the (red) set*

Reviews and ideas about films that are a little bit different to mainstream fanboy & girl reviews…..

pic: Emily Blunt as The Young Victoria, found at the guardian

Inspired by the rigour of twitter, where character count determines what one shares, the red set has decided to move to one sentence reviews – just like haiku – sort of….. and if you like the short & sharp approach you can follow us on twitter at twitter.com/AFTRS

If you feel inspired to write your own short haiku style review send it to us at stayconnected@aftrs.edu.au and if we like it we will post it ! ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

September 25 by Karen Pearlman – AFTRS Head of Screen Studies
The Young Victