Willemen wrote, “performed a similar function for America in the 1950s: he depicted a society that appeared to be strong and booming, but which was in fact exhausted and being torn apart internally.”

With Paul Willemen’s untimely death in London, we have lost one of the most challenging and rigorous contemporary thinkers on and around cinema. “On” was never enough for him; in his thinking and writing cinema was always caught in webs of meaning; in language, society, politics and history. He was a film festival programmer, most famously with the Edinburgh film festival in its most innovative moments; an activist writer and an editor, moving from the Screen milieu to Framework in the later 1980s. Under his editorship Framework explored the films and film cultures of Africa, Sri Lanka, Latin America (across two issues in 1979), Egypt, Portugal, Brazil and Australia, as well as black British cinema; it also took up tough, problematic areas of theoretical work, and feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, and dealt in nonconformist ways with Godard, Hitchcock, Herzog and Pasolini among others. In his editorial role and in other ways, Willemen promoted and defended innovative work in Britain (for instances, Cinema Action’s So That You Can Live and Rocinante), in Ireland, in India, in Australia. In No. 25 (1984) you can find an interview with the great Maori documentary director Merata Mita; at that point, few Australian critics knew she existed.

Visiting the 1982 Sydney Film Festival, he was an impressive and unorthodox presence; much too eminent by then to be sidelined, he could be acerbic and intransigent in certain areas of argument, and had little patience with art-film as bourgeois cultural consolation. Striding or lounging in leather jacket and boots, he seemed (in Lesley Stern’s words) “like a sort of European intellectual Marlon Brando.” He could also be immensely kind, and was capable of seemingly endless patience as a listener and commentator on your work if he found it interesting – as he generally did when critical work emerged on little-known films and from non-metropolitan places. He was shown work in progress on Helen Grace’s landmark film essay Serious Undertakings – a film which took up exactly the question of non-metropolitan identity, among much else; an important project, then under threat, because completion funding was being denied. Willemen liked what he saw of the film, and organised invitations for it from several British festivals. The local bureaucracy, properly impressed, finally came through with the money.

His links with Australia and friendships here were many. The splendid, searching introduction to his most substantial book of essays (Looks and Frictions, Indiana University Press, 1994) is by Meaghan Morris, who comments on Willemen’s “devotion to cinemas that strain our powers of translation and intensify our understanding of social life; his irrepressibly active internationalism...” There is a long, patient concluding dialogue on the meanings of “cinephilia,” with another Australian, Noel King. Willemen held the questions open; he repeatedly calls his work “unsystematic”; “a set of notes and reflections”; and he’d say in conversation, “I was just mulling it over.” •

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ONCE film festivals were small, embattled enterprises for groups of enthusiasts, who had trouble convincing local authorities that cinema might have claims to serious attention. Now they are sizeable institutions with social cachet, permanent staffs, small armies of volunteers and interns; there’s buzz and sparkle, with visiting directors, red-carpet opening and closing nights. Size clearly matters; it’s the basis for the enabling patronage of state and local governments, agencies of culture and commerce. In Sydney between June 6 and June 17 there were sometimes five programs running concurrently, more than 150 films altogether. The institution becomes almost labyrinthine; the cinephile will debate her choices with friends; and with six people each buying a pass of ten tickets, they’ll end up seeing five or six different festivals. That pass costs $137; one for thirty, for those with both cash and stamina, costs $347; and if you want the razzle of the opening night, film plus party afterwards, that’s another $100. One friend of mine used to say that the festival is really always there at the State Theatre in the middle of town, a wonderfully cacophonous village of sound and vision; we go trooping there, ceremonially, every winter.

Now, however, the Sydney event is rather exhaustingly dispersed, playing at the State and also, at some distance, in two and three venues at the ugly, raucous Events complex in George Street, the Dendy at Circular Quay and the excellent Domain Theatre at the state art gallery. You need serious planning, and some kind of cinematic compass. Attention to the festival’s program notes will show you that a good many features have local distributors, and are therefore likely to make the commercial circuits. Those should include, before long, Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share and Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar; these will be looked at again. Nikolaj Arcel’s much-praised A Royal Affair is in wide circulation already; so is the remarkable documentary Marley (if you didn’t like his music, it’s still a terrific movie). So too is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, discussed earlier, and not to be missed at any price. Maϊwenn’s electric Polisse has opened around Sydney, and it’s worth your attention – razor-sharp, horrifically funny and infuriating by turns, it should turn anyone off entrusting kids or grandkids to interrogation by a child protection agency.

That list suggests the developing interdependence of commercial and non-commercial circuits; while once the exhibition traders regarded the festivals with suspicion, they’re now seen as promotional, even collaborative, in sustaining a climate. Your compass might well direct you to those festival offerings which are less likely to reappear. Mine didn’t work as well as it should have; I greatly regret missing Alexander Sokurov’s Faust and Ann Hui’s A Simple Life, among others. The needle swung toward documentaries, and I found several of the best. Dr Sarmast’s Music School follows the doctor named back from Melbourne to his home city, Kabul, to establish an institute of music in which both traditional Afghani forms and instruments are taught beside the music of the wider world, and for the benefit of children whose lives have been stunted by poverty and war. Directed by Polly Watkins, this one should get around as widely as possible; among much else, it takes us some way into an Afghanistan we don’t get from the TV news.

Golden Slumbers (Le Sommeil d’Or), a brave French-Cambodian co-production, retrieves fragments of a vanished national cinema, one that was largely destroyed by the Khmer Rouge from 1975. In Phnom Penh the director, Davy Chou, finds a few survivors, assembles memories, scraps of sound and vision, faded posters, the sites of ruined movie-houses and sets. It appears that Pol Pot deeply hated the cinema – a popular, song-and-dance cinema at that; it’s worth thinking about the special kinds of threat he and his cohorts discerned in it. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is a highly engaging portrait of the activist Chinese artist, who denies that he should be labelled a dissident; he says that the regime is rather “a dissident government.” Since this one is being distributed by Madman, it should make it to local TV, if not to bigger screens. From India, The Sound of Old Rooms, a real-life comedy directed by Sandeep Ray, tracks the way a part-time poet called Sarthak struggles against the fates; he has a wife, a child and a mother, and his house, crammed with books, is falling apart. The film observes all of them, kindly and at close quarters. Its director is the son of Satyajit Ray; thinking back to the older Ray’s superbly crafted dramas, from Pather Panchali onwards, and looking now at this amiably plotless essay in which several stories are caught on the run, we’re looking at changes in the whole cinema landscape; India’s, but the world’s and ours as well. Among the Indian features, Valley of Saints was especially rewarding, its story – very like that in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide – moving into Kashmir, its lake, and the idea that water pollution in such a place might be worth even more worry than endemic civil strife.

With every film festival, I want the retrospective; there’s always too much of the past of cinema, the recent past included, that goes perennially unseen. The work of Bernardo Bertolucci was a great and extravagant choice. Before the Revolution, the rebellious melodrama he made at the age of 23, was worth revisiting if only for its flowing style and energy; but the great treat was 1900 (1976), the five-hour chronicle of political struggle and change in Italy. It was a short five hours, with the eloquent presences of the younger Robert de Niro and Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Alida Valli, and Donald Sutherland as the deeply sadistic Attila, the property manager committed to fascist politics and personal cruelty at every turn. La Luna (1979) turned out to be wonderfully wild Oedipal opera, almost but not quite falling over the brink of absurdity; The Dreamers (2003), in which Bertolucci tried to work with May ’68 in Paris, did fall over quite catastrophically. But The Sheltering Sky (1990) from Paul Bowles’s novel, is splendid, with dialogue in English, French and Arabic. Paul Bowles himself sits around, a knowing seer; Debra Winger and John Malkovich are finely instrumental, knowing their places in the epic.

ONE question for this film festival had to do with the place in it of the Aboriginal and other Indigenous films which in earlier years have made up the special program called Message Sticks, run at the Opera House each May. This time the program has been made part of the festival’s documentary strand. Perhaps Message Sticks has gained, in the sense that the films – most notably Coniston Massacre and Croker Island Exodus – have probably been seen by wider audiences; but there is arguably loss as well, in that the distinctiveness of the program, in both storytelling and politics, has been lost in the huge extent of the festival’s range. To these two films especially, as to others named here, I hope to return. •

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THE films come from fifty countries; sometimes the map is jumbled – there is a New Zealand documentary on the disappearing qiddiq, a beautiful white dog which is almost extinct in the Arctic; there is a Canadian film about Hindu beauty queens, an Italian film that takes up Shakespeare, an Australian one that travels into Greece and France, and a stunning Korean animation (The King of Pigs). A film festival will always be virtual travel, sometimes to times and places you wouldn’t really want to go. But then you do, and the globe shrinks. The third and fourth worlds are there on the screen at the festival, a major event on a big city’s cultural calendar; and so they become felt as just outside the window, round the corner.

That thought arises as we watch the gruelling La Pirogue, in which an open boatful of young Senegalese men and one young woman – who’s a stowaway – endure a stormy, futile journey in the Atlantic, trying to reach Europe via the Canary Islands. This one made the special list for Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where one comment was that its subject-matter and point of view would be “likely of little interest to those outside continental Africa.” Not so; it is and should be of interest wherever refugees are turning up. The principal boatman, Baye Laye, is a young man with a family; the glimpses of his neighbourhood in Dakar help to show why he’d put himself and others at risk to try for a better life, though joining the boat is clearly against his better judgement. The director, Moussa Touré, keeps a close grip on the action in the crowded boat; quarrelling, endurance, dread about food and water, weather and directions. “Go back to where you came from”? Some of them do, and in this kind of story it can be a choice between tactical retreat and death.

Such a work finds its place in global cinema circuits, and it’s largely because of film festivals – however much you might curse the length of the queues these days – that an African film like this one can deliver its message to the West. That message isn’t very different from the one Frantz Fanon sent in his unforgettable book Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) more than fifty years ago. What’s different is that today, knowledge is unavoidable. La Pirogue confronts the culture-minded middle class with the faces of human desperation, the looks and the likes of the people we take into detention centres, and whose lives we then submit to minute inspection by ASIO.

Another place you mightn’t choose to visit is the inside of a high-security prison. In Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die) the great veteran co-directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani take us inside the bleak concrete spaces of Rome’s Rebibbia jail to tangle with a no-budget production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by a cast of inmates. You may have to supply a good many of the original lines for yourself, as one does with Grigori Kozintsev’s Lear and Hamlet, but that makes this a more active film experience, an astonishing double marriage of theatre and cinema, documentary and drama. A long time ago, as a schoolkid lucky enough to have very good English teachers, I found the complex dynamics of Brutus’s relations with Caesar and Cassius, the picture of love between enemies, quite spellbinding, and so they are here – much more so, in fact, than in many well-funded productions. As the prison area fills with bodies, Antony’s ironic lines on honourable men, betrayal and ambition take over, to the point where the setting is almost forgotten. But then, with a clanging of locks in tall iron doors, each actor is returned to his cell; and once you’ve experienced life in art, one of them says, imprisonment is harder to take than ever.

That essay on liberty, ambition and betrayal is one of two major festival pieces I most want to look at again. The other is from the Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (also screening commercially in other capital cities), which turns police-procedural into epic (and won the Grand Prix at Cannes). Three cars wind along country roads in a night-time landscape of vast, bare hillsides; inside them men talk and argue fiercely. Several of them are police and gravediggers, one is a prosecutor, one a doctor, and one is a murderer who is required to lead the others to a corpse. There’s rambling chatter, in which varying tales are told, and the prosecutor displays his pleasure in the way he was once told he looked like Clark Gable (he doesn’t now). There’s confusion about the place where they’re looking for a shallow grave; in these huge spaces, there are no landmarks. There’s further confusion about what happened and why; in a sort of tangent, we’re allowed to suppose that somewhere in all of it there could have been a crime passionel. But the woman and child at the centre of that possible drama will find their own ways, and will not tell whatever they may know. We’re given a world in which the lives of men and women seem intractably separate; it’s the gulf between them, and the refusal of any way to tie up the puzzles of the story, that fire this film’s magnetism, two and a half hours of it. You want to go back there, look again, and make sure you saw what you thought was there at the beginning; there’s nothing so glib as a flashback.

SOMETIMES, when it’s time to watch an Australian feature film, I think: duty calls. The rewards of Not Suitable for Children (director, Peter Templeman) have something quite irresistibly to do with looking at my own neighbourhood on the big screen; the location is Newtown, Sydney, where I live.

This film opened the festival on 6 June, with a program note on “Sydney’s most bohemian suburbs, with their dilapidated terraces, cute cafés and free-spirited residents.” Oh dear; wasn’t Bohemia an out-of-date notion by the mid 1960s? The central character, Jonah (Ryan Kwanten) is another version of the Owen Wilson role in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris; people keep on calling him “endearingly goofy.” Goofy yes; I’m not so sure about the endearing part. It’s an intelligent farce about a young man facing infertility, and therefore in a terrible rush to procreate. Sarah Snook puts in a glowing performance – she, and the beautiful terrace house (definitely north Newtown, and never mind the dilapidated bit; this one would set you back a cool million these days) are the real stars. Adulthood and complexity are not about the numbers on birthdays; there are lots of quite real people in this demographic. I’d love to see these film-makers produce one that’s really suitable for grownups.

More to come on the film festival, where, among other offerings, the Bertolucci retrospective is worth every second of your attention. •

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ALLEGORICAL paths are tempting; what can we read about contemporary Russia from the bleak and beautiful poetry of Silent Souls, currently playing? Two things at least: that it still sustains a film-cultural climate in which rigorous and demanding cinematic poetry is possible; and that remote, disappearing folk traditions, sustained in impoverished regions, can be acknowledged, accorded their validity. Behind all that there is a history of immeasurable loss; here a tale of personal bereavement figures the disappearance of a whole world, a whole people’s history. The film is short (seventy-seven minutes), dense, lucid, and perfect in its own terms.

There are affinities with last year’s austere and masterly How I Ended This Summer, though that’s a much more spacious film. This one, directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko and written by Denis Osokin, also follows two men in a cold landscape; no polar bears or radioactive fish, but two lively caged birds – buntings, like big sparrows – travel in the car with the men and, for most of the trip, the corpse of a dead young wife, Tanya (Yuliya Aug). The three belong to a vanishing, isolated Finnish minority, the Merja, and the journey has a purpose, to cremate the young woman’s body according to Merja traditions, while her widower Miron (Yuriy Tsuirilo), also in line with his traditions, speaks to his friend about his love and lust for her; this is a recognised practice after a spouse’s death, and they call it “smoking.” Aist, the narrator (Igor Sergeyev), has other burdens in his memories of a father who wrote poetry, and of times they once shared rowing on the Volga. All the way the birds are chirping, fussing, dancing inside the cage; this isn’t the first Russian film in which escaping birds symbolise both the will to freedom and the departure of the soul.

The men reach a shore of the vast river, and build the bier from a load of timbers we have seen them buying on the way. This process is recounted, almost ethnographically; we have also seen the washing of the body, the careful combing out of long red-brown hair. The film is made of such precise details, deliberate observances, in which the men act out their acceptance of where they belong in their world and what they must do. In the wordless spaces as they go through the process, another story is present though almost unseen, and tentatively offered for decipherment: Tanya’s story. It can be read in different ways, and your way may not be mine.

IN THE past ten days I’ve seen two Australian fiction-films about family and couples. One is good, the other very good indeed. The former is the highly praised melodrama Wish You Were Here (honours at Sundance), written and directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith and co-written by Felicity Price, who also has the central role of Alice. She, her husband Dave and sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) have returned from a hectic week of holiday in Cambodia; their friend Jeremy (Anthony Starr), who came with them, has gone missing. His disappearance is pivotal to the drama at first, but fades into the background as crucial tensions open among the other three. Dave is at the centre, and Joel Edgerton superbly communicates his desperate struggle to live with his guilts and secrets while sustaining an overcrowded, raucous domestic and professional life – he and Alice have two young children, with a third on the way. He designs pleasure-boats, and the business is holding up despite the GFC. That fact is tossed off in casual talk, and it’s part of the film’s insistent, rushing contemporaneity: “we’ll just hang by the pool”; “catch you in fifteen”; and Steph is never called Stephanie.

The everyday chaos round the kids is vividly rendered, by them and others, in Jules O’Loughlin’s cinematography and Jason Ballantine’s rhythmic, kaleidoscopic editing. Each fragment of drama occupies minimal screen time for maximal effect; the realism is highly detailed, down to the fine wrangling of airport sniffer dogs and drug searches. But in the outcome, there’s less than meets the eye. A critique of Sydney materialism (allegedly worse than that of other cities, but I’m not so sure) is hinted at; Alice drives a glossy red Saab, and the flat, or house, overlooks Tamarama beach. It’s not enough for seriousness; the central story is the same old. The great Spanish-Mexican modernist Luis Buñuel (1900–83) once said that for cinema “the bourgeois adulterous drama” was over, out of date; and so it should be.

The other film was Stephen Wallace’s Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977). It was screened in a retrospective, Outsiders in Australian Cinema, currently at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Love Letters, written by Wallace from real letters found in a flat, negotiates the dynamics between sexual love and compulsive violence in the relationship between industrial worker Len (Bryan Brown) and his wife Barbara (Kris McQuade). Barbara has given up on Len and gone home to her family in outer-suburban Sydney, where she shares a cramped bedroom with her sister, played by a very young Gia Carides; the letters, in which Len finds a different, pleading voice, are part of his struggle to win her back. The dialogue is finely tuned, the performances insightful and absolutely convincing; a working-class milieu is not observed so much as created and inhabited. No triangles here; the conflict is built of clashing needs between two people, and neither of them can help it. Across more than three decades, I had remembered this film’s settings, its probing of everyday, irresolvable conflicts; Len’s mum in her kitchen, Barbara mulling over things with her friend Norma, the sunlit final sequence in which the capering child plays with water around the Hills Hoist. A mere fifty minutes of fully believable life, and not one of them wasted. This film was funded by the once-upon-a-time, and still lamented, Sydney Filmmakers’ Co-operative.

The Art Gallery series has included other such small masterpieces as Ivan Sen’s Wind and Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries; other films still to come (Sundays and Wednesdays) include Jane Campion’s Sweetie, Glenda Hambly’s Fran, Ray Argall’s superb Return Home, and David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom. •

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THEY love it or they hate it; This Must Be the Place really divides audiences. Maybe they’ve gone in to see it because of David Byrne and Talking Heads, and then didn’t get enough of them, or because they thought Sean Penn in wig and makeup might be no more than off-the-wall camp entertainment. In any case the experience became properly uncomfortable, and some viewers, reviewers among them, have gone online to tell us that it’s a giant heap of garbage. They could find no way of bringing its elements together, and I’m not here to correct them; rather to suggest that the capacity of cinema to depart from naturalism, and present what’s grotesque, incoherent, apparently non-sequential, is one major reason to pursue it.

So you’ve got a road movie, and the agent of the quest is not your floundering, well-intentioned innocent who has lost a father, but a has-been rock star leading a near-impossible, almost deadened after-life. Inside the huge wig, from the face masked with lipstick and mascara, Sean Penn as Cheyenne delivers monotone lines. From the beginning in Dublin, in a seemingly normal domestic space with a sane and knowing wife – played very sanely and knowingly by Frances McDormand – he sets out to find the father he hasn’t seen or spoken to in decades. Reaching the bedside just too late, he sees the numbers from the man’s time in a concentration camp, and sets out to find the Nazi torturer. From there, we get a gallery of American grotesques, and landscapes which are horrific because they’re like reality, just slightly skewed. Getting across the Midwest – all lonely gas stations, endless roads running to flat horizons – This Must Be the Place looks more than a bit like Paris, Texas, the more so with the brief and highly enjoyable appearance of Harry Dean Stanton. This film, like Wim Wenders’s of 1984, presents an America seen from Europe, with the difference that the Europe of the director Paolo Sorrentino, and his co-writer Umberto Contarello, is one that remembers the Holocaust – though whether Cheyenne’s pursuit really needed the concentration camp images is a point to be argued.

In this film, plot isn’t really a consideration. There is an array of visions, pictures from a journey, and a return home. The film poses a major question; after hitting a rock star’s apex, how does anyone come down? “You sang with Mick Jagger,” says the child. “No,” says Cheyenne, “I didn’t sing with Mick Jagger, he sang with me.” If Cheyenne seems permanently stoned, it’s because he is, not with any particular substance but because the way back down into ordinariness has been unendurable, for all of them (consider again those high celebrity deaths). Frances McDormand’s performance, in this film as in others, has to do with getting back into some kind of real world. There’s a film that shadows this one, lurking behind it, and it’s hers.

Le Havre has been widely accepted as a benign, sweet-tempered entertainment from the travelling Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki; “utopian,” as the Village Voice critic J. Hoberman wrote, because it shows “everything as it is not.” Indeed; the people of the working-class community around the docks in the port city are kindly and seasoned; they respond to human need when they see it, and nobody thinks the pathetic black folks who are found inside the ship’s container should go back to where they came from. The elderly shoeshine man will go many miles out of his way to connect the wandering twelve-year-old Idrissa with his lost African family; the community will cheerfully organise a fund-raising pop concert to buy Idrissa’s smuggled passage to London, where his mother, herself sans papiers, is working in a laundry. There will be hope, if not quite a happy ending; and the film, superbly performed by its ensemble, convincingly projects a locale and a milieu. Since all films must be considered in their contexts of reception, Le Havre is as much a moral fairytale for ourselves as for any other grudging Western movie-consuming area it may land in. I see it not long after reading about the most recent suicide in Villawood.

THE Film Critics’ Circle of Australia issued its judgements in April. I think they’re right in confining the field, and their own role, to Australian films – there are enough awards for the rest; and I can see the merit in this year’s judgements: best film, best direction and best actor awards all went to Snowtown, its director Justin Kurzel and lead Daniel Henshall. Emily Watson was judged best actress for her work in Oranges and Sunshine. I was sorry to see that the only recognition for Ivan Sen’s Toomelah was the award to Daniel Connors for the best work by a young actor, much as that was deserved; and more regretful that the FCCA doesn’t reach toward documentary, given that The Hungry Tide, The Tall Man and Mrs Carey’s Concert must be, on any measure, among the best films to emerge through the year. It would also be an excellent thing, in this anti-critical climate, if the FCCA could expound and publish their criteria. •

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LOOKING again at Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, currently on release, I feel again my ambivalence about the major-city film festivals. The problem is that your response to an important film can be blurred or blunted by the crowding of the program, by what you see in the sessions before, after and around it (I know I went straight on to look at The Tree of Life; not good for responses to either work).

Farhadi’s lucid, complex drama is even better than I thought it was when commenting on the 2011 Sydney event, where it won the Sydney Film Prize. That judgement was prescient; a great array of awards has followed, including the Oscar for the best foreign-language film. The websites register contending voices inside Iran, among them Farhadi’s own: he wants to make audiences think. A miracle, at that rate, that he hasn’t been silenced along with his distinguished colleague Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Crimson Gold), who has been forbidden to travel and banned from film-making for twenty years. The sour, censorious authorities have rebuked Farhadi, both for speaking up for Panahi and now for presenting a story they perceive as squalid, as feeding into subversive understandings of Iranian life. The fact that it’s packing them in in Israel doesn’t help him at home.

Brilliantly structured and edited, the film displays the conflict between Simin (Leila Hatami) and her husband Nader (Peyman Moadi). She is a beautiful woman in early middle age; as a teacher, a woman manifestly in charge of herself, she wants to get out of Iran and take her young daughter with her, seeking a better life and opportunities for both of them. Nader, who seems younger for his age and altogether less purposeful than Simin, can’t think of emigrating while his aged father still lives. The old man has Alzheimer’s disease, is confused and incontinent (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, in a fine, near-wordless performance).

After trying to convince a harried, impatient magistrate that they should be allowed a divorce, they hire a needy working-class mother to care for the father during the day, a humble, anxious person trailing her four-year-old daughter, a child who does some expressive watching while the grownups storm and argue. The mother is pregnant; during a brief absence while she visits a doctor, the old man falls. A fierce confrontation follows; she miscarries. In a welter of conflict, in which both class and gender tensions go to work, their lives go on.

Nothing is solved while we watch. A question mark overhangs, but while father and mother, sitting well apart in a corridor, wait for a decision, we’re looking at troops of people coming and going; we are made aware of a restless, crowded urban community in which – surprise? – women, chador’d or not, are as much in charge of daily life as men, and as much creatures of necessity. The daughter, Termeh, is the pivot of the story. The script tells us that she’s eleven years old; in the performance of Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter, she seems rather more – thirteen or fourteen, well in her adolescence, centred on school and homework, observant, grave and sane in a way her parents are not.

At first I thought of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but that great work is finally about the nature of love. A Separation is more about intra-familial power struggles and resentments; about the intractable dilemmas entailed in the care of the old and helpless; about the tensions between society and family in frameworks where family is everything.

With kaleidoscopic editing by Hayedeh Safiyari, it’s given to us in slivers, swift fragments, glimpses; we’re never told too much, and that discretion may have been essential to the project. The authorisation for this film was temporarily withdrawn; it may have been finally allowed because the story is so fully contained within the domestic realm. The few exteriors are in the streets, in thick traffic; everywhere, palpably, life is under pressure. The reasons for Simin’s resolve to leave are only hinted at, left trailing; the political background is unspoken, but the film goes to audiences with fresh memories of the dubious re-election in 2009 of Ahmadinejad, the huge riots, the popularity of the liberal contender Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the country’s last prime minister.

Architect, artist, journalist and multilingual politician, Mousavi represents the Iran we don’t know about, the intellectual community which, Asghar Farhadi has said, inherits “a glorious culture,” but one “hidden under the heavy dust of politics.” Out of that dust, A Separation emerges to remind a global audience that there is an Iranian modernity, one in which the family story requires several voices, none with final authority.

In very elegant Persian script, the credits roll upwards. In this case I don’t feel annoyance with the absence of subtitles; I do feel the linguistic impoverishment of the society around me.

AT THE Oscars, The Artist danced off with its own clutch of prizes, Best Film included. It’s an intelligent, graceful caper, an evening’s delight. It calls on the memories of memories; Jean Dujardin evokes all the moustachioed actors of legend – Fairbanks, Flynn, Gable – and dancing girls who shimmied in very short skirts, with lots of glitter and gleam. With the glowing Bérénice Bejo, and John Goodman as the cigar-chewing producer, it also stars the Jack Russell Uggy, surely the most talented movie dog in the business. The framing story, the transition from silent cinema to synchronised sound, and the way silent film stars were put abruptly out of business, was taken up most memorably in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the ultimate musical for people who think they don’t like musicals; go find a copy immediately if you’ve never seen it; and enjoy The Artist – but don’t go off thinking it’s adequate cultural history.

It is evidently reviving interest in silent cinema at large, and that’s great; but those who are moved to attend silent film programs – and some are fortunately around – will quickly discover that they’re in quite another place. Silent cinema was never simply the movies, minus speech and sound effects. It was, as David Denby argued at knowledgeable length recently in the New Yorker, an essentially different art form, one involving another, intensely stylised range of performance, closer to the modes of high theatre and opera. The Silent Film Festival project, with a program playing in Newcastle as I write, is worth the attention it demands.

THE film and television producer Martin Williams died of cancer in Sydney on 25 February, at the early age of sixty-three. In an eloquent tribute in the industry journal Screen Hub, David Tiley has written that “The industry is diminished by his passing… He contributed patiently and intelligently to the discussions around policy, was able to question established practice… He understood the absolute necessity for respect and inspiration in the relationship between agencies, development specialists and key creatives. He championed the cause of ultra low budget features, and innovative production methods. He cared equally for drama and documentary, focusing always on the storytelling.”

During the 1980s, Martin produced two groundbreaking series for the ABC, Singles and Relative Merits; both demand retrieval. After a period with the Australian Film Commission, he set up Second Sight Productions with Samantha Jennings; one outcome was the superb short film on a refugee story for SBS, So Close to Home. Working more recently for Screen NSW as a principal in film development, Martin encouraged creativity and innovation, matched patient listening with sharp critical insight, and strongly defended the interests of individual directors, while holding his ruling commitment to the crafts and disciplines of film-making. He had no concern whatever for his own status, no drive to be a name above the title; the creative and collaborative processes – and the friendships that came out of them – always mattered most to him. Through his last weeks, actors, directors, writers, with family and friends, all gathered round him; he was building community right to the end. •

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When the trolley comes past, the woman next to me passes a water bottle and asks if I’m going to Alice for a holiday. “Just visiting,” I say, and then she asks “You like Alice?”

Without thinking I say, “Yes, I think it’s a pretty interesting place; how about you?”

“I work there but nah, I don’t like it. Might be interesting but it’s a terrible angry town if you ask me. Too many murders.”

She’s right; it’s one a month, perhaps more. A beautiful town, a sad and angry town, with history visible, palpable on its streets. I remember night-time scenes in Todd Mall, people weaving about, a desperate woman pulling strings of wooden beads from round her own neck, calling out hopelessly, trying to sell them to anyone who passed. I think of an unkempt artist drifting into the immaculate spaces of the gallery where his paintings are sold, calling loudly for another bunch of dollars – which maybe they owe him, maybe not. I remember a gallery-owner going out of her way to assure me that in fact Aboriginal artists do better on percentages than white ones; “but you know,” she said, “they can’t manage their money.” In cream silk and pearls, she was like a city boutique manager, and there was clearly no point in trying to defend a culture of kinship and sharing. The splendid abstract I was looking at – too expensive for me, but probably undervalued on the world market – might buy the next short-lived, second-hand Toyota for the artist’s home community.

My neighbour reflects, and asks “So why’d you reckon it’s interesting?”

I don’t actually want to talk; I’ve got some work reading I need to do. A bit recklessly, I say I think it’s not bad to have one tourist place in Australia where visitors see a lot of black faces as well as white ones on the street.

“Yeah,” she says equably enough, “but like, you couldn’t say the Aborigines and the white people really know each other.” She doesn’t think they do, not really. It’s a case of parallel universes, she reckons, and I can’t do much but concur, low-key, and open my briefcase.

What she’s just said, wryly enough, is fully in line with my reading matter. My friend Dennis McDermott, an Aboriginal poet and psychologist, has handed over some of his unpublished essays, and the one I pick up first is about exactly that, the chasm of non-communication between black and white. He uses the confronting title “Abo-Proof Fence,” and discusses “the barbed wire that ran through Australian society for much of the last two hundred years”: a fence built of ignorance and amnesia.

It’s September 2005, nearly forty years on from the landmark moments: the 1967 referendum which changed the Constitution in favour of Aborigines; then the legendary Stanner lectures of 1968, exposing and shattering what William Stanner called “the Great Australian Silence.” McDermott acknowledges that much in race relations has changed through those decades, but argues that the heavy penalties of dispossession “still take up little space in Australia’s collective memory.”

He wants a history, taught and circulated into general acceptance, which charts those penalties. He wants classroom-level knowledges to encompass the banal, everyday discriminations –

the rental property that vanished when they saw your face, the exclusion from school when a critical mass of parents objected, the forced removals of whole communities as late as the mining-mad sixties… the plethora of pass-laws, dog-tags and permits to travel, to marry across colour-lines, to scratch yourself…

Dennis wasn’t writing about Alice Springs, but “the plethora of pass-laws, dog-tags and permits” was probably more punitive there than anywhere. The odd thing is that when you’re in Alice, listening to older An-aŋu people – elders guiding tours, telling stories to schoolkids – you won’t hear much, from people quite old enough to remember, about the weighty paraphernalia of prohibitions which ruled their lives into the 1960s and ’70s, times when designated “half-castes” could enter the town, while “full-bloods” – often called “wards” because of their alleged ignorance and incompetence – could not. But they still understand Alice Springs, Mparntwe, as a spread of sacred places, and you might hear how some of those have been honoured, some transgressed, like that place where Barrett Drive, on the eastern side, cut through the ridge which formed the caterpillar’s tail. The new road should have gone around it.

That story is still a painful one. Your guides will also know which camping places are covered now by supermarkets and parking lots, what kind of farm there was where you now see the Oasis motel. They’ll often speak without obvious nostalgia or lament, as though equably claiming their share in the town as it is. They’re likely to remember their own, their parents’ and grandparents’ parts in making it: digging and building, making bricks, cleaning and cooking and washing.

Dennis writes about Aboriginal distress and misery, both personal and collective, and about why poetry matters in special ways. Writing it, he says, has much to do with “the leaving of trauma’, but he doesn’t believe that writing can supply any shortcut to healing. He insists that there’s no way around the work of it, the imperatives of learning, reading and literary craft. For him this is finally personal and intimate; as an Aboriginal man with Irish grandparents, he must find a speaking position, and a literary voice, in which that hybrid identity can be claimed and made to work.

This is complicated, and disquieting: if the facts of hybrid origins enter into questions about his speaking and writing voice, then how about mine, ours, white Australia’s at large? If his identity is unfixed, mobile, what then of his readers’ – faced with radical difference, called to attention by history? I look down again at the land. There are the salt lakes, miles of them stark white in the distance; so we’re over the Simpson Desert, or is it the Strzelecki?

I suddenly remember the practicalities of Alice, like drinking enough water, even in winter, and wonder if I’ve packed enough skin lotion – washing in bore water can set off intolerable itchiness. Looking down now, it’s red desert, merging far off to gold, gold cooling into blue: like one of those Rothko paintings where the eye moves upward from gory, purplish depths into light.

The next essay is about Aboriginal men and what Dennis calls spiritual sickness, but I can’t take any more on board for the moment; I fold the papers away and shut the briefcase. In aeroplane reading, you often glide too easily over words which ought really to bring you to a stop.

“Yellow Fella”

I call in at CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association. Once a modest radio operation, this is now a multimedia production house, with a base on Todd Street along from the gallery strip. There I find the DVD I want, a documentary called Yellow Fella, seen first at the film festival in June. The reason I want it now is that I think this film, and Dennis’s writings, are working along converging tracks. You could say I need them to think with.

The director, Ivan Sen, films a journey with the actor Tom Lewis, beginning with memories of his role in the 1978 feature The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. He says he felt that role was close to his own life, a young, restless man of mixed descent struggling to find a path between two clashing cultures. The documentary finds him thirty years on, seeking out and affirming the difficult double inheritance: “I’m not black, I’m not white, I’m yellow fella and it’s going to stay that way.”

His search is for the grave of his white father, the Welsh stockman Hurtle Lewis, with whom, in his teens, he spent a few brief periods of time. He is filmed at the wheel, talking energetically as he drives across Arnhem Land. Along the way we also get to know his Aboriginal mother, Angelina George, who sits in the back, dignified and laconic. Once, on the property where she went to work as a servant in her teens, the white man pursued her, with strong encouragement from her own relatives. She “got used to it,” she says, but when her child was born, she took him back to her own home country at Roper River. Hurtle Lewis followed her to offer marriage, but she refused him, and kept to her own path.

Tom was brought up by her and his Aboriginal stepfather, whom he remembers with love; but he also shows how much it has mattered that his natural father cared enough to make that journey. Now they’re driving 600 kilometres to the Tennant Creek cemetery, where Tom thinks he might find the grave. From the passenger seat, the camera keeps a close grip on his changing emotions. He talks fiercely about what it means to be both black and white in present-day Australia; he says it’s like being in a pinball machine, tossed violently to and fro. He remembers, vividly, the short times with his natural father. He identifies a bush hill on the changing horizon as a sacred site, and turns to the camera to attack white society furiously for destroying the land, for sacrilege.

You could get embarrassed; as he drives and is driven to make sense of his story – at close quarters, moving in and out of anger, sometimes weeping – it’s hard to sort out responses. There’s room to be on his side, but what can we do with our own? Later, as the film ends, and Tom has failed to find the grave, he keeps on arguing with fate: “I’m not black, I’m not white, I’m yellow fella.” For his two fathers: “I love them both. God bless them both.”

He says he’s finding an inner balance, but after the passages of agitation, anger and weeping, we wonder whether he’s not working too hard on it, trying to wrestle his way into feeling what he thinks he ought to feel. Old stories are evoked: memories of the mid-century painter Albert Namatjira, the first Aborigine whose name many of us, who were children then, ever heard pronounced. His story and others have been transmitted as tragedies of irreconcilable conflict when the Aboriginal figure, virtually doomed by his talent, is caught between two worlds. In 1959, Namatjira – sick at the time, not far from his death at fifty-seven – was in trouble for supplying alcohol to relatives; he was judged to be assimilated, and thus permitted to drink, but his kinsmen were not. The painful contradictions in the assimilation policy were efficiently exposed. Some have claimed that the case helped to finish it, but in fact the nation’s governments went on trying for another decade to turn Aboriginality into a darker shade of white.

The truth in the conflict stories is undeniable; Tom himself, with the pinball-machine metaphor, asserts their continuing painfulness. But for the purposes of romantic racism, versions of predestined doom have been only too convenient. Now, when Indigenous speakers, writers and artists of mixed descent address the majority in Australia, their Aboriginality is usually paramount. Audiences know what political correctness requires; Aboriginality must be affirmed and applauded. So when it gets to question time, after a reading or conference paper, nobody asks: what are you doing with your white inheritance? Sometimes the guest is almost hostile in positioning the audience as Other, shackled in white privilege. But sometimes too, on a public platform, a writer or artist may find herself placed as more definitely Indigenous than she wanted; she might well have concerns other than Aboriginal identity.

In Yellow Fella, with a remarkable performance as himself, Tom Lewis makes a break in those disabling circuits. His search for the grave plays out a wider history in which white and Aboriginal lives have always been intimately entangled. In blood and intimacy, as well as in all the bigger histories, they’ve been sharing the country for centuries. There aren’t too many fourth- and fifth-generation white Australians who can be sure they have no Aboriginal blood. Tom’s search is left unresolved, and the film leaves us with his emotional wrestling. It asks us to see the past working dynamically in the present, a past that’s not to be taken as wrapped up, tied off and done with.

Government sees things differently. It thinks in boxes and immoveable boundaries and, refusing to learn from history, is condemned to repeat it. The minister whose numerous portfolios include Aboriginal Affairs will decide, without consultation with those most concerned, which organisation continues to draw public sustenance and which one won’t, and he will trumpet his decisions on what’s good for Indigenous Australians and what isn’t, much like a primary school principal speaking in the supposed interests of the children. We’re back to a pre-1960s politics, where Indigenous Australians are defined all over again as marginal; it’s the Victorian recipe, charity laced with moralism. History has been censored out, along with present-day social realities, of the places where history is lived.

So it was consistent that when the government trumpeted major policy statements to mark its tenth anniversary in office, there was nothing on Aboriginal policy, and no admission that it merits a central place. As government spokespersons are quick to remind us, it was the much-respected Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson of Cape York who most definitively insisted, years ago now, on the wrongs of passive welfare, and on Aboriginal responsibility and moral capacity. Now, when all that has been turned round to justify a revival of old, discredited paternalisms, he and other leaders refuse to speak against them.

Elsewhere, in the unofficial politics of dissident public gatherings everywhere, Indigenous representation is beyond politically correct. It’s mandatory, and the government’s politics of denial work as provocation. Major educational institutions engage seriously in Aboriginal studies – not only anthropologists and historians, but also economists, health workers, students of culture and literature and cinema. They find the boundary areas irresistible. We begin to see the force of a call Umberto Eco made many years ago, for a “reverse anthropology,” for dialectic, for the necessity that observer and observed should change places, and that “we” – the white majority – begin to see ourselves as we are seen: beneficiaries of invasion and dispossession.

Thus, as Dennis McDermott has charitably written, white Australia is “in recovery from a long habit of removing blackfellas from the scene.” He sees that such recovery is a difficult business “for the nation, as much as for those dispossessed, taken, sidelined, whitewashed or airbrushed out.” And elsewhere, memorably: “This country has a long, pot-holed track, where a road should be, between where we are now and reconciliation with our own history, let alone any real Indigenous and gubba [white person] embrace.”

After the screening of Yellow Fella at the film festival, there was a low-key Q and A, with Tom Lewis on stage. He moved off from this particular film to plead to the whole audience, probably a thousand or so at the time, to keep struggling for the precarious life of Australian filmmaking. He confirmed the film’s inclusiveness when he said, please don’t let the industry go: “This is our campfire,” he said.

He got a huge wave of applause. It was a utopian moment; black and white were encircled together, and in a flash there was no problem. Round campfires, people are literally on a level.

Along the pot-holed track

But the space must be cleared to build fires, and there Dennis comes in, insisting on Australia’s fundamentally bicultural nature. Like Sally Morgan and other Indigenous writers, he came late to the knowledge of his Aboriginality. His poem “Page Three Story” recalls an ironic tale from the mid-1950s. When his darker-skinned older sister won the City of Sydney Eisteddfod for her singing, the Daily Mirror ran the headline “First Aborigine Wins Eisteddfod.” But then

The only person apparently not pleased
Was my mother. Didn’t they know
The Trinidad connection? Our honourable line
Of West Indian descent? The life-line that
Bound us mix-ups to our parents. My mother called it
Slur, called for an apology, asked for
And got a printed retraction. Page three.
That put them in their place.

McDermott doesn’t blame his mother, Dorothy, for thus energetically repudiating her real ethnicity and fabricating a different one; her extreme anxieties were part of the whole picture, and thus his book of well-honed poems is called Dorothy’s Skin. There was a lot at stake: not just that Aboriginality was downgraded and disreputable, but that the kids could have been taken away from her. The siblings were obliged to believe the Caribbean tale until their twenties; then they worked things out for themselves and took their Aboriginality on board. McDermott now says “As someone with both Irish grandparents and Aboriginal grandparents, in trying to write unselfconsciously, though not uncritically, about my Aboriginality, questions as to what constitutes authenticity of voice are more than academic to me… Defensive identities set hard, deny the reality of ongoing cultural evolution.”

There he strikes at the centre of present-day Hansonism: “The acute awareness of loss, the simmering anger and the sense of diminution… Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suffering may be of a different order: longer, harder, sharper… but we all lose, under present arrangements.” Knowingly or not, McDermott is repeating Gough Whitlam’s call in 1973: that without coming to terms with Aboriginality and the facts of dispossession, “all Australians are diminished.” But he goes further; he wants Australian writing, from both black and white, to “get to grips with this bloody barrier – that not only cuts us off from each other, but from the so-slowly won wisdom crucial to living here… this unique here”:

Australia needs the Indigenous knowledge, and the frameworks for acquiring and living out that knowledge, that it has always pushed away. If… Australia’s environmental and economic survival, and the persistence of our humanity, depend on some contemporary manifestation of traditional, respectful relations with “land” in all its totality: of being “owned by” the land, rather than owning it – then that becomes a major challenge for Australian writing generally.

Shifting metaphors, he finds that the denials and attendant misunderstandings are huge spaces, like the wide areas of darkness in Rover Thomas’s paintings. The cover of Dorothy’s Skin carries a segment of Thomas’s Ngarin Janu Country. Invoking the great Kimberley painter is like calling up thunder. In 1994, Thomas’ work was on large-scale display for the first time in the National Gallery, and I remember how on a grey Canberra day his larger works, with black mystery in vast ponds and channels moving through clay and sand, stopped us in our tracks. Nothing had prepared us for painting like this, the chasms of complex, alien knowledge, areas of incomprehension; stillness; great emotional distances, gaps and rough gullies in a history which still had to be taken on as our own. This is how McDermott writes of that artist’s way of representing “the killing times”:

Rover paints in reverse:
A massacre’s just a skull up a tree.

He makes the sky fall in
on how things are held to be: ground takes shape,
becomes visible; what we thought figure
now looks ground.

… Rover shows no blood, but when I stop
driving, become a passenger, I see. Now, vision seeps

through canvas. I see the earth turning, people
wound to the point of discharge, serpent winds
that dance, like Kali, the desperate’s renewal.

So the transformation of Australian self-understanding must not be only for the political and social domains; it is, first and last, a matter of extending imaginations.

McDermott has a special freedom. He can call on Rover Thomas, and go ranging across European literature as well. Thinking again of separations and denials, he quotes from the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s poem “Vermeer”:

It hurts to go through walls; it makes you sick
but it’s necessary.
The world is one. But… the wall is part of yourself.

At that rate, such walls must be demolished first from within. First, but not only. There is always a kind of comfort in affirming the psychic and personal domain, but unless the inward paths lead us back and out, through those classrooms into politics and history, they are sad dead ends. •

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HOWEVER unreasonably, I find myself wishing that Clint Eastwood had somehow found a bit part for himself, Hitchcock-fashion, in the thick structure of J. Edgar – even if he’d done no more than appear and disappear in the recesses of those gloomy Washington rooms, perhaps as a reminder of time’s eventual revenges. This is a dark film in every sense, a stern film, with Hoover’s psychopathology made visible and set in operation as a central cause of the FBI’s endless build-up, the expansion and multiplication of its investigation systems. The question it calls up is: why now? Does the present American moment provide a place from which we can look back on Hoover’s FBI, as though its time was really gone? Over to WikiLeaks for the answer.

Leonardo DiCaprio appears thickened and scowling, full of admonitions; known so long as a young and youngish actor, he is called on here to play someone who was never young at all, mother’s boy though he is. As the mother, Anna Marie, Judi Dench puts in a fine turn as a woman whose energies are concentrated entirely on her son; in the one childhood sequence, she promises him a future in which he will enjoy great power. He gets it, amassing millions of documents on innocent citizens as well as on some who might have been involved with petty crime or gangsterdom, and on others, post–second world war, who might or mightn’t have been communists or fellow-travellers. The registry of fingerprints ran into many millions. That was the Cold War, or part of it; paranoia unlimited.

Hoover’s secretary, Helen Gandy, knew the vast range of the files and may have known, in the end, even more of their contents than Hoover did himself. Here Naomi Watts moves on from the CIA (Fair Game) to the Bureau; could there be other such roles, as American cinema continues to engage with recent history? Gandy will be indispensable, learn the system and become its assiduous guardian, and remain in her position for the forty-seven years of Hoover’s reign. Glamorous at first, she ages with him, as does his second-in-command Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer); he and Hoover just might have been lovers, and then again might not. In any event they shared lives and holidays, and one lurking suggestion is that open homosexuality was so far out of the question in the period – close as that period still is – that Hoover was virtually chaste; that self-discipline in that respect might not have been a problem for someone so fully obsessed with power. Christopher Hitchens once wrote that Hoover’s dirty little secret was simply that he had no dirty little secret.

The personal tensions explode toward the end, set off when Tolson tries to blow Hoover’s power fantasies apart. There Eastwood, and his writer Dustin Lance Black, give us an extraordinary burst of drama in which love and hate are entangled, in an intimacy that’s almost horrific. But the story which should matter most in this welter of material isn’t personal. We should see the cover-up, and Gandy’s eventual destruction of a huge repository of files, and get a stronger sense of the Bureau’s relation to other structures – the CIA obviously, but also to governments and successive administrations. Those are barely sketched, though in one exchange Jeffrey Donovan does a fair look-alike with Bobby Kennedy.

This is Eastwood’s thirty-second film as a director. There’s no easy way to relate it to earlier wonders: Mystic River, Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima and Gran Torino. I name the works I care for most, those I most want to see again; but many others will want to extend the list to take in Eastwood’s much longer history as a performer, the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s wild westerns, Dirty Harry and all. J. Edgar adds little to the list; but however you may want to order it, a major retrospective is called for.

ON THE home front: all concerned with local film will know that the AFI awards have become the AACTAs, given annually by the newly constituted Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. Given the need for an active critical climate, these should be argued over publicly and energetically; the criteria should be spelled out. Some of this year’s decisions will be generally welcomed – Snowtown’s and Justin Kurzel’s for best direction, best adapted screenplay, best lead actor (Daniel Henshall) and best supporting actress (Louise Harris); cinematographer Don McAlpine’s Raymond Longford award for lifetime achievement; and Ivan Sen’s Byron Kennedy Award for, as the citation went, “his unique artistic vision and for showing, by his resourceful multidisciplinary filmmaking, that telling stories on screen is in reach of all who have something consequential to say.” Well said; but Sen’s Toomelah wasn’t in competition, perhaps because its release dates (such as they’ve been so far) didn’t meet the criteria. The prize for best film went to Red Dog; since the twenty-one nominees included The Eye of the Storm, Snowtown and The Hunter, it seems that critical judgement bowed out and populism took over. Mrs Carey’s Concert took the award for best documentary; The Tall Man, discussed in this column some weeks ago, was its main competition – a film which had far harder work to do, and did it with style that matched its courage. For a witty and penetrating comment on the AACTA event, go to Tina Kaufman’s discussion on Screen Hub.

I recommend the truly cinematic delights of The Artist and Hugo, and hope to discuss them. Along with the remarkable Iranian film A Separation, soon to hit the circuits, they’re not to be missed.

The post Power play appeared first on Inside Story.

THERE were long queues for The Iron Lady at my local Dendy. It seems to work as the holiday choice for grownups; after steering the kids through Tintin, the Harry Potter exhibition and the Muppets, people head off to the Thatcher film for an hour or so of engagement with the real world and recent history – though that’s not exactly what they get. On its surfaces the film is fluently pleasurable, with a compelling rhythm in the recurrent movement between the shadowed present of the aged, housebound Thatcher and her past times at centre-stage. Meryl Streep’s performance goes beyond inspired mimicry; she performs that Thatcher whose ascent among the Tories was powered by skill and conviction, with the calculated appeal to the wisdom of the honest housewife trading heavily on her special notion of common sense and personal responsibility for just about everything. The unions must be dealt with firmly, and there are no troublesome geo-politics involved in the war over the Falklands. That situation is simple; the islands “belong to Britain, and I want them back.”

So small-business capitalism triumphs at home, and an amazingly old-fashioned imperialism gets away with it – temporarily, anyhow – abroad. You’ve only got to look at the PM in her blue suits, with the mandatory pearls and helmet hairdo (and if you’re female and old enough, think about what we were actually wearing in the ’80s), to see that she was out-of-date to begin with: the presentation expressed not conservative politics, but a whole reactionary program. Why and how so much of Britain fell for it are questions the film doesn’t even try to address.

With an uneven stoop, and convincing prosthetics on face and neck, Streep quite brilliantly inhabits the floundering old woman, suffering her own decline and seemingly uncertain about how she ever got there. Here the director, Phyllida Lloyd, and writer Abi Morgan go bravely into the domains of old age and dementia; some have seen their film as primarily an essay on that life-territory. It has been reported that Mrs Thatcher, as she now is, has forgotten that her husband Denis has died; in the film, she is repeatedly in conversation with his shade (Jim Broadbent, splendidly down-to-earth and unghostly) so that while he was her faithful support in life, he’s now her fantasy-refuge from senile desolation. Pathos is allowed its moments – Maggie buying her milk and finding that the price is up to 49p; her hands in the sink, washing up a single fine, gilt-edged china teacup.

Their younger selves (Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd) are plausibly charming; the only feminist issue at the outset is an individual matter – it appears that Denis wanted to marry her because of her ambition, not in spite of it. From there, the striking aspect is her gendered isolation; the blue suit is constantly seen solitary in a crowd of dark male ones, and there are simply no female coevals – where, for example, was Barbara Castle, and Margaret Thatcher’s contemporary, the Queen, with whom, after all, she did have to deal for more than a decade? Discussing responses, people hesitate to mention the issues, as though they didn’t want to be caught at political correctness.

There is an argument, and it can be strongly held, that any film should be judged on its own claims and in its own terms; this one is a kind of biopic about a national leader who left the stage more than twenty years ago, and the invited response is centred on her impressive rise and fall. While her wrong-headedness is there on show, it also seems as though old age has allowed the film-makers a kind of alibi for history. Some have taken the film on its own terms and enjoyed it, politics regardless; many others, who can’t forgive Thatcher, monetarism and neoliberalism in general, don’t forgive the film either. One friend of mine angrily called it “an apology for the dispossessions of capital.” Several American reviewers found it confused and confusing on policies and events; the New Yorker’s David Denby found it “an oddly unsettling compound of glorification and malice [which] whirls around restlessly and winds up nowhere.”

Had the film’s material been worked into the kind of fiction we get with The Ides of March, these charges wouldn’t stick; the problem is that once history has been named, it should be dealt with. You wouldn’t know from this version how much conflict there was within and among those working classes whom Thatcher was determined to chastise, and there’s no part here for Arthur Scargill. The bomb in the Brighton hotel doesn’t kill Denis or Margaret, but we get no sense of the IRA’s reasons; and as the economic medicine was dispensed, there were more than three million unemployed in that prime minister’s Britain. The striking miners are seen, both visually and conceptually, as a single raging mass, and I was reminded of the late Raymond Williams’s most famous sentence: “There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” The last thing he’d have denied, however, was the existence of society; in a famous line not included in the film, Thatcher said there was no such thing. The film to communicate her legacy might well be documentary history, and surely it wouldn’t leave out one bit I really wanted – the lady’s dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev? “We can do business with him” – remember? The film-makers didn’t, and being too young is no excuse. Archival news footage is powerfully evocative, and there’d be no need for scripted dialogue.

Jean-Luc Godard has insisted on the difference between making political films and making films politically. The latter, in Godard’s own five decades of practice, is a matter of styles and strategies, with little or no investment in individual destinies – though if you want politics and everyday life, there’s nothing tougher, or funnier, in all modern cinema than the shoot-out between Yves Montand and Jane Fonda in Tout Va Bien (Everything’s OK, 1972), when it’s about mixed motives, principles and personal journalistic ambitions. The repair of the couple, however, does not override what the film shows about the factory workers and the population of the hypermarket; and (four years after May ’68) it doesn’t resolve the question about how leftist intellectuals, film-makers included, are to find their positions when progressive movements have been defeated by the Right. It’s that question which the film explores, performs, makes visible.

Forty years old this year, Tout Va Bien remains as modern as tomorrow. I wish George Clooney, with all his good intentions, would pick up the DVD and take a look at it; but The Ides of March is every bit as old-fashioned as The Iron Lady. Here too it’s all about individuals, and it must be said that they’re superbly and enjoyably played, by Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Ryan Gosling as the corruptible young aide on the make. They hand lots of ammunition to the enemy; all the shifting, lying and double-dealing takes place within the Democrats’ domain, and the framework seems to belong to the Clinton era rather than Obama’s. The girl, the blonde victim (Evan Rachel Wood), is an intern, and one obvious point in this gloomy, fatalistic scenario is that there’ll always be other interns, and they’ll be fair game. But there’s no Monica Lewinsky figure; it seemed to me that the echoes went back further, and the story was really about the Kennedys and Marilyn – she’ll never leave the stage. Marisa Tomei’s moments as an acute and persistent New York Times reporter lift the whole enterprise. Had there been more focus on her and her enquiries, we might have had a film just a bit less male-dominated, and one that told us something we didn’t know only too well already.

AFTER all that conformism, Pedro Almódovar’s gender-bending in The Skin I Live In was great refreshment. I’ll see it again, and comment further. Meanwhile, there’s other holiday fun in the Steven Spielberg–Peter Jackson Adventures of Tintin (3D), best seen in the company of a Tintin reader aged not much more than twelve. One of that generation tells me that the 3D glasses don’t really make much difference, but I used them and enjoyed the whole thing. Catch, if you can, Bill Cunningham New York, the documentary essay on the humane, unsinkable NY Times street photographer; he and the film are very intelligent delights. •

The post Old-fashioned politics appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN a volume arrives as the Faber Book of whatever it is — cooking, gardening, Icelandic ballads, cinema from here or there — the publisher’s name carries prestige; we expect something finely written, fully inform­ed, up to date. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins’s Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary, published in 1996, lived up to that promise. It is one of the best books I own on cinema: a wide-ranging array of documents and primary evidence gathered from a whole century, beginning with Maxim Gorky’s report in April 1896, after his first-ever viewing of moving film: “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there...”

In the vast field of evidence Macdonald and Cousins assembled, many documents, and some of the major films discussed, are French. There are nine pages on Claude Lanzmann’s huge canvas on the Holocaust, Shoah (1985), described by the editors as “one of cinema’s greatest achievements.” There are also two substantial interviews with the great ethnographer Jean Rouch (1917–2004), whose inventive documentary essays and occasional excursions in drama (Moi, un Noir) are credited with inspiring the early adventures of the New Wave from 1959 — and those first films by Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and company were indeed anthropology, pursuing their own Parisian tribes. Breaking out of specialist ethnographic audiences into wider circulation — into the Cinémathèque Française, into the proliferating ciné-clubs — Rouch’s films opened up perspectives: Europe seen from Africa.

These films were parts of a radically altered framework, in which the Third World could never again be ignored. There, cinema connected with the radical writings of Frantz Fanon, and with the cutting-edge philosophy and journalism of Sartre and Beauvoir, with their journal Les Temps Modernes, from 1945. From the later fifties the critical writings of the young cinéastes, and their early films, harked back to those major intellectual adventures of the postwar years. They also harked forward to the great political and social breaks of 1967 and ’68, and to that moment when Truffaut and Godard closed the curtains at the Cannes film festival. Meanwhile, by 1959, with Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless), the old, tasteful French cinema of quality, le cinéma du Papa, was decisively out of date. Not that Africa was necessarily visible, or even spoken of, in the works of the New Wave; rather that the privileged France of the bourgeois audience, of de Gaulle in his later reign, was faced with its own unacknowledged levels of injustice and disorder. The way young Antoine Doinel challenges the gaze of the audience at the end of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) took us all beyond the limits of that particular story; it was a command to look straight at what Beauvoir succinctly named “the lie of the bourgeois life.”

The contrast with Faber’s latest book of cinema, The Faber Book of French Cinema, could hardly be greater. Charles Drazin doesn’t mention Lanzmann or Shoah, and accords Jean Rouch only a single passing reference: serious omissions, not simply because those names should be on anybody’s list, but because they signify a failure to grasp both the range of the field and also the deep divisions within it.

Drazin argues that France has taken cinema seriously — “no other country, from the earliest years of the cinema’s existence to the present day, has done so much to defend the intrinsic worth of an extraordinary medium.” His book is offered as a linear history, and so begins with the famous documents, the Lumière brothers’ pioneering works of the late nineteenth century: the workers leaving the factory, the couple feeding their baby, the train arriving at the station. Then he moves on to Georges Méliès and his almost accidental discoveries of the new invention’s capacity for trickery, magic, the transformations of vaudeville and circus. But although he sees that marvellous plethora of genres at the dawn of cinema, Drazin settles into a simplistic program. He wants to uphold an outdated notion of French cinema as “quality,” in opposition to Hollywood as commerce, and then identifies “cinema” largely with the fictional feature film, the dominant, privileged genre. So, of course, do Margaret and David on the ABC of a Wednesday, and so do the weekend newspaper reviewers; but in a book you’ve got room to do better. Some non-fictional work does make the cut: Marcel Ophüls’s Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity); Nicolas Philibert’s superb, widely circulated documentary on a small country school, Être et Avoir (To Be and to Have). The great film essayists are nowhere to be seen; Chris Marker is mentioned just once, and none of his films is named.

The book’s most interesting passages are those in which Drazin discusses particular films in their contexts, the conditions of production and distribution. If cinema always lives between art and money, market calculations could never account for France’s output, in the 1920s, of surreal comedy and romantic farce, nor for what followed — the burgeoning through the 1930s, against all commercial sense, of the broad genre known as poetic realism, and above all of the work of Jean Renoir. The best chapter is called “The Spirit of ’36”; there Drazin grasps the short, intense history of the Popular Front, and shows how it framed and empowered five extraordinary films by Renoir: Les Bas-Fonds (The Lower Depths), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Marseillaise, La Grande Illusion and La Vie Est à Nous (Life Is Our Own). The funding was always precarious; the high optimism of that political climate is almost unimaginable — until you see the films. A darker mood prevailed in La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939). Then Renoir fled the war. The films he made in America are not discussed in this book; The Southerner, Swamp Water and The Woman on the Beach might have presented puzzles for Drazin, since he can’t allow Hollywood as “quality.” But right from their beginnings in the fifties, the riders of the New Wave always knew better than that; they knew their gangster movies, as they also knew Jean Rouch.

JONATHAN Rosenbaum’s book, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, gives us a much higher-level reconnaissance, traversing three decades of high-end critical journalism laced with regaling segments of autobiography; the late Susan Sontag’s many ambivalent readers will gain from his account of their exchanges. He was critic for the Chicago Reader for twenty years, and since retiring has written for, and/or attended to, a great range of other publications, including the Parisian Trafic and the Melbourne-based Senses of Cinema and Screening the Past. (In reference to the latter, Ina Bertrand is mis-named as Ina Bernard.) Largely thanks to Adrian Martin, he thinks well of Australian criticism, but (in these pages at least) doesn’t mention a single Australian film or film-maker. But then, in fairness, there’s nothing here of Canada either, little of Asia or Latin America; and this is one of several collections.

The point of the title is that the reception of film is no longer centrally, or even predominantly, an affair of sitting comfortably in the dark as one of an audience before a large screen. That may well be the way many of us still want it, but if cinema pervades our worlds, it’s because of VHS, DVD and computer circulation, the aesthetics of scale and fine detail regardless; this, for Rosenbaum, is the wider domain of cinephilia. Whatever we lose by it, we also gain in access to global cinema and — with luck and the availability of specialist stores and libraries — to the cinema of that other continent, the international past.

The tantalising range of Rosenbaum’s writing in this volume goes from the work everybody knows — or at least knows about — to that which is, undeservedly, hardly known at all: from Chaplin, Monroe, Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola, for instances, to the films of the Indian and Iranian avant-gardes, obscure experimentalism from many lands including the United States, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoires du Cinéma. Generic boundaries confuse, dissolve and overlap; Rosenbaum quotes, with approval, Abbas Kiarostami’s statement that there’s less of a distinction between documentary and fiction than between a good movie and a bad one. Opening a discussion of Roberto Rossellini’s great film on India (India: Matri Buhmi, or India: Mother Earth), he speaks of “the ambiguous overlaps between documentary and fiction.” So, in Rosenbaum’s generous perspective, that boundary disappears, and Imagining Reality, wonderful book as it is, is in a very special sense out of date. In its pages there’s a brief quote from Chris Marker, in whose work actuality, fiction and political reflection are always inextricably entangled. The editors had asked him, as they asked several others, to comment on his documentary objectives and on the future of documentary. Marker amiably declined to be categorised, but added, “My best wishes for your book: rarely has Reality needed so much to be imagined.” •

The post Dissolving borders appeared first on Inside Story.

TWO of the best films made in Australia, in this and most other years, are now finishing short runs at marginal sites in our cities. Many who care for cinema per se, and others who see these stories as central in the landscape, are likely to miss them altogether. They can be sought on DVD, but they repay the big-screen impact and should be allowed more of it, with more talk around them, more energetic promotion.

One of these is Ivan Sen’s Toomelah, a close-to-real-life story about a very real place, one linked to this director’s early life and family, an Aboriginal community in northern New South Wales. Its generalised depression and poverty could be the material of visual clichés; they’re not, because of the life in the performances, the conviction in the transmission of place. With trees and bush, twisting dirt roads and river, prowling cars, litter, desolate houses, indolence, the film builds Toomelah for the audience, and those who watch it in a setting of urban privilege must know they’re visiting foreign country. We see young Daniel (Daniel Connors) being kicked out of the little one-teacher school for playing up; his father has been missing in action for years, his mother sits around getting stoned, even sending off the child to collect her next stick. There’s a worn-out grandmother, who stares into space, smoking; but she cares about the ten-year-old and asks him what he’s going to do with himself. “I don’t know,” says Daniel. “What can I do?” I think that’s his longest line of dialogue: this film contains many silences, and Daniel has a highly eloquent way of looking back at his questioners; academic theorists of the cinematic gaze could have a real party with this one.

To the child’s question, some of the big men of Toomelah offer misguided answers; Daniel badly needs different grown-ups around him, different men especially. For the young and directionless, this is the kind of place where suicide is a truly possible option. But there are cracks of light, doors that open just enough to allow us some hope for this observant kid and his kind. Apart from a couple of cops seen from behind in middle distance, the one white person on the scene – and he’s barely glimpsed – is the schoolteacher; but he’s really trying. He has made a big chart for the kids, one that shows invasion and dispossession at the centre of the history they need to know. There’s an open possibility of learning why they’re here.

It might sound like the kind of film generally called “confronting.” Curiously, because of the wholeness and steadiness of Ivan Sen’s directorial vision, and its strand of comedy, it’s not. As a township Toomelah exerts its own normality, and that includes the mother who keeps her house in order and pulls her boy into line and the little girlfriend who hopes Daniel will come back to school. The invitation to the audience is to accept this world as a continuing part of the Australia we hold in our imaginations; not a problem to be fixed from outside (“intervention”!) but a place where people, deserving much better as they do, have agency. That was demonstrated a few weeks ago when Ivan Sen screened the film on a sports field in Toomelah for its own subjects; he found the responses extraordinary, far beyond what might have been expected, in the expression of lives, selves, places and identities validated, made real to their owners as never before. For such a community, there’s nothing like recognition.

Having thus worked as a cast, the Toomelah people want to go on working – in films. Sen, now partly based in Hong Kong, has said that he’ll go back, set up workshops and help them. Anything could happen, and probably will. Meanwhile, the scandal for us is that such a film couldn’t be given a mainstream outlet, with full-on mainstream promotion; it should be seen by everyone who saw Samson and Delilah, and for that matter by everyone who doesn’t know the Toomelahs are there.

IN SMALLER cinemas you might still catch one stunning documentary, The Tall Man. This was written and directed by Tony Krawitz, from Chloe Hooper’s splendid book on the struggle for justice by members of the Palm Island community, after the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee in November 2004. Through successive inquests and inquiries, the story became widely known: Doomadgee, a fit thirty-six-year-old, was walking the street singing – “happy-go-lucky,” several witnesses said, as he generally was – when he exchanged a few words, swear-words included, with Sergeant Christopher Hurley, who arrested him and took him in the police wagon to the island’s lockup; when they arrived, Doomadgee punched him. Inside, according to one witness, Hurley – a very big man, two metres tall and 115 kilos – beat Doomadgee aggressively before leaving him in a cell; forty-five minutes later the prisoner was found dead, with injuries like those which could have followed a car crash at high speed – bruising, broken ribs, a ruptured liver and massive internal bleeding. If Hurley’s blows didn’t kill him, no one can find out what did. The coronial inquiry found the officer culpable; the police and their union were outraged; after another inquest, the director of public prosecutions exonerated Hurley. After massive public demonstrations, then-premier Peter Beattie intervened. Hurley was charged with manslaughter, and a trial took place – without, however, one particular Aboriginal witness and his crucial evidence. The sergeant was found not guilty; he is now serving in the force on the Gold Coast.

Noby Clay, the featherweight boxing champion whose story was told in Boxing for Palm Island (part of the 2010 Message Sticks program) is among the storytellers, with Cameron Doomadgee’s sisters and partner, Tracy, who talks of his lightness of heart; she says that he could always lift the spirits of the people around him. Doomadgee’s teenage son Eric speaks about his father’s strength, and his teaching about strength. By the end of the film, we know that Eric has killed himself.

Andrew Boe, the lawyer working pro bono for the community, Chloe Hooper herself, and the journalist Tony Koch, working for the Australian, each give analyses. They are the detectives who have come in from elsewhere; now the story clearly owns them, and they can’t let go until their work for it is done. Andrew Boe says that he doesn’t believe racism was involved, but at that point, he seems to forget that racism is only partly a matter of personal attitudes; it’s bound into social structures, in histories and in the way they are told.

The case was complicated by Hurley’s impressive record of service in other Aboriginal communities, like Burketown on the Gulf, where he set up sports programs for the kids, took them camping, and involved himself busily in township projects. Murrandoo Yanner, of the Carpentaria Land Council, is a highly articulate and insightful commentator on the Burketown chapter, and here he’s a fair comedian as well. He speaks of Hurley as the only copper who’d come as a welcome visitor to his house; as a man who strove hard to recognise and deal with his own racism; as one with a lot of good in him, and also with “a dark side.” It seems likely that in a few terrible moments on Palm Island the darker elements surged up and overwhelmed the rest. In consequence, we look at the huge rallies that filled streets and squares in Townsville, then in Brisbane, some held to protest for justice on the island, and several solid thousands marching for the police.

The film doesn’t take up everything explored in Chloe Hooper’s book; for example, the intense commitment to Christian faith on the part of Elizabeth Doomadgee, or the details of the trial. It could be seen as conventional documentary, made of talking heads and scenic images; but the yield is clarity, energy, purpose. If there’s a dimension of poetry, it comes out of the place, with its compelling beauty held in tension with the knowledge of its history – a dumping ground for the unwanted, an accidental community made of people from differing tribal groups, belief systems and languages. There are also their ways of finding everyday happiness – children and grown-ups alike, splashing and fishing off the beaches, riding the island’s wild horses. There’s also an open-eyed recognition that this story is unfinished, and likely to remain so. As with Toomelah, it’s part of where we are.

JONATHAN Teplitzky’s third feature, Burning Man, has been rather over-praised. Critical questions jump out to be dealt with: how much has the response to do with the surface dazzle of Teplitzky’s style, and how much with the integration of style and story? For all the showy tangling of timelines around the central melodrama, the story is a very simple one. Two young people fall in love, marry and have a child; when that interesting small boy is eight, disaster strikes and must be dealt with, well and badly. With brilliant editing by Martin Connor, and athletic cinematography by Garry Phillips, Teplitzky fractures the tale into kaleidoscopic fragments, so that the audience must allow them to come together. When they do, the film makes considerable sense of the anger and craziness that can go with a major bereavement. We meet Tom (Matthew Goode) in an unforgivably destructive moment, tearing up his small son’s birthday party; then, as the pieces fall together, and coherence builds, there’s more to think about. Tom is manifestly young for his age (thirty-fiveish); all we know about him is that he’s an English immigrant chef, who has landed a place on Sydney’s eastern beaches. Nothing is given of the past, of the other country; the child in this story is Oscar, who is performed with fine complexity by Jack Heanly, and we get a study of the disquieting way in which such a child has to take the adult’s role in a family disordered by illness and death. While Tom is surrounded by women who want to sort him out and (mostly) bed him, Oscar is inevitably the centre of the audience’s hope and dread.

The sex scenes don’t do much for the story – perhaps the intended point is in their very banality; but the settings, in the frantic restaurant kitchen, the house, cafe, beaches, are expressively crowded and detailed. As far as it goes, the film is carried by Teplitzky’s own sharp script and by the performances; Matthew Goode’s, with Bojana Novakovic, Essie Davis, Rachel Griffiths and Kerry Fox among others around him. The pervasive music is by Lisa Gerrard, whose work I have greatly admired since Balibo; this time the score is rather too soulful, as though Tom is being confirmed in self-pity. But then this is melodrama; if the family is torn, the family must be mended. The music is there to remind us, as though we were likely to forget. •

The post Here and now appeared first on Inside Story.

IT HAS been said that only the most truly serious artists know how to be properly trivial; because they can slog through the depths, they know better than others how to dance around the surface – Shakespearean comedy comes to mind, a lot of Bach and Mozart, a lot of jazz. Form and style transcend ostensible content, and the work is not to be reduced to statements; but with all that said, there are whole cine-literate cohorts who can’t be persuaded to take Woody Allen seriously. I concede that he’s had his off seasons, but such concessions can only be made when you’ve acknowledged the size and weight of the oeuvre; and the moment you’ve written off some of the recent lesser works (Celebrity, Deconstructing Harry, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) as so much fluff, someone will turn up the nuggets inside them. Confession: I’ve enjoyed all of them. There are always at least a few great lines, clarity of mise en scène and story construction, and pleasure in performance – even if you can’t stand Mia Farrow’s whiny voice.

Midnight in Paris involves a flight across time, much as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) allowed Mia to jump the barrier between the cinema screen and her lonely place in the audience, and as Stardust Memories (1980) took a muddle-headed film director into the European cinema of his aspirations (some called that one a New York version of Fellini’s 8½; it was actually a much better film). This time Allen follows a much younger, bumbling alter ego, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) from present-day tourists’ Paris into a whirling dream of the town in Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920s, with Scott, Zelda, Ernest, Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein, Luis Bunuel, Picasso and T.S. Eliot all making appearances, superbly cast and costumed. The legendary past lifts Gil away from the considerable discontents of his twenty-first-century life; he’s engaged, inexplicably, to Inez (Rachel McAdams), a bossy, materialistic blonde harridan, and thus involved with her impossibly conventional Republican parents; he’s harnessed to lucrative commercial scriptwriting, and (of course) wants to soar above it all and write a world-beating novel.

Gil also wants to live in Paris, the Paris of his American imagination – and maybe, when it comes to that, Woody Allen’s; a city that has never known car-burning riots, financial crises and Sarkozy, and never heard of the strikes and insurrections of the 1960s. In that after-midnight dream city, Gertrude Stein is prepared to read the draft and tell him he’s showing promise; he can show Bunuel how well he knows his films; he can dally with the girl who’ll run off to Africa with Hemingway. He’ll then discover how these dancers of the Jazz Age dream of being back in La Belle Epoque, when things really were wonderful; the newcomers to the cultural milieu in every period will be told that they’ve missed the really great days, the time only just gone. In the interactions of past and present, one of the funniest twists has to do with the surrealists, Dali and Bunuel, who have no problem at all with Gil’s claim to be arriving from the future; while the hapless detective – hired by Inez’s father to tail Gil at night – gets hopelessly lost in eighteenth-century Versailles.

As ever, Allen nails the anxieties of the Western culturati, and makes comedy out of the wannabe artist’s shaky grip on the world and on his own identity; while worrying incessantly about his own authenticity, Gil scorns others for pseudo-intellectual pretension. The film’s musicality, lightness and grace allow us to indulge his romantic unease – crazy as they were in those particular 1920s, perhaps their madness had its special grip on truth, while Republican banalities can be consigned, along with temporal logic, to the domain of nightmare. The balletic weavings of the plot are like those of Restoration comedy, but the plot is not the film.

With Midnight in Paris, his forty-first film, Woody Allen has again divided critics and audiences; at least one critic finds him now caught up in shallow self-parody. Others have hailed a “return to form.” He’s never going to make it too easy; some find his array of characters almost wholly alien, company they don’t want to keep, since empathy is clearly precluded. Allen doesn’t ask us to invest in his flitting, anxiety-ridden men, nor in their spiky, unloveable female muses and partners – though a measure of compassion, mingled with comic exasperation, may sometimes be in order (consider Judy Davis’s character in Husbands and Wives). At his most searching, looking at the high bourgeoisie, Allen can open up a space for real moral horror; there’s no darker film in our time than Crimes and Misdemeanours. From the whole forty-one, I’d like a partial retrospective; one taking in the smaller, near-forgotten treasures as well as the essential Zelig: Shadows and Fog for dark, Manhattan Murder Mystery for dark and light together. •

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SOMETIMES the most unlikely fusion of modes can actually work. In the extraordinary case of The Eye of the Storm, it must have taken high courage from the director Fred Schepisi, the actor-writer Judy Morris, their producers – and a whole array of Australian funding bodies – to go anywhere near that novel, which in itself is nothing short of magnificent. This film was a giant gamble, and they won. It had to be an actors’ film, and has been judged and summarised as such; but to the great credits of director, writer, cinematographer Ian Baker and the entire team, it is very much more.

It’s all stops out, high theatre as cinema, rising to the operatic with the actual storm on the island. That event is cinematic splendour; but the film works to open up the greater storm, the one made by the energies let loose within a family and a household at the time of a central death, the kind of death that is both desired and dreaded by next of kin and inheritors. Such an event leaves the survivors beached, with nothing much to do and, in these cases – those of Elizabeth Hunter’s drifting middle-aged children – little psychological equipment to make adequate sense of either her life or their own. It’s in the extended family, that of the nurses and carers, that the violence is exercised; and with the cast, Morris’s finely spun script ensures that each of them becomes more than a function. Alexandra Schepisi is a marvellous schemer, Flora the nurse, who fails to trap the appalling Sir Basil (Geoffrey Rush); Helen Morse negotiates the sadness and horror of Lotte, the servant and dancer, who had only her role for Elizabeth to live for. John Gaden as the family solicitor Wyburd – and this is far from a simple retainer’s role – is as good as he always is, and that’s saying a lot.

The principals, Charlotte Rampling as Elizabeth, Judy Davis as the acid, defeated Dorothy de Lascabanes, and Rush do more than inhabit their roles; they work together, making sense not simply of persons but more tellingly of relationships. Rampling was a great choice, glinting from the pillows under a variety of wigs, encompassing both the malign matriarch and also the needy one, whose relations with her children are infinitely complicated. She and Davis make real the mother–daughter duo, stumbling to come to terms around Elizabeth’s undignified end: last-minute humiliation for an intransigent patrician (this actually happened to Patrick White’s mother Ruth). Brother and sister together can tell more of the truth than they ever could apart, though Sir Basil the London actor, with the failed Lear in his record, will go on kidding himself. Geoffrey Rush has never been funnier.

I don’t know how often the Melbourne mansion Ripponlea has done filmic service for the wealthy, traditional Anglo-Australian households of fiction, but here it is again, at least as an exterior setting. Whether the interiors belong to it I don’t know, but with dark polished rooms, draperies and fine furniture, they fill out the trappings of that squattocracy’s world that nurtured Patrick White in his well-being, his attachments and his hatreds. The drama is centred in such a house in White’s Centennial Park, Sydney; but Sydney’s here in only glimpses – black swans on the lake in that park, a harbour ferry and, more significantly, the arches of the Opera House when Rush’s Sir Basil climbs the grand stairway and parades briefly on the outside of those spaces he’d have loved to enter as a performer. (This could have been meant as a signature moment; did Schepisi and Morris know that White appeared, publicly and bravely, as a supporter of Jørn Utzon in the crisis days of 1966?)

There are regaling contrasts and visual mood changes, from the oppressive rooms to the country house, the forested island, the sandy roads among the paperbarks; while the beach and waters at the end offer a certain kind of redemption. There the story forgives Elizabeth, as the servants do. Some critics have been tougher, commenting on the way the film transmits White’s misanthropy; once entered into, however, that dim view of motive and character is also a complex one, yielding up a lot more than we asked. Schepisi and Morris do it justice. There’s a vista here. Both film-makers and readers – the latter including literary critics – could yet do more to meet the challenges posed by Patrick White. After many failed projects on Voss, that terrifying visionary tale may remain eternally unfilmable, and so be it; not so the rest.

CHANNELLED through Geoff Gardner’s invaluable e-mail circuit Film Alerts, there has been one proper challenge to dominant opinion about another Australian film currently playing. Geoff supplies his readers with box-office figures for Australian productions, as well as rounding up critical views, and reminding all of us what we ought to be recording from SBS 2 at 3 am. After his note last month on the record-breaking box-office success of the amiable, kelpie-centred Red Dog, Geoff ran this response from Tom Ryan, regular critic for the Sunday Age (excerpted):

I fear that your unrelenting focus on box-office figures for Australian films has led you to overlook one very important fact about Red Dog. That is: at a time when Australia’s dark side has been so clearly exposed, its production and release is [sic] pernicious.

It insists… that we’re a nice multi-cultural nation, and that the spirit of Australia imbedded in a dog covered in Pilbara red is all that’s required to bring us all together. We’re all lapping this up, toddling off to the box-office to pay our money, to be patted on the back and to be reassured that we’re all good (white) folks, while (racist) crimes against humanity are being committed in our name.

By all means celebrate box-office figures if you must. But please don’t present the films as if they’re simply a means to an end. What they have to say and their quality or lack of it matter a lot more than the money they make.

Red Dog is among other things a great rendering of the red gravel of the Pilbara, where most of us don’t live and not so many actually go (superb cinematography by Geoffrey Hall, with the script from Louis de Bernières’s novel by Bernières and Daniel Taplitz). It is otherwise a kids’/young adult film, meant to make the audiences feel good and just a little weepy; Koko the kelpie is a wholly engaging central character in the long, long line of feel-good animal-centred movies since Lassie Come Home (1943, with the late Liz Taylor, aged twelve, starring with the collie). In fact Red Dog’s supporting cast is not all white, nor all Anglo; and on Tom Ryan’s side, I’d have been glad myself to see a few more Aboriginal faces. Racism and xenophobia are taken up, if only mildly, in the opening sequences; and it must be said that Kriv Stenders emerges again as one very good director, who now needs a more complicated subject.

If Tom Ryan is thinking especially of the villainous policy on asylum-seekers – still current after all these years – and of the racist and discriminatory Northern Territory Intervention, I am more than all with him. (They’re some of the main reasons I vote Green rather than Labor.) But this film is only inside our targets if we insist on taking it as nationally representative. It is not. It addresses a particular market; it is talking to ten-, twelve- and maybe fourteen-year-olds. It takes them out of the suburbs. It gives a benign version of community (so, in their days, did John Ford and Jean Renoir). And no, we shouldn’t be lying to them; but how many stories will you ask them to take on at once?

The campaign to fight is one that would, among other things, get Ivan Sen’s Toomelah – seen and briefly discussed after the film festival screenings – on to the wider circuits. From then find the writers, and directors of Kriv Stenders’s and Warwick Thornton’s calibre, who’ll take on the detention centres and the policy-plagued outback communities in feature-film genres. There are producers and distributors to be supported as well, with attention to their struggle for local and wider markets.

Not least we – the writers on the sidelines – can be extending our responses to those other film-makers, the documentarists, who struggle hard to tell the truth on those battlefronts. Meanwhile, it is a truth not sufficiently acknowledged that we can’t fight effectively on all fronts at once. •

The post Rising to the operatic appeared first on Inside Story.

SOME say that Page One, a lively, complex, searching documentary currently on cinema screens, is only for the dying generations of those who – in the teeth of galloping change for the public media – persist in loving newsprint. Against those voices, I can’t but remember others, which were heard predicting the death of cinema from the moment television arrived. Cinema survived, retreated on some fronts and advanced on others, morphed and proliferated, because there were always enough people who wanted to make it, and enough wanting to see it. Similarly, serious journalism does things nothing else can do, as its practitioners tell us in this film, and for that reason it has to stay – somehow navigating fierce opposing currents. It’s life and death; without the transmission and sharing of information that the ruling powers would rather you didn’t get, we can’t have liberal democracy. That’s not to say that we’ll always need newsprint; one good thing about Page One is that it puts the argument out there, and it should be taken up.

The film manifests a confidence and courage which border on the romantic; its makers (writer-producer Kate Novack, director-cinematographer Andrew Rossi) clearly love the kind of journalism to which the New York Times belongs, with serious, time-consuming investigation coming to the surface in long articles and series. There’s also a sense that a certain kind of loyalty is at work, that some film makers and some kinds of journalist are kindred, sharing obsessions. The Times was one of three papers which shared in WikiLeaks’s project on that murderous episode in Iraq, when innocent journalists themselves were wilfully killed in fire from an American helicopter; there’s a sequence here in which Julian Assange stakes out adjoining ethical territory. He can partner with journalism where there’s a link with his own activism, but he wants to be identified more as activist than as journalist; he says that while with activism you can see a clear pursuit of justice, the values of journalism are “more muddled.” Those words, however, help to mark out the Times’s territory from other parts of the print landscape, and the stances taken by its various section editors make it clear that while across America newspapers are going down like ninepins, this one has not only to survive in the days of WikiLeaks and Twitter, but to do so on its own terms.

Those terms are made clear by a few of the professionals, talking to camera from their desks, phones and computers. They know they’re embattled. They are followed through the year 2009, which begins with news of the widespread closures and layoffs; here, they must lose a hundred editorial staff. The media editor Bruce Headlam appears, the classically unglamorous newspaper man in shirtsleeves, deliberating on the Times’s part in the four-way link with WikiLeaks, Der Spiegel and the Guardian. We have to wonder why the old poster for Citizen Kane is there on his office wall – a French poster at that, with the legend l’un des dix meilleurs films du monde. Of course; but Kane tracks exactly the kind of newspaper project that the New York Times, and this film, indirectly but potently oppose: the mogul’s empire. The poster is there to affirm the continuing life of the press, to insist on its legend; and at points through the film, particularly in the meditations of the executive editor Bill Keller, we can wonder whether it is living, as it were, in the slipstream of its own legend.

Today’s Kane (still), Rupert Murdoch, has a brief speaking part; he’s seen commenting that it doesn’t matter if newspapers have to be read on iPads as long as people can still read them. Perhaps the film-makers included that clip to reinforce the sense of the other kind of power possible to newspapers, the kind the mogul himself can’t have: the collaborative liveliness of the newsroom itself. Against prophecies of doom, there’s the intense dynamic of the editorial meeting, where section editors fight for space on A1 – that’s the front page; and where it’s decided that the Times, for one, won’t fall for the pseudo-news of a phoney pull-out in Iraq, won’t give it the big headline Washington seems to ask for.

The action is centred on a handful of characters around the paper’s media desk. Young Tim Arango, who dreamt in his early youth of working for this newspaper, demands frontline journalism; he goes to Iraq, and soon becomes the Baghdad bureau chief. Brian Stelter, compulsively tweeting, is a young fat boy who loses ninety pounds through 2009, and tells everyone all about it on his blog. The main pursuit is of David Carr, who does the big story on corruption at the Chicago Tribune, and hunts out the dealings between CNN and Vice magazine. Carr is tall, gawky, gloomy and reedy-voiced; before entering journalism, at a later age than most, he was a drug addict, and then a single father on welfare, and he says that after all that nothing much can scare him.

It would have been good to meet more of the workers, women especially, and to see more of other editorial domains; but the focus on the media section has to do with the general overhanging threat.

Newspapers, they tell us, will be gone in five years from now. What will it be like without them? Will iPads and Kindles really do their jobs? It is not enough to insist that inter-networking, blogging and tweeting make everyone a potential publisher, and that they add up to a new kind of cultural democracy. What happens to craft and training, to the development of analysis, the language skills we use to extend our own understanding and others’, the expressive interactions between photography, cartooning and the printed word?

Toward the end of the film, National Public Radio is mentioned as a model for newspapers as advertising sources keep on drying up. NPR, with around 160 regional stations around the United States, is funded partly from federal government sources, partly by corporate and private philanthropy. (ABC News Radio picks up its excellent public affairs program All Things Considered, and NPR, like the ABC, comes under attack on issues of bias and prejudice from every side.) There’s nothing new in making independent critical journalism a philanthropic enterprise for enlightened benefactors, but its printed forms can’t be answerable to governments. At the end of Page One, with a high shot of that famous newsroom, the New York Times is sailing on, with a smaller crew and high bravado; the Grey Lady, as they call her, is both alive and aloof.

NOT being any kind of dance critic, I can only say of Pina that it’s completely mesmerising, a great tribute by her company to the late Pina Bausch. The familiar classical ballet repertoire contains nothing to prepare us for Bausch’s strenuous mini-dramas, devised for human bodies in space. As director, Wim Wenders gives each one its own stern clarity. Bausch wasn’t one for happy endings; her work is deeply and darkly European, haunted by memories of fascism. She devised the kinds of dance in which life and love are rebuked, admonished, called to order; one piece that sticks in the mind showed lovers being forced apart, their movements reduced to stiff puppetry, in a sequence that brought back the ultra-mechanical nihilism of the original Metropolis. The 3D glasses supplied at the cinema might be uncomfortable, but this film – like the recent work by Wenders’s compatriot Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams – makes glorious sense of 3D.

The Herzog film, seen earlier at this year’s film festivals, is currently showing on city circuits; and so, for those who might wish to feel the contrast between Pina Bausch’s kind of dance and others, is Frederic Wiseman’s La Danse, his long essay on the inner workings of the Paris Opera ballet.

For next time, after a shorter interval, I will consider Fred Schepisi’s film version of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm. It might be an idea not to read, or re-read, the novel before watching. •

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THERE’s a whole range of ways to negotiate the complex relations of film and history. Costume dramas, picturing the past, threaten to be genteel, all too tasteful; but then you find one as dynamic as Creation, a version of Charles Darwin’s emotional life as he toiled on The Origin of Species. Then there are those uncomfortable mixtures of archival material with re-enactment, beloved of SBS as they fight the Nazis time and time again. In the films of John Hughes of Melbourne, there is an elegant and eloquent balance of contemporary viewpoint with recorded memories and the material traces of the past, in his work on the submerged histories of the left in Australia: in Filmwork, The Archive Project and After Mabo among others. Part of Hughes’s gift is in showing how any work on the past is also work on the present. This is also true of the powerful documentary called Senna, which resonates the more strongly by working not with memory (talking heads) but with material traces of a short life, the Brazilian Ayrton Senna’s (1960–94).

Senna, directed by Asif Kapadia, is made entirely of old news footage and clips from the archive of the Formula One motor racing organisation, home movies, TV news footage and family photographs; in historians’ terms, primary documents. The whole essay is a major triumph of editing, by Chris King and Gregers Sall and their team; this 106-minute film was sculpted out of 15,000 hours. The visual rhythms counterpointed by Antonio Pinto’s music, with lots of bossa nova and Samuel Ferrari’s electric guitar; voiceover comment from Senna’s family and his doctor, Sid Watkins, who offers a particularly humane perspective. We follow Ayrton Senna from his teens into his thirties, beginning with go-karts – that, he says, was “real driving, pure racing, it makes me happy.” By that he means that go-karts didn’t involve money, or the infighting of the F1 organisation; we catch sight of that when Senna walks out of a back-room argument with the bullying president Jean-Marie Balestre.

On to one Grand Prix after another, the images are grainy, often jumpy and blurred; no zooming-in, no polishing by afterthought. No nostalgia, and no kind of deficit; the film builds its own aesthetic, offering a sense of seeing at close quarters, sharing the trajectory, picking up fragments of a story, with no claim to make them more than that: this is precisely not about Senna’s private life, and with tangential references to girlfriends – one, who was evidently the last, is glimpsed and named – there’s no mention at all of his very brief marriage. We hear the voices of his mother and sister, but they’re barely seen. Some commentators have registered frustration with this, but they misunderstand the film’s project. With all the young man’s glamour – and if this were fiction you wouldn’t cast him; he’s a deal too pretty – this romance is not about persons but about winning, winning the biggest possible prizes, and what the monster show-business of his races meant to a huge country in which most people are poor. Early on there are images of the favelas, the slums of Rio, where Senna pitched in and did community work in his weekends. Near the end, there are high, wide images of his funeral; the event is communal and national.

The one personal relationship that matters is the complex one with Alain Prost, the durable French champion, five years older than Senna. They began as team-mates and friends; then the rivalry set in as they alternated first and second places, and the exchanges grew venomous, to neither’s credit. Twice they collided on the track; Senna was accused of dirty tactics, and he acknowledged them. Prost emerges as the more complex, more thoughtful character; he is pragmatic and wily, where Senna is poetic and devoutly religious, always believing that God is with him on the tracks. Talking to camera, Prost says that the problem for Senna is that “he doesn’t believe he can kill himself; I think that’s very dangerous.” The survivor was a pallbearer at the funeral, and he has said that despite or because of their personal war, a part of him died with Senna.

The camera is in the capsule-cabin as Senna zooms round the circuits in Monaco, Melbourne, Japan; you share incredible speeds (250 kph), get dizzy on the bends, and come close to the phenomenal young champion as he drives the last lap of his life in San Marino, Italy. That comes only a day after the death of his competitor Roland Ratzenberger; the glimpses of Senna in the short interval show a sobered hero who actually stops to wonder why he’s doing it, asking himself what the whole game can possibly be about. Along the way he has told an interviewer that he knows there’s more to life than racing; but, he says, he will learn and discover more, he has a lot of time ahead. The audience knows otherwise, but the tension and drama are unabated. That end was not inevitable; the irony is that only hours before it came Senna was working to make the sport a safer one. We are told that there have been no deaths in F1 racing since, that safety has been increased partly because of measures he worked for, and partly because of lessons from his death.

The film has been accused of lionising Senna, producing him as angelic; in words attributed to the conservative columnist Tim Blair, its account is “unbalanced to the point of dishonesty.” Not true, if you attend properly; we do see the elements of arrogance, the spectacle of a prince enclosed in his role, in his own aura, surrounded by kin and allies who serve it; he has known nothing else. The film lets us see all that from the outside. It opens space for later contemplation of superstars and their stories, and how it’s been that Senna’s has travelled so far beyond Brazil.

IF WE really must have our literary classics illustrated, the new version of Jane Eyre is made watchable by three excellent performances. Mia Wasikowska is a grave and very intelligent Jane, one always holding resistant strength in reserve. Michael Fassbender’s handsome Rochester matches her, so that the mutual challenge is constantly felt, and he has a fair touch of the Heathcliffs – I wondered how far those Bronte girls’ fantasies were as much collective as individual; no doubt literary scholars will have busied themselves on that question. The dreadful Mrs Reed is a thankless part for Sally Hawkins; the Lowood and St John Rivers episodes are despatched rather briskly. Judi Dench is a satisfactorily earthy Mrs Fairfax; the moors are very wide and bleak, the rain comes down on cue, and guess what: love conquers all.

No time here for bloody-minded feminist considerations on the plight of the madwoman in the attic, or recollections of Jean Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea; this could have been made fifty years ago. I can’t say whether it’s the best of its long line, since I did not see the Zeffirelli version with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg; but if it sends people to bookshop or library to connect or reconnect with the truly magnificent novel, some good may have been done.

Similar considerations apply to Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, a hommage to the late and great Jacques Tati. As an animated feature, beautifully and richly drawn and painted, it is not nearly as engaging as the same director’s rich and witty The Triplets of Belleville (2003), which had a well-packed plot around three long-retired jazz singers. There’s a thematic link; again there’s ageing performer, a memory of crowded halls and sizeable audiences; but this time the story around the ageing Monsieur Hulot is too thin and wandering. The images of near-empty auditoria are only too reflexive of the film itself; when I saw it, I counted seven others in the Chauvel. Again, there’s more profit in finding M Hulot’s Holiday or Playtime, if you can find your way to some exceptionally well-stocked DVD and video source.

Failing that, I recommend the excellent American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s writings on Tati in his recent book, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (University of Chicago Press, 2010). On his subtitle, he comments that film culture “has pretty much remained in transition for all of its existence, and will continue to remain so. That is an integral part of its mystery and magic and its continuing emotional hold on us.” •

The post Dangerous pleasure appeared first on Inside Story.

IF YOU are in the dismal position of confinement to DVDs – you watch everything at home, in like-minded company or alone – you could be losing out on important things in the cinema experience. One of those is proximity to strangers, audience members whose responses may be different, perhaps very different, from yours. At the long-desired end to Peter Weir’s The Way Back, the woman next to me exhaled: Wasn’t that wonderful? Split-second choice between honesty and tact; the former was irresistible. Well, actually no, I said. For her, the film attained its grandiose ambition; for me the grandiosity, among other things, was its downfall.

For some viewers and reviewers, the case against The Way Back can be applied to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life; this one has really divided audiences. This film too has been condemned for reaching too high and too far into grand meanings, requiring the story of one family to be seen against the universe; the big bang, galactic volcanoes, the life and death of the planet. People walk out, and among those who stay you can hear, at the end, various groans: that was absolutely interminable. Bombast, said one reviewer. Flawed, botched, disjointed; phrases like “a botched masterpiece.”

Much of the life of cinema is in argument, and the cinephile’s involvement often begins when she registers, with fascination, the intensity of audience loves and hates. The Tree of Life, however, lives in a space outside argument; those who walk out, or who see it as fatally inflated, are not to be convinced by others who may have loved (just about) every minute of it. It’s tempting to judge that the former group don’t know how to respond to cinema, the full orchestration of imagery, sound, concept, narrative or philosophic progression. The philosophic dimension is rejected; there is a view that this is something cinema can’t do, that a film has to be structured by drama, clear narrative, focus on characters and persons. That view is rejected, in theory and practice, by Jean-Luc Godard, , who has said that anything whatever can be filmed.

In The Tree of Life, just about anything is. You could see the intense, near-murderous struggles within the 1950s family as being taken up and set down, distanced in a cosmic perspective, but it’s more interesting than that. The volcanic imagery near the beginning comes just after the wife and mother, played with eloquent saintliness by Jessica Chastain, receives the telegram telling of the death of the middle son. What we see then is about grief, absolutely non-negotiable loss. She gets banal advice: how she’s still got the other two, and how life will go on and the pain will pass, and how (in this evangelical southern town) the god they believe in both gives and takes away. The advice doesn’t touch her; what happens to and within a parent who loses a child has more to do with limitless cosmic chaos, and that’s what we look at.

The film goes back in time to the woman’s family, her authoritarian husband (Brad Pitt), a small-town plant manager, and their three growing boys. As the eldest, Jack, seen as he develops a justifiably murderous hatred for his dad, young Hunter McCracken gives the best performance in the film; he gets the emotional cross-currents, the building of both understanding and rebellion. When father goes on a business trip, the three kids have a magnificent time horsing round, smashing windows, playing in forbidden places, careering into the forest which was first shown, at the beginning, in prehistoric life with giant saurian predators. Then he comes back, and authority clamps down; the nature of his own failures and frustrations emerges; he really wanted to be a musician. He may earn a little pity, less forgiveness.

Nothing is solved, and it is part of the film’s genius that the family story is given in inconclusive fragments. The drama is not literal; dialogue and incident are limited, but they’re all we need to know of time, place and people; we’re watching the glancing action of memory, Jack’s. Sean Penn plays him as a late middle-aged adult, not a musician but an architect; and Penn’s sequences, among urban glass towers in Dallas, are somewhat out of key with the rest. But the film’s music, arranged by Alexandre Desplat, overrides the details, and it’s there throughout: from Bach to Berlioz and Mahler; great choral passages; strings, organ and piano. Make what you will of the light in rock crevices, ocean waves and currents; call it film opera, film poetry and in moments, film prayer. There is an extraordinary fusion of elements. What’s odd is that you can agree with everything they’ve said against it on aesthetic extravagance, artistic hubris, and still enjoy its every frame; whatever The Tree of Life is not, it’s cinema.

KELLY REICHARDT’s Meek’s Cutoff has been called a minimalist Western, a description which is accurate in some sense and quite misleading in others. The title comes up in old-style embroidery, telling us the story is set in Oregon in 1845; and the trail of three bullock-drawn covered wagons duly crosses a bare, cold landscape. There’s a patriarchal bearded leader, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), on horseback; two other men and a boy; three women, trudging along in cumbersome dresses and bonnets, one noticeably pregnant. They ford a river, baskets held high. We hear no speech among them until the boy reads aloud in the evening from the book of Genesis. There are prayers, and rationed food and water.

This is the kind of opening to sink the heart; things are grim for this lot, and they can only go down from here. The group corrals a lone Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux); the men debate on whether to kill him, and refrain from doing so in the belief that he might lead them to water. All move on together through unforgiving landscapes. As the story reaches an end which is not an ending, some of the audience exclaimed in frustration; the logic of the piece had escaped them. This is not really a costume drama, and a good thing too; it is a kind of essay for which elements of the traditional Western have been artfully rearranged. The white folks, in brave and foolish pioneering ambition, have come into country they can’t deal with, although Meek insists, “We’re not lost; we’re just finding our way.” Lost they are; one woman, Emily (Michelle Williams) is prepared to face it ruthlessly. The Indian does not learn English from them, and they don’t learn his language; they don’t learn anything much. In a compelling sequence when one of their number collapses on the waterless trail, the Indian sings at length; but if that solves anything, it’s only for the singer.

This film is a fine, sparse poem and a parable. In its implied concern with the errors of white imperialism, you could set it down here in the same period – say in the Simpson Desert, or somewhere round the Dig Tree. •

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ON ITS opening weekend the huge Sydney Film Festival varied festivity with principled stance and protest, running features by Iranian directors Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. Both are currently under sentence by the Ahmadinejad government, not only to six-year jail terms; they are forbidden either to make films or to leave the country. The sentences are currently being appealed. Meanwhile, several films invited us to consider their modes of subversion for ourselves. In Panahi’s Offside, a few teenage girls disguise themselves in various unconvincing ways in order to mingle with the roaring crowd at a football game, Iran versus Bahrain; this is an ostensibly ordinary human world in which a young woman can be arrested simply for moving round the city on her own. They’re all detained, and penned in at the back of the stadium, managing to follow the game without seeing it; the action dissolves in anarchic derision, hilarity, sustained defiance. As Iran wins, so in a fashion do they.

The same director’s The Circle, made ten years ago, offers a darker version of the urban women’s story. The beginning says a great deal of it; as the credits come up we hear but don’t see the signs of labour and childbirth. The first images show the grandmother taking in the news; the baby is a girl; the grandmother visibly despairs. From her the film moves on to young women being hounded, pursued and imprisoned, though they do everything to dodge the authorities and to find a life. I’d seen The Circle before, and found it worth revisiting for its vitality, the rendering of Tehran as a crowded, living, untidy city, full of buying and selling, shouting and music. Panahi says that all his films are about restriction, which puts it a bit mildly; they are also about the resolve of the very vulnerable – like the children in The Mirror and The White Balloon; following them into danger, he’s very good at getting hearts into mouths.

The specific offences of Panahi and Rasoulof haven’t been announced; perhaps the regime is threatened by the uncompromising ways in which they show oppression and underprivilege. Rasoulof’s film Iron Island shows a huge, rusty, tanker, moored in isolation somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Under the patriarchal guidance of Captain Nemat (Nemo?) a community of the poor and homeless tries to establish a workable village on board. The image of the tall ship, solitary and obviously unseaworthy, standing there in wide, calm water is very powerful; the suggestion is of a major, looming disaster that’s not to be avoided. Allegory abounds, but the film works on the immediate, material level as well, gathering small narratives together, finding minimal hope; lives may be salvaged, if the ship itself must sink. Perhaps the Ahmadinejad regime can read cinematic suggestion only too well.

The most complex of the Iranian works is Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation; while Farhadi is not one of the directors under sentence, he has defended them and is in some trouble on that account. His film should be set as a text in legal ethics courses, taking up as it does questions of the gaps of understanding between speaker and hearer, of status and gender, of the claims of old age and equally those of childhood when parents divorce: just about everything on your list. The story involves the setting of a hard decision upon a child; I wondered, had The Caucasian Chalk Circle never played in Tehran? Fortunately, this one is to go on general release; and it won the Sydney Film Prize. It is excellent to see this local award given to a film so deeply intelligent.

The Iranian films shared the long weekend with the most unlikely companions; this year’s retrospective took up five of Douglas Sirk’s fabulous 1950s melodramas, Hollywood artifice at its long-ago extreme. The backward prospect of more than half a century allows pleasures we thought we couldn’t afford in the 70s, excess, absurdity and all. It permits the clearer perception of subversion and ambiguity in the compositions, the immaculate interiors and beautifully clad personae inhabited by Jane Wyman, Lauren Bacall and Lana Turner. When it came to the political domain, the overblown glories of Imitation of Life (1959) should have carried the message on racial equality further than ever it went with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. There are prancing horses and haystacks of flowers for the black housekeeper’s funeral, and beyond all that, Mahalia Jackson sings.

The 1950s, of course, didn’t really know that race relations in American history involved old stories other than south versus north, African-American and white. The splendid documentary on the life and times of Harry Belafonte takes in the struggles of Native Americans as well; but that film belongs to the present, and to the remarkable singer’s own present 80s. There were surprises; linking him mainly to the charms of “Banana Boat Song” and Carmen Jones, we hadn’t known that Belafonte was so closely involved with the civil rights struggles, out there with Dr King and Bobby Kennedy all the time, and on stage with Miriam Makeba. The film on her life, Mama Africa, is even stronger, not to be missed when it comes up on TV; the story of a great singer who was forced to live much of her life in exile, and who, even in post-apartheid South Africa, went on communicating the meaning of that kind of loss.

In an Australian audience, such works leave major questions in their wake: where are the films of equal passion on race relations here? The answer is that they exist, they have been made and modestly circulated over many decades, and they are often forgotten. The Message Sticks program, discussed recently here, brings new works of Aboriginal authorship to small and special publics. The facts and consequences of radical dispossession have become part of the hanging backdrop of history, part of what all of us live with, and that knowledge has spread, if too slowly, since the 1960s. Ivan Sen’s new feature, Toomelah, got a great welcome from the festival audience, confronting as it is. The location is a tiny, poor community; Toomelah has grown out of an Aboriginal mission, somewhere between Moree and the Queensland border. Within it, parents are missing in action, schoolteachers struggle, grandparents give love but little direction, and a ten-year-old kid like Daniel (Daniel Connors) can easily get involved with older blokes who are up to no good at all. Toomelah is too small to be marked on the maps, but is still a point on the drug trails. As he did in Beneath Clouds, Ivan Sen leaves us with a narrow crack of daylight, a tenuous hope for Daniel. What everyone was asking at the end was: what’s ahead for him, and for the other kids of Toomelah? Why does Australia still neglect such places – and there are many Toomelahs? The questions have their weight because Sen manages a great balancing act, between grave, clear cinematic eloquence and address to very difficult content. After Samson and Delilah, this film widens the canvas. It deserves the widest possible circulation.

I SAW about a tenth of the festival’s huge program – 161 films, with forty-two countries represented. At that rate you may find (at least) twelve people who saw twelve different festivals, and I can’t claim to speak for the other eleven. As I saw it, documentary supervened. Tom Zubrycki’s The Hungry Tide explores the effects of climate change and rising seas on the small Pacific nation of Kiribati – a scattering of sandy atolls – and the work of one of its citizens, Maria Tiimon, to spread the news internationally. Maria is seen at her job with an NGO in western Sydney, failing to make it home for her mother’s death, worrying for her father, and at Copenhagen in December 2009, pleading for her sinking nation; growing into her public speaking roles, and returning to Kiribati as one of a delegation led by Patrick Dodson. This is a marvellous film, strong in narrative, imagery, argument and character. Every politician should be obliged to watch it. (The Melbourne Film Festival will screen it on 1 August, and there will be a fund-raising screening for aid to Kiribati on 5 August at the Chauvel in Sydney.)

One documentary I want to see again for its sheer energy is Khodorkovsky, the German director Cyril Tuschi’s contemporary history-essay on the Russian oligarch who, after making billions from the oil franchise he acquired under Yeltsin, is now in deep trouble with Putin, and consequently in jail in Siberia, with the sentence recently renewed for another six years. He has been arrested for money-laundering, tax evasion and the like, but his real offence has evidently to do with speaking out against repression and in favour of open democracy. The man himself is interviewed in the dock; otherwise we see little of him, and the story is told through other people’s comment and recollection, with passages of forceful and elegant animation. There are sparse, shadowy passages from Arvo Pärt, who has dedicated a whole suite to Khodorkovsky; the elements were finely judged.

Music was a point of argument, however, with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog’s remarkable 3D work on the prehistoric cave art of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc in southern France (for which festival staff sold us the required glasses, at $1 a pop). Archaeologists marvel at the processions of bison, woolly mammoths and rushing horses, drawn in dark charcoal on the walls of deep caves to which access is now mostly forbidden; the film crew was allowed to join them, with special lights that emitted no heat. Perhaps the drawings are 32,000 years old, perhaps less; they are believed to be much older than those of Lascaux. They remind one researcher of the Bradshaws in the Kimberley, and we can only wonder at their origins and their survival. Ernst Reijseger’s music is rather insistent, with much organ and cello, and choral passages ascending; a bit over the top, people said. But this is an extravagant director who has often believed he can film ancient secrets, and the intention is probably to communicate boundless time, mystery and distance. Inexplicably, Herzog finishes with a coda on albino crocodiles swimming in the runoff from one of France’s many nuclear reactors; but you can shed his pseudo-philosophic gestures, and keep the memory of the cave art, the lively animal forms and the human handprints. “They were here!” says one archaeologist in delight.

Worse was done with music in the Russian offering Target, a dystopian extravaganza centred on an abandoned nuclear site. There’s emotional torment surging everywhere, orgy scenes, and lots of graphic sex to the sound of operatic choruses. A good many festival-goers liked this one; “Felliniesque,” they said. But we’ve had one Fellini; do we really need another?

Thus film festivals set off arguments worth having. To some of those, I hope to return. •

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From that point on the stories told, and there’s a great spread of them, are of films and film-makers, and not least the shifting, interlocking bureaucracies that have determined the fortunes, and misfortunes, of Australian film throughout. Necessarily therefore, history takes precedence over criticism; we are reading of production, distribution and reception, not of viewing experiences. But one book can’t do everything, and the trio get around this problem very cunningly; they quote from reviews and journalistic comment in ways which communicate the life of documentary films in the world. The professional lives and adventures of film makers are registered as well; thus the discussion of Pat Fiske’s marvellous film on the work of the late Fred Hollows, For All the World to See, catches up a sketch of her projects, in both direction and sound-recording roles through the 1970s and 1980s. Considering her work, and that of Megan McMurchy as a producer, we are looking at the profound influence of feminism on the film work of those decades, and at all kinds of grassroots activism within film and around it. As Tom Zubrycki remembers, “Those were the days before VHS. So we rigged up monitors in community halls, pubs – even shop-windows. It was enjoyable, stimulating, and, naturally, unpaid.” The book becomes social and cultural history together; political changes press heavily both on the conditions of production and on content.

The range is enormous, taking in works, makers and events too little known outside the specialist field: the landmark occasion of the UNESCO Round Table on Ethnographic Film held in Sydney in 1966; the oeuvre of David and Judith MacDougall, always transcending the ethnographic category; the long and honourable record in independent production and distribution of Ronin Films, working from Canberra; Sharon Connolly’s leadership at Film Australia (1997–2004), then Daryl Karp’s more conservative reign, one marked by well-researched historical documentaries, often with dramatised segments. The authors note gently that there wasn’t too much in that chapter to upset the Howard government. Under other headings, they offer rewarding production histories: John Hughes’s masterly analysis of the same government’s insidious racism in After Mabo (1997); Christopher Tuckfield’s film-essay on two elderly Chinese immigrants, A Breath: Surviving the 20th Century in China (1998); the work of Bob Connolly and the late Robin Anderson in Rats in the Ranks (1997); the development of Ian Dunlop’s classic series People of the Australian Western Desert (1964–67). There is attention to film-work not simply about, but more importantly by Aboriginal people: Rachel Perkins, Darlene Johnson, Donna Ives, Ivan Sen, and the increasing body of work enabled by the National Indigenous Documentary Fund.

One criticism: with many references to the long record of Tom Zubrycki, there’s no examination here of his substantial film work on social, political and intercultural stories. Zubrycki’s claims to a whole case study are surely greater than those of others who get more attention in the book. (His new film on climate change, The Hungry Tide, had its first screening on Sunday at the Sydney Film Festival.) But if the authors’ choices can sometimes be debated, they’ve still made a great gift to the general audience. “Documentary” emerges from the book as a category in flux, and in question; all the best films push and blur the boundaries. After Mabo, for example, is at once personal essay, political interrogation and history. Ian Dunlop has acknowledged the elements of re-enactment by the Aboriginal subjects in his Western Desert films. The Connolly–Anderson films elicit story and drama from factual description and real-life performance; that’s the cunning, and the great pleasure of Rats in the Ranks.

BOB CONNOLLY’s new film, co-directed with Sophie Raymond, is Mrs Carey’s Concert. Like Inside Job earlier in the year, this is a documentary drawing in mainstream audiences; as I write, it’s playing in six cities. Karen Carey is the principal teacher of music at a privileged Sydney private girls’ school, the Methodist Ladies’ College in Burwood (fine buildings of old-Sydney red brick, spreading green lawns). Obsessed with her job and with classical music, Mrs Carey wants the school’s 1200 pupils to share her passion and display their skill in the biennial concert at the Opera House. She puts special energy into building the confidence of gifted sixteen-year-old Emily Sun, whose immigrant Chinese family has its own difficult past; she finds it hard to deal with a stubborn, angry student like Iris, whose behaviour during rehearsals makes it clear that she’d rather be just about anywhere else. We share Mrs Carey’s tension as she waits for them all to take off with Brahms or Bruckner, beyond her tutelage or control; she’s a presence in the wings, in an eloquent use of dim, grainy available light.

The school’s busy milieu is brilliantly communicated; with the film-makers, we’re constantly among the girls and involved with them – I found myself hating the self-indulgent teacher who wouldn’t stop probing his pupil to get at her innermost thoughts, and jibbing at the whole notion that music teaching must necessarily engage a teenager’s striving, precarious sense of self. But I also found myself reacting in ways the film-makers might well have thought irritating and irrelevant: how about the struggling orchestras in public high schools, the talented students whose parents can’t afford special lessons or violins?

Those questions are for other film-makers, other films. Emily’s violin soars; the final credits roll to a resplendent passage from Aida.

THOSE I noticed walking out of Snowtown did so during the torture and murder sequence, which is indeed gory and shocking enough; people said, as they did after Silence of the Lambs: I don’t need this. In its totality, however, the film is much more than its obvious plot. One part of it is the way the teenager James (Lucas Pittaway) is seduced into criminal violence by the serial killer John Bunting (Daniel Henshall). Stunned, mesmerised, obedient, the boy moves toward the horror in the bathroom; what is that vacancy in his mind which the murderer sets out to fill?

Before and after that point, the film presents the elements of a provincial tragedy; they are offered in sound and image for the audience to piece together for themselves. Snowtown has divided both critics and publics; it won the audience award at the Adelaide Film Festival; it has been widely praised and just as widely condemned. Some commentators have found it incoherent, frustrating in its lack of continuous narrative, and in the way the director, Justin Kurzel, and writer Shaun Grant refuse to offer diagnosis. This is not an attempt to understand the atrocities which took place before all those human remains were found in acid in the barrels, but rather a work which situates them in a society and a place. Bunting first appears as benign; when he takes up with needy Elizabeth (Louise Harris) he’s prepared to cook and serve, and offer fatherly affection to her boys. But we have seen already how he dismembered a couple of kangaroos; dead though they were, we were still looking at untrammelled viciousness. The bloody animal remains are flung onto the doorstep of a schoolteacher, who might have been gay; the man leaves town, as anybody might.

A reviewer for the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting wrote that “It darkens the heart to know that this film depicts truth, not fiction.” What didn’t they know? A lot of the time, in fact, truth is approached rather than depicted; after the first murder, the others are suggested, never spelt out. There are images of geographic and social emptiness, lonely roads, huge fields without people; extreme cultural poverty and extreme moral hypocrisy; homophobia, paedophilic cruelty; evangelical religion in sententious action, ludicrously irrelevant to the needs of the congregation.

It’s tough viewing. It is also a very good film, communicating with the indirection and allusiveness possible to cinema; Justin Kurzel and his team are gifted professionals. But for the sake of the real people of the real Snowtown – as we hear, a community struggling back on to its feet – I did rather wish they’d called it something else. •

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Here I Am, touring the country with the Message Sticks program and soon on general release, is Beck Cole’s first feature, but it comes after a substantial record in documentary and half-hour dramas. Cole was one of the writer-directors on SBS’s First Australians; in Wirriya – Small Boy, she watched seven-year-old Ricco, who lives in one of the Alice Springs town camps, on the day he goes to school, and then on the day he wags it. In the highly enjoyable The Lore of Love, she observed a group of feisty grandmothers joking as they instruct a teenage girl on men and sex; in Plains Empty she drew a fine brief ghost story from a remote mining area. Her images of people in their settings stick in the memory for years; if, as Cole has said in interviews, her work in documentary and drama draws life from her responses to individual people, its strength is equally in the way locations themselves tell the stories.

In Here I Am we’re in Port Adelaide, shown in Warwick Thornton’s masterly cinematography as a world of hard, cold light on grim container terminals. Karen (Shai Pittman) emerges from jail after two years inside; her offence had something to do with drugs, but the details hardly matter. What matters is that she’s an attractive young Aboriginal woman on her own in gloomy, unpeopled streets; she wanders into a cheerless pub, and into a sexual encounter she doesn’t really want. She finds refuge in Temple House, which shelters Aboriginal women in difficult stages of transition. At first, the place seems like one of Dickensian bleakness, with Big Red (Vanessa Worrall) as a punitive supervisor, but one capable of relaxing into camaraderie. Slowly Karen’s fellow inhabitants, variously raucous, sullen, kindly, become a network of friends, ready to encourage her in the quest to reconnect with her young daughter. In that, however, she has an implacable enemy, her mother Lois (Marcia Langton), who has custody of the child. Langton does implacable like no other performer I can think of (and in the Q & A after the Message Sticks screening, Beck Cole told of the importance of that particular casting).

Their struggle has much to do with the back story, a past that is registered in eloquent fragments. Part of it is that Lois has, from her own point of view, seen too much human wreckage to be merciful when it comes to her own; and there is something terrifying in her need to nurture the child alone. (Langton could play a pretty considerable Medea.) So Here I Am, most obviously one of the necessary tales of Aboriginal survival today, is no less a film about mothers and daughters. The appearance of one good bloke in Karen’s life will help, but he’s not a solution.

The film is dark, with passages in harsh electric light; there’s little visual softening. No trees or gardens, no sunlight. If there is an element of hope at the end it’s in Karen’s ability to face the authorities and — actually — smile; but hope has not come cheaply.

Here I Am got a standing ovation in Adelaide, and deserved it. There aren’t too many movies around that centre on female agents — as distinct, that is, from offsiders. Mad Bastards, written and directed by Brendan Fletcher, offers a more conventional tale of contemporary Aboriginality. Here, too, is the ordeal of alienated parenthood. The long road from Perth to the Kimberley, taken in hitchhiking stages, is a clear metaphor for the ethical and emotional journey of Thomas, or TJ (Dean Daley-Jones); he has spent thirteen years in town doing, as it seems, nothing in particular. Coming to the chaotic town of Five Rivers, he is met by an old man who sees that he doesn’t belong in this country, but, he says, “it’s my son’s country” and that means that he has to come to terms with it. The boy, Bullet (Lucas Yeeda), isn’t impressed by his father’s sudden appearance. (“What you come here for?” “I came to see you.” “Now you’ve seen me, now you can go.”); Bullet’s mother Nella (Ngaire Pigram) is less than half-prepared to be won back. But they dance together to the guitars that play, with somewhat maudlin persistence, across the town and throughout the film.

The strumming is fatalistic; it suggests that nothing’s going to change much for the people here, despite their struggles toward betterment. With the men’s discussion group, Nella’s insistent cleaning-up and the cultural expedition with teenage boys out into grasslands and billabongs, Five Rivers is trying. TJ’s inner conflicts explode in a fierce fight with the cop called Texas, who is at once friend, mentor and enemy (a complex, benign performance by Greg Tait). There’s a stumbling recovery, and some progress toward the mending of the broken family — which may be classic melodrama, but that doesn’t mean it’s false. There’s life in old plots — it depends how they’re worked; this one is entangled with real communal vitality, and framed in stunning landscapes.

Brendan Fletcher drew on true stories from the Kimberley; but the film’s postscript, in which the actors speak for themselves, wasn’t really needed.

There is much debate around Bob Connolly and Sophie Raymond’s documentary, Mrs Carey’s Concert, currently playing (as documentaries rarely do) in several outlets. I shall come soon to the issues involved there, and also to Justin Kurzel’s brilliant Snowtown: the reasons why people walk out of it, and the reasons for seeing it through. •

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THERE are the movies, the astonishing gallery at present 115 years long; and then, within that gallery, there’s cinema. The implied boundary is blurred, mobile, floating; but there are times when it has to be affirmed, and one of those, as we cruise the circuits, is now. It works as experience, and what it means for any film to become more than the sum of its parts. It has to do levels of transformation, and with how much you’re left to think about afterwards.

How I Ended this Summer (writer/director, Aleksei Popogrebsky; cinematographer, Pavel Kostomarov) is, supremely, cinema. It is set somewhere inside the Arctic Circle, where young Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin) is completing a graduate assignment at the metereological station run at a remote outpost by the older, taciturn Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis). They live and work in a group of rough timber barns, manning a beacon, checking readouts, working the computer and two-way radio communication with remote headquarters. There’s not much conversation, and they rarely eat together. Both are emotionally incompetent; it becomes clear that Sergei, whose heart is with a wife and child in a faraway city, prefers to be on his own, and that Pavel has no idea how to make moves toward friendship. While the summer sea is open, Sergei would rather be off fishing for Arctic trout. He goes AWOL from the station; Pavel must cover for him, awkwardly, when urgent messages come in. Then there’s one that seriously concerns the family; on Sergei’s return, Pavel can’t find a way to break it to him; and when a helicopter comes puttering over, the pilot fails to see Pavel’s waving flare. There’s a fine Russian tradition at work here; as connections fail, we’re in a truly Chekhovian domain, and the struggle is more ethical than psychological.

But the symbolism is deeply grounded in the physical world. There’s a polar bear on the mountain, and Pavel is told that one of the station’s earlier personnel came off worst in an encounter with this bear, or his brother. The animal advances in the middle distance, and as Pavel flees desperately, skidding downward over rock and stone, a burst of snow reminds him and us that summer will end, and soon. High, wide shots of the station on its spit of land take in sky and ocean, the low huddle of buildings; the light changes, in a range of subtle blues and greys. But when dusk prevails, the story is not after all fading out, and for all the spectacular geography we’re not in a travelogue. The sound design communicates entangled elements; there’s elusive, intermittent music (Dmitriy Katkhanov’s), but it’s embedded, interwound with perpetual radio static and the whining wind. There’s high tension – will these two ever really face each other? – and decisions to be taken on both sides. Nor is the far Arctic free from politics; when another helicopter swoops away with a load of frozen fish, this food for humans could – because of human blundering – be carrying radioactive contamination.

In all the praise for this film, Tarkovsky has been invoked. There was only one Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), lost too early to the world; but in another generation, Popogrebsky and his near-contemporary Alexei German Jr (Paper Soldier) inherit their shares of Tarkovskian poetry, and they’re also dealing in their fashions with Putin’s Russia, its poverty and its threats. They speak to the day of Fukushima, and it would be timely to have another look at Stalker, that astonishing work of Tarkovsky’s which, in 1979, foresaw Chernobyl. These later films work under its shadows.

Never Let Me Go has been the much-praised artwork of the moment, with admittedly fine performances, gentle pacing and prevailing autumnal light. Directed by Mark Romanek from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, it works with that writer’s characteristic tone of elegy for what’s lost and might have been. The youth and beauty of the main characters suggests the lives they should have had; in the extended opening chapter, made of boarding-school assemblies, classrooms and playgrounds, they appear as very healthy kids, set for real futures. They don’t know yet that they’re clones, deliberately brought into being to donate their vital organs on reaching adulthood, and to expire, at around thirty, with that duty done. There’s no suspense around this; one intrepid teacher (Sally Hawkins) insists on telling the kids the truth about their lives early on. In this over-engineered plot, it makes no difference.

Carey Mulligan has been highly praised in her role as Kathy, whose task as a carer delays her own doom; but I’ve met some in the audience who confess to getting sick of her invincible virtue. Others were held by Keira Knightley’s beautiful face; but for me the memorable performance was that of Izzy Meikle-Small (aged ten or thereabouts) as Kathy in the protracted opening segment, which shows the three protagonists as children in the sinister closed world of their school. There Charlotte Rampling, with her witch’s eyes, does a great job as an evil headmistress.

The child’s vitality there threatens to give the lie to the whole schema, in which there’s no real drama because there’s no resistance to the overhanging force. I’d call it quasi-Orwellian, if that weren’t injustice to Orwell; his fictions did have links to the world of his day, and so achieved the status of fable. In Never Let Me Go the elements of fable are embryonic – you’ve got to dig to find them. There’s no convincing discord; a burst of useless rebellion from Andrew Garfield’s Tommy, a wan and futile plea for reprieve, and as the insistent violin lament needlessly reminds us, we can only go down from there. For me and others I know, this film left a taste of dishonesty; if you like, a feel-bad movie.

The Canadian Barney’s Version (director, Richard J. Lewis) offers a mild cure. Paul Giamatti’s Barney Panofsky is an enjoyable portrait of a real slob, one created by Mordecai Richler in his last novel: a self-deluding Montreal businessman who exasperates his wife by getting drunk and disorderly at dinner parties, but blunders through the world with some success; he runs a soap-opera factory called Totally Unnecessary Productions. Through Barney’s first two marriages, despite the pleasures of Minnie Driver’s haywire act in the second of those, the film threatens to stay on the level of farce. It’s rescued, to a point, by Dustin Hoffmann’s wry intelligence as Barney’s improbable father, and the pleasures of the Leonard Cohen songs; the last chapter touches down on reality. American reviewers have hated this one inordinately, while some Australians have given it credit for wit and compassion; I think they’re right.

A more telling answer to dystopian fabrications is My Afternoons with Margueritte (director, Jean Becker). Margueritte – the double t, she explains, was her father’s mistake when she was born something over ninety years ago – lives in a kindly, civilised aged-care place which, eventually, her family can’t afford. Late in the story, she gets stuck – temporarily – in the hell of an appalling, crowded establishment in which the elderly and helpless have no lives worth living. But along the way, she has made a close friendship with Gérard Depardieu’s lumbering, near-illiterate odd-job labourer Germain Chavez, and for him she has opened the pleasures of reading. This is unashamedly a feel-good movie, so she is of course rescued, with the promise of spending her final years in good company. Gisèle Casadesus is an elegant and witty Margueritte, Maurane a marvellously fiery bartender in the bistro which is Germain’s real home, Claire Maurier convincingly demented as his thoroughly dysfunctional mother, and Sophie Guillermin a lively girlfriend who struggles to understand what it is for him with Margueritte.

There’s much more here than sweetness and provincial sunlight. This film throws a searchlight on to the under-recognised needs of old age for purpose and valid forms of connection; dare we say it, for work; and there’s also a story here about the place of literacy in life. I treasure the sequence in which Germain, without human company in bed at night, discusses the problems of the dictionary with his cat. •

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Between those poles the large areas of accommodation and attentisme (waiting to see how things turn out) were all most of the population could manage; but through the postwar decades when de Gaulle dominated the state, his version of the resistance amounted to something like a secular religion. At the Liberation he trumpeted that France had been freed by the French themselves — la France résistante, la France combattante! — as though D-Day, the Allied landings and the multinational roles in the defeat of Germany had never happened. Eisenhower publicly confirmed the moral force of the resistance; it was, he said, worth fifteen divisions.

But de Gaulle’s insistence on résistancialisme and the unity of France worked against national acknowledgement of the deepest conflicts of wartime: the struggles of resistant life against the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Pétain, and against the persecution and deportation of almost 76,000 Jews. The French contribution to the Holocaust was not imposed by the occupying Germans; Vichy’s police and militias did their work for them.

In recent decades the end of the Gaullist myth, and a developing realism about the Occupation period, have generated lifelong projects for such historians as Robert Paxton (Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944) and Henry Rousso (Le Syndrome de Vichy) among others. In their work, memory and memories are particularly important; Vichy won’t go away. Rousso coined the phrase un passé qui ne passe pas, the past that doesn’t pass; there’s too much inherited shame hanging around. Before Paxton’s work began appearing in the 1970s, there was the major scandal created by Marcel Ophüls’s four-hour documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), an enormous orchestration of interviews and archival gatherings from notables including Pierre Mendès-France, Anthony Eden and Hitler himself, plus numerous ordinary citizens and stars of stage and cinema, uncovering the ambiguities, indecisions and compromises of life under the Occupation in one city, Clermont-Ferrand. One unforgettable interview is with a citizen called Marcus Klein, who placed a public advertisement to assure everyone that despite his name he had no Jewish connections.

That film is marvellous, and for us now it’s an indispensable primary document, if not a whole set of them; but in 1971, and a quarter of a century on from the Liberation, it was still too soon for the French to accept the ways in which collaboration and resistance had been entangled. Ophüls had great trouble finding distribution; the film was banned for TV for a full decade after its completion, though one small Left Bank cinema picked it up. Then in 1974 an unforgettable feature film, Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien, appeared to show how an ordinary, unschooled individual, a boy who had tried and failed to join the resistance, could be caught up in collaboration. Perhaps Malle’s film contributed decisively to a tidal turn in understanding; in any event, from 1981, when the TV ban was lifted, Le Chagrin et la Pitié began gathering audiences, and continues to do so.

THAT shift in historical consciousness stands behind Alan Riding’s work in And the Show Went On. Riding has lived in Paris for twenty years or so, long enough to discover that the Occupation, Vichy and the forced deportations remain close in popular memory, the days before yesterday, as areas of high sensitivity: the issues are still alive. Riding modestly identifies himself as “a journalist [and] an intruder in the world of historians”; but when the investigator is faced with an array of very aged interviewees, all struggling in the toils of memory and forgetting, journalistic skills can help to find the triggers. And although his account doesn’t reach back into the interwar decades, he is historian enough to see the lines of connection between Vichy and anti-Semitism on the one hand and the inheritance of the Dreyfus case on the other.

He is concerned mainly with one burning question: how did those with cultural privilege negotiate life with the enemy? Attending to a great repository of spoken recollections, diaries and memoirs, to the dominant collaborationist press and the imperilled, mainly clandestine journals of the resistance, he has provided a new map of the period. Following its trails, you can find out, for example, which of the great modern painters took up Goebbels’s invitation to visit the Third Reich in late 1941; among the chosen eleven were Derain, Vlaminck and Van Dongen, great colourists and leaders among the Fauves; and the sculptors Charles Despiau,

Henri Bouchard and Paul Belmondo (he was Jean-Paul’s father). Before their train left the Gare de l’Est, the artists were photographed with uniformed German officers, thus feeding the Nazi propaganda machine. During their two-week tour, they looked at Albert Speer’s plans for the new Berlin of Hitler’s fantasies, and spent time with his favourite sculptor, Arno Breker. In the following year Breker’s retrospective at the Orangerie, a major event, was supported by leaders of the Vichy government, certain fascist writers, and celebrities like the dancer Serge Lifar, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and Arletty. The opening and later reception were huge events, and Riding shows, adroitly, how such occasions could be received: this could be Parisian society collaborating, or else France on show in elegant defiance, carrying on regardless. There was the same kind of ambiguity about all of the city’s legendary night life; cabarets, music halls, brothels stayed open and busy. The population, and the German soldiery along with them, all needed distraction. From the resistants’ point of view, or among the Jewish artists and performers being excluded from the galleries, the stages, their workplaces and markets, there were no two ways about it.

Riding opens a wider window on the fields of theatre, painting, cinema and literature as they were in those years. We can look through it at Chevalier and Piaf singing to the Germans, and eavesdrop on those soirées, so high-handedly assembled by the wealthy Florence Gould, where French writers and artists fraternised with art-loving German officers. We can estimate the price of wartime survival for a journal like the Nouvelle Revue Française and its publisher, Gallimard: they had to accept a pro-Nazi editor, Drieu la Rochelle. Hundreds of films were made; one, Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, has survived above the rest and, though it was shot during the dark years, wasn’t screened until the end of them. Riding says that it was the only film shot during the Occupation to take an important place in cinema history; on that he is wrong — Robert Bresson, for one, began filming in those years, and scores of films permitted by the Nazi propaganda machines have their own claims to attention, if only for that reason.

In that as in other fields Riding finds resistants and collaborators living and working cheek by jowl, refusing to let their differences destroy friendships and family links; he explores the famous ambiguities in the careers of Arletty, Maurice Chevalier, Colette and Marguerite Duras; he marks their paths, and holds judgement in the balance. He tells of the struggles of French musicians to be heard when German music was swamping the radio channels, and the irony in a story like Olivier Messiaen’s: he completed the Quartet for the End of Time in a German prison camp, but after being released was obliged to take the place of a Jewish musician at the Conservatoire de Paris. Duras worked in publishing for Vichy, and for a collaborationist office concerned with approving allocations of paper for new books; but then she, along with both husband and lover, joined François Mitterrand’s resistance group and became active in giving shelter to fugitives and gathering information — from a collaborator who might, or mightn’t, have been another lover. Who knows, and who can judge?

That question is posed in a scene in Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s film Sarah’s Key. A journalist, Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), is at work on an article on the scandal of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1942, when some 13,000 Jews were arrested and packed into the stadium, in appalling conditions, before being deported to concentration camps. She is shocked to find that her younger colleagues in the magazine office know nothing of that history. Someone says that of course he can find images for Julia’s article, since the Nazis, notoriously, filmed everything; Julia reminds him that the roundup was the work not of the Nazis but of the French themselves. The younger people express revulsion; Julia asks how they know what they’d have done.

The question has often been raised in the famous cases of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who at the outset were involved in a resistant cell called Socialisme et Liberté; it floundered and then, as the philosopher comrade Merleau-Ponty said, simply expired “from not knowing what to do.” For the duration, they kept their heads down and wrote. There was no avoiding the Germans in the cafés where Beauvoir would set up her writing spot — somewhere near the stove, to keep warm — every morning. She had a teaching job; to keep it, she had to sign a declaration that she was neither Freemason nor Jew. Sartre rebuked her for this, and then when it emerged that the journal Comoedia, to which he had contributed an article, was under covert German control, it was Beauvoir’s turn to admonish. Both resolved not to publish while the Occupation lasted, but Sartre did have two plays produced; resistant plays, he insisted. Beauvoir’s biographer, Deirdre Bair, wrote that “their record is not scrupulously clean, but neither is it clearly soiled.” Again, who adjudicates?

You could leave Paris, and hide out in a remote country village, as certain painters did — but not if Paris was home, milieu, and therefore the only meaningful site of resistance and survival; the place from which, as a writer, you must witness your own patch of history.

Alan Riding has done a lot for our knowledge of the dark years and the people who found, or lost, their ways through them. He gives back one of the major stories, that of the early resistance network formed by the ethnographers and other specialists of the Musée de l’Homme. This was the first cell formed by professionals; their resistant action was based in their work. They were led by a young Russian-born ethnographer, Boris Vildé, his colleague Anatole Lewitsky and the museum’s chief librarian, Yvonne Oddon, and assisted by the art historian Agnès Humbert, whose vivid chronicle of her life under the Occupation, Notre Guerre, emerged only in 2004; Barbara Mellor’s excellent translation, published as Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, appeared in 2008. Vildé emerges from Humbert’s account, and now from Riding’s evidence, as a valiant networker, a man of exceptional charm and cunning, who managed to travel undetected around France, linking small resistant cells together to get information out to London. At the same time, the anthropologist Germaine Tillion came home to Paris from her fieldwork in Algeria, also determined to work against the Occupation by whatever means.

All that the scattered groups knew of each other was that they opposed Vichy and supported the distant, still-unknown de Gaulle and the Free French. Vildé named the fragile network the Comité National de Salut Public (the National Committee of Public Safety, a piece of anti-authoritarian irony). They began producing a journal, Résistance, the first with that name. Of course, Humbert noted mischievously, “I was the typist.” What she typed can be read now on the endpapers of her book: Vildé’s front-page call to resist, not to be resigned, not to submit to the sense of isolation and impotence, to find allies, learn the skills of working underground, identify ways to act. An informer found them out; Vildé and six of his colleagues were shot in February 1942. The women went to prison camps and to forced labour; Tillion, who survived until 2008, aged nearly 101, wrote of Ravensbrück, Humbert of her time in abysmally cruel conditions in a German rayon factory. Each of them practised the crucial strategies: find allies, connect with the others.

One story traced by Riding is that of Rose Valland, who, in her curatorial role at the Jeu de Paume, assisted the long-term salvaging of work by Jewish artists by keeping a secret record of the paintings being sent off to Germany, and then by alerting resistance saboteurs to the trains that were not to be blown up. Riding describes her as a hero of the resistance, but also, in an unconscionably sexist moment, as “a frumpy-looking forty-two-year-old spinster” — please, where was his editor? He patronises Agnès Humbert, “who at times seemed to think she was acting in a thriller.” Indeed, why not? — the sense of theatre carried people through. Germaine Tillion triumphed by writing an operatic satire while she was in Ravensbrück; sixty years later, a group of young musicians performed it for her on her one-hundredth birthday.

SARAH’S KEY has been much praised, taken as a film of great seriousness; in the words of one promo, “moving gracefully across the decades and people’s hidden histories.” Julia’s investigation is happening in the present; in 1942, the Jewish child Sarah Starzynski seeks to protect her little brother from the Germans when they arrest her family; she hides him in a cupboard and manages to keep the key. Since this is a Holocaust story, the plan goes very badly wrong, and when Julia gets carried beyond her journalistic brief sixty years later, she can only uncover further tragedy. She has her own problems — this is solid, middle-class, French–American melodrama — and another child named Sarah must give us all a bit of hope (for what, exactly?) at the end.

If acting alone could make cinema then Scott Thomas, Mélusine Mayance as the ten-year-old Sarah, and the extraordinary Niels Arestrup as a gruffly reluctant resistant, with others, would bring this one home. They’re brilliant, and their performances are driving at truth. But we have to deal with the film’s guiding concepts. The whole drama, with its double timeline, is offered as realistic re-enactment. The Vel’ d’Hiv story is conveyed in quasi-documentary style, the screen filled with mayhem and panic as mothers and children lose each other and helpless prisoners bend over buckets — the overcrowded stadium had no toilets for the 13,000 Jews who were herded into it on their way to the camps. Julia goes to work on history, and the audience is offered a sort of redemptive pattern; in solving her own conflict, seeking out one particular victim of the past, she is somehow dealing adequately with a massive public tragedy which too many have forgotten.

The whole idea is a gross sentimentality. It is as though invoking the Holocaust is a guarantee of seriousness, even of art. There have been scores of films like this (for recent years, think of Schindler’s List, Sophie’s Choice, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas). Not for nothing has the New York critic Stuart Klawans, himself Jewish, called for a moratorium on such works; they are, he wrote in Tablet in December 2008, “starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate.” Even if Sarah’s Key were better than it is on its own terms — the plot creaks and meanders, the American sequence looks like something out of Days of Our Lives — we could still ask whether, at this date, naturalistic melodrama can address that history in any way to advance its claims on the present.

At most it can be a reminder. From that, we should turn back to Agnès Humbert’s journal for — to put it very mildly — a reality check. At unbearably close quarters, she describes day-to-day life between the prison camp and the rayon factory where the women prisoners — variously old, sick, pregnant, crippled — were made to stand, eight hours a day, dealing with fast spindles and burning acid. No gloves or other protection, no washing, few toilet breaks, little food or drink, sadistic supervision. Humbert’s survival skills are palpable in the vitality and wit of her writing; she never lost her sense of the grotesque and the absurd, or her response to the personalities around her, pitiable, stalwart, defiant, under persecution of unlimited cruelty. Her book must be read; it belongs beside those of Primo Levi.

For cinema, the thirty-two minutes of Alain Resnais’s 1955 film, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), say it all. The script is by Jean Cayrol, the music by Hanns Eisler, both survivors of the camps; many of the images come from stock footage of the cattle trucks, the mass starvation, mass extermination, mass burial; film shot by the Nazis themselves. Others are from documentary records of the camps as the Allies found them at the liberation. Only ten years on, Auschwitz was already a tourist site; the camera moves over peaceful green fields to find the barbed wire, the abandoned barracks, the grass growing in the rail tracks. There is no personal drama, no cast of actors, no fiction, no moralising; the narration asks what can be known, how different are the murderers’ faces from our own? The questions draw the audience in, and Cayrol finally refuses consolation: he says that as these images recede, we can pretend it’s all over forever, that all this happened only then, and only there. At the price of being blind and deaf to the world as it surrounds us now, we can keep that pretence. More than half a century on, Nuit et Brouillard remains stunningly contemporary. •

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THE word documentary often signals the sort of film many moviegoers will decide they don’t want to see; they’re being offered instruction, and it therefore can’t be entertainment. But the boundaries are blurred; too much of the liveliest cinema is other than mainstream feature film, and we resort to awkward constructions like “film essay.” That’s probably the best available term for Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job: film essay, film argument, film polemic; an inventive, high-energy, angry film which incites anger while offering much ironic enjoyment and fierce comedy along its path.

Tracking the global financial crisis, the film uses graphics, interviews and stunning images of Manhattan’s forested skyscrapers to consider the processes whereby a devious system of credit-swapping led to the collapse of giant institutions like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. We watch while several masters of the universe display their breathtaking moral autism, dodging questions on the ethics of their strategies – or else, at times, appearing not to comprehend such questions at all; at those incredible moments, the audience gasps. What we can’t dodge, as the story unfolds, is that these men (there’s just one woman on that power level) didn’t really know what they were doing. Several of them got away with murder – that is, as the structures collapsed beneath them, they took tens of millions of dollars in severance money as they left, while unemployment soared across the country and thousands lost their houses. We look at one aspirational villa after another, the grass growing tall in front of them and the real-estate notices up; and as the film goes on, the Manhattan towers gather force as major symbols. Attempts by Washington to institute legislation controlling the excesses get only so far; the huge financial institutions inexplicably recover, and George Soros pronounces the awful truth: “It’s a Wall Street government.” Throughout Inside Job, cinematic pleasure carries the information content; there is horrific comedy in this tale. But anger supervenes, and so it should.

Looking back across the summer’s main offerings: wherever three or four cinephiles have been gathered round their yum-cha, there’s been disagreement about the success or failure of Peter Weir’s The Way Back. You must have a view on it; this director is still One of Our Boys, and each one of his films aspires to make it through and beyond the movies into art. And we all have our histories with him; I loved the glaring grotesqueries of The Cars that Ate Paris, loathed the gentility of Picnic at Hanging Rock, loathed even more the racist fancywork of The Last Wave and the careful conformism of Gallipoli – it was hard after those to keep the mind and eyes open for the undoubted merits of Master and Commander.

The Way Back tells a story, which might be halfway true, about the escape of six men from the brutalities of a crowded Soviet gulag, and the trek across central Asia that follows. The opening sequence in the prison is brilliant choreography; after that, the task is to find drama in endurance and survival, a sparse stringing-out of incidents in huge spaces. Early on, in snow and blizzard, one of them freezes to death. A wandering Polish girl joins them; they cover stony wastes, then sandhills, and make it through a raging dust storm; they find a well and exult in water; they deal with mosquitoes and get away from wolves; they kill and eat a snake. Two will die of heat and thirst; Ed Harris’s character, Mr Smith, will head off into Tibet; three will struggle into India.

The landscapes are huge and stunning; this film belongs most to one of the world’s great cinematographers, Russell Boyd. Weir is trying for epic poetry, and some think he attains it; but I could not find that imagery and human drama came together, despite the occasional intensity delivered by the performers. Ed Harris does his contained-bitterness number very well. Too often, the dialogue belongs to a boys’-own adventure. And even now, thirty-five years after Hanging Rock, the female element is again there to be virginal and visionary; she appears in order to vanish. It’s formulaic; put pathos and nature together, you might somehow guarantee seriousness.

In their wonderful version of True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen grasp the kind of cinema poetry that eludes The Way Back. This version builds on the 1969 original and changes it; Jeff Bridges inherits John Wayne like a son, but Hailee Steinfeld’s Mattie, with her long, literate sentences, is a feminist creation of the present. Their penultimate ride is a lyric passage, fully earned by content. The film is still on round the place after weeks, deservedly holding audiences. So, for reasons I find hard to understand, is Black Swan, an inchoate melodrama in which no distance is taken at all on the driving mother, the sadistic impresario and the suffering ballerina, the last in a state of prolonged and (eventually) lethal depression. The story swings on crass, wornout ideas about female frigidity and art. Apparently, ballet-struck teenagers love it; but they should be steered away toward a good video shop, and copies of the fabulous, irreplaceable Red Shoes.

The West Australian film Wasted on the Young (director, Ben C. Lucas) got some excellent reviews, and deserved them for its use of cool light and remarkable spaces – an expensive modern house looking over the sea, filled by super-privileged young folks trying to find their lives, and never really getting there. Some thought the casting needed a few grownups, teachers or parents; I thought that with the undoubted cinematic gifts of Ben Lucas and his team, they just needed a story. •

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THE late Pete Postlethwaite (1946–2011) performed in some fifty-two films; he had leading roles in only a few of them, but looking at his work wherever you might have found it – In the Name of the Father, The Usual Suspects, Distant Voices, Still Lives, Brassed Off, momentarily in Alien 3 – you saw a particularly generous kind of professionalism: an actor who pitched in without reserve, without care for image or career, giving his full energy to the work on hand. Since his death at New Year, the obituaries have been long and generous. Some recall his tour of Australia and New Zealand in the one-man show Scaramouche Jones; almost none remember the film that came out of that journey.

In Perth, an old friend, an erstwhile fellow-seminarian, caught up with Postlethwaite. The friend, Bill Johnson, had a film script he wanted the actor to read; he also had a terrible story to tell. His adopted Aboriginal son Louis – who had been born Warren Braeden, and taken from his mother in Alice Springs for adoption at two years old – had been horrifically tortured and killed by two young Englishmen, recent immigrants. Asked why, they had said, according to report: “Because he was black.”

On the same trip, Postlethwaite met Patrick Dodson, who had seen Brassed Off not long before, and instantly recognised Danny the bandleader. The actor couldn’t forget Bill Johnson’s story, and sought to learn more about Aboriginal Australians. The outcome was a road trip, or rather a succession of them, shared with Dodson and the singer-songwriter Archie Roach, and the film, Liyarn Ngarn, which the three made together on the way. With Dodson and Roach, he visited outback communities; in Alice Springs, he found Warren-Louis’s birth family, and he gathered up the story of how the Johnsons brought Louis back to Alice for burial among his own people, and the way the black and white families met. He heard the stories of several black deaths in custody, among them Robbie Walker’s. He met the football star and long-distance walker Michael Long, and the actor and storyteller Ningali Lawford, talking of the film she’d like to see made about the legendary Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra (who, she says, is “up there with Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King”). From part of his speech to camera, it seems that Postlethwaite meant to be involved in making such a film, and that research for it began.

The words Liyarn Ngarn mean “a coming together of the spirit.” The language is Yawuru, spoken in Patrick Dodson’s home country in the Kimberley. In their exchanges Dodson reflects on the encounter of the English with the country and its first inhabitants; and Pete Postlethwaite’s own highly accredited standing as an Englishman, his possession of an OBE, became thematic. Within the racism, he detects a kind of fear, and Dodson also sees fear – of the desert, of the wilderness, of vast stretches of uninhabited silence, of profound foreignness and an extreme of human difference. He has a thesis; he sees the planting of roses, the spread of suburban gardens, as aspects of the fear; attempts at control, to render tamed and comprehensible what was incomprehensibly strange. Images and argument are deepened by Archie Roach’s singing, some of it infinitely sad.

Postlethwaite spent three days with Patrick Dodson, who took him back to Paul Keating’s Redfern Park speech and the beginnings of the Council for Reconciliation, back to retrogressive political change, Pauline Hanson’s entry, and Howard’s notorious outburst at the 1997 Reconciliation Convention, when, as in many other polemical moments, he tried to insist on a fixed boundary between past and present (the elders, you may remember, rose and turned their backs). If Pete Postlethwaite had any single purpose in this film, it was to deny that any such boundary could really exist. He picks up on the old myth of terra nullius, and unlike any other commentator that I know of, he proposes that those words describe a still-continuing cast of mind – sometimes a quite conscious one (I’ve heard it said aloud: “They’re a conquered people; why can’t everyone get used to it?”). Patrick Dodson remembers why he pulled out of the Reconciliation project, and argues for negotiation, for an apology, for a treaty. (The film, which doesn’t carry a date, seems to have been finished before the National Apology of February 2008.)

We see a vast, magnificent painting made by sixty artists of the eastern Kimberley to expound their claim on land rights to their country, and hear that by the time that land claim came to a hearing, nineteen of those artists were dead. The English actor is then seen in the desert, somewhere east of Broome, contemplating the lessons learnt on the journey. He talks of a great country, where he has experienced the utmost friendliness and welcome, and also of a country where the first peoples are always lower down the scale: “They are worth less, they count for less, they matter less.” He and Archie Roach disappear together down a long bush road.

Still in desert country, the actor says that the business of walking together should really be quite simple. The three men talk around a table, Dodson arguing that the Australian state must still negotiate with the first peoples, must arrive at a treaty, must work on unfinished business. But then he says that art and music matter more than argument; and the film ends with Archie, singing about places where the desert meets the sea, then the song he wrote himself around the two words, Liyarn Ngarn. In his music, there is the communication of incurable loss; there is also commitment to carrying on, singing on. There’s a kind of fusion there, a balance so that the loss can’t be forgotten. It is profound emotion without sentimentality, and you dare not talk about hope.

The three had projected a conventional documentary of the journey, but couldn’t raise the kind of money that would take; the work was crewed by Murdoch University film students, directed by their tutor Martin Mhando. They did a fantastic job finding relevant archival footage – the story of Robbie Walker, his poem and his music; the stolen children; Redfern Park, and the great march over the Harbour Bridge in May 2000. The film is thus an assemblage, put together intermittently over two or three years; Postlethwaite returned to Britain to keep his work commitments, and then came back, as he said he had to. When it came to editing, the three found at first that the work lacked the emotional force they wanted. They got involved, taking a stronger hand in the process. At the end of it, Postlethwaite said, it was no longer a documentary, just a film to be taken wherever you can go with it.

As it is, Liyarn Ngarn packs enormous punch. To watch it is to smash through general amnesia, through the long-inured, dimly well-intentioned liberal boredom with the story of race relations in Australia. No déjà vu effect; having seen Rabbit-Proof Fence, Samson and Delilah and The First Australians, there is still another perspective: that of the questing stranger (“a nosey Pom,” he says) for whom the encounters registered in the film have been wrenching, shocking, because he didn’t know – and he shows us that neither, in many senses and even now, do we.

I think we need a sequel, but wonder who could replace Pete Postlethwaite as a central questioner and searcher. Among many other things, Liyarn Ngarn is also an Australian memorial to the actor who, as a storyteller, put all his skills and responses into this new call for justice.

The film is distributed only by ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation). It has achieved some circulation around community, school and church groups, and they’re seeking a television outlet. •

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EVEN though the story of the 1936 Abdication (they often gave it a capital A) and the succession of King George VI may be lost in the mists of time for most of us, it still hangs around; for the present generations’ grandparents and great-grandparents, it was a far bigger story than any Hollywood scandal. It merged with the Battle of Britain, the heroisms of the home front, the blitz; with Menzies telling Australia (“It is my melancholy duty…”) that if Britain was at war, then “Australia is also at war.” Within all that there were the royals, the model of the good family, led by the nervous, virtuous king who would not leave London through the blitz. Offstage, in vaguely disgraceful ambiguity, there were those who had failed their duty, the departed Edward VIII and his lady (twice divorced! how could she be acceptable?). The skills of a historian, a sociologist and a good dramatist combined would be needed to unpack the ways in which the royal melodrama worked to support family-values morality for decades. The playwright would be highly conscious of the theatre of the absurd.

The history is the backdrop to The King’s Speech, and to its extraordinary popularity. At my local Dendy, it’s hard to find a seat. At its centre, the film, directed by Tom Hooper, works as a particularly strong two-hander, with Geoffrey Rush’s mix of unsinkable mischief and resolve balanced by Colin Firth’s struggles for verbal confidence, alternately pitiable and noble. But the surrounding performances are very strong; Timothy Spall’s growling Churchill provoked a friend of mine to say that he should do nothing but play Churchill for the rest of his career; Derek Jacobi does a great archbishop; Claire Bloom gives Queen Mary humane intelligence; and for a few minutes early on, Guy Pearce steals the show as Edward VIII delivering the abdication speech. Helena Bonham Carter is a feisty and believable Queen Elizabeth, but the script gives her too little to do after Lionel Logue (Rush) has taken up the job. She wears the notorious hats very well.

Some are concerned that the film’s huge success is a symptom of deep conformism, of political inertia; it has been called a loyal film. As a deeply republican cinephile – republican, of course, in the Australian sense – I cannot share those reservations. It wouldn’t matter if this George VI was the king of Ruritania; kingship here is merely one human and historical situation, and your republican audience-position is irrelevant, as it is when you’re watching Shakespeare. There is, too, the anti-monarchist, nonconformist element; in this story it is from Australia, from the colonies and from an insubordinate colonial, that help arrives.

CINEMA demands to be thought about, dissected, argued over indefinitely; ever since my earliest adventures with film festivals many moons ago, I’ve been struck by the intensity with which viewers – not necessarily aficionados – exchange responses. For some, such intensities are unravelled over time into student essays, PhDs and lifelong academic careers in cinema studies. Now and again you’ll find an aspiring scriptwriter, assistant director – or even director – expressing resentment toward those who, as s/he perceives it, are securely employed for merely talking about the stuff, while those who actually make it are living precariously from one job to the next. It’s not quite like that; the postgraduate who has her conference paper accepted (on, say, forgotten Hollywoods or outback picture-houses) may well be on a short-term contract, and overloaded with teaching to boot. The production worker and the film intellectual are both film workers; without the latter, we’d know far less about the huge range of cinema, past and present.

There were two film-study conferences in Sydney in December. Cinema, Modernity and Modernism, hosted by the University of New South Wales, was the fifteenth biennial gathering of the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand. This conference, which alternates occasions on each side of the ditch, pulls a fair crowd, and not only because academic cinema study is a popular option; the vitality of film in New Zealand (which I discussed briefly in my recent review of Boy) is also part of it. Another part is that young academics need their breaks, so it’s the kind of conference that offers several concurrent papers, and the necessity of choice is tantalising. The range of subject-matter was enormous, since “modernity” and “modernism” can mean everything you want them to mean, from pornography to Busby Berkeley, Fred and Ginger, Dino de Laurentiis on the Gold Coast, Bresson’s uses of writing and Godard’s uses of books; and three book launches were parts of the program. An enjoyable retrieval of a 1929 sound jazz film (Victor Saville’s Me and the Boys), by the archivist Graham Shirley of the National Film and Sound Archive, demonstrated the intensive craftwork of film restoration, and equally its rewards.

There were three papers on Iranian cinema; one of those, Michelle Langford’s “Honest Shadows” on About Elly (2009; directed by Asghar Farhadi) was exemplary in its clarity and attention to the relation of screen and audience, and also to the culturally specific framework in which the film was developed. Like Antonioni’s now-classical L’Avventura, About Elly is centred on the disappearance of a young woman in a privileged middle-class milieu. The group of youngish lawyers is a kind of collective protagonist; the story unfolds to show how socially sanctioned practices of equivocation and dissimulation, carried out to avoid wounding and preserve peace, come into conflict with their chosen modernity. This film has won prizes around Europe, and in Iran itself; through it, and through the work of Michelle Langford and others, we can do some important virtual tourism. The films that emerge from that conflicted, complex society, in the teeth of censorship and repression, help to give a context for those passionate pro-Mousavi demonstrations around the 2009 election. Very many of them appear to be female-centred, thus insisting on women’s agency in situations where it’s forbidden to show women on film without their headscarves.

The other conference in Sydney was billed as the Politics of World Cinema symposium. This was a smaller and more intensive event, one session at a time, addressing, for example, the links between film and literary fiction in Chinese cinema; the dominance of realist strategies in war and anti-war films; the ways in which the figures of children and indigenous people become the foci for audience anxieties. The historian Judith Keene took us back to Korea and a film too often forgotten, Pork Chop Hill. “The film speaks to ideology and history as well as to the cinematic medium,” she said, and showed why; one particular battle toward the end of the Korean war in 1953 involved many thousands of Chinese and American lives, to no gain on either side. The film intended by its principal instigator, Gregory Peck, would have been an anti-war exercise in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front; Peck engaged the director of that classic, Lewis Milestone. Dr Keene’s paper showed how Cold War pressures worked against their main purpose, and made the film less than it could have been.

In a daring and inventive paper called “Encounters with the Third Age,” Michelle Royer drew three strands together – the work of the French-Algerian filmmaker Yamina Benguigui; Simone de Beauvoir’s rigorous thinking on old age in La Vieillesse, probably the least known of her major works; and Beauvoir’s existentialist thought as applied particularly to feminism. Benguigui’s film Inch’Allah Dimanche plays out multiple oppositions – future versus past, youth versus age – through the struggle of a young Algerian immigrant mother, who seeks the freedoms of French society for herself and her children, against the older women of her family. Mother and mother-in-law are determined to maintain North African traditions, even while they live in France, and that means keeping women in narrowed, homebound lives. Dr Royer drew on Beauvoir’s theses about old age as imposed isolation and disempowerment, and on her existentialist insistence on the necessity of active engagement in the world, in “projects,” that favourite term; meaning action as release from lives overdetermined and enclosed.

This paper will appear as a chapter in Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: a Beauvoirian Perspective, a collection to be issued by Berghahn Books (Oxford and New York). It’s an exciting prospect. Cruising the publisher’s website, I found a notice for an academic film journal called Projections; its stated aims “are to explore these subjects, facilitate a dialogue between people in the sciences and the humanities, and bring the study of film to the forefront of contemporary intellectual debate” and to deal particularly in essays connecting film with (inter alia) psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, the neurosciences and genetics.

FROM positions outside those fields, we can take note that cinema, in all its complexity, is engaging the attention of professionals within them, and that should provoke us to require arts and industry funding agencies to take it seriously as well. For no decipherable reason, Screen Australia has cut funding from the splendidly eclectic online journal Senses of Cinema, the widest-ranging of those locally produced. In its ten years, Senses of Cinema has run critical comment and information on the output of most, if not all, film producing countries on the planet; it has drawn contributors from everywhere, and is in general very well written. (That needs saying, in these dismal times when it often appears that academics in the humanities have small respect for the craft of building sentences and paragraphs.) The current number (57) includes work by and about the French sociologist and sometime film-maker Edgar Morin, with a translation by Lorraine Mortimer of his essay on Ava Gardner; there is also the philosopher and cinephile Pedro Blas Gonzales, this time on the way Citizen Kane poses questions for biography at large; and there is work on digital cinema and its inheritance from the past. The team plans to struggle on; donations are welcome, to sensesofcinema.com, where you can also find their postal address. •

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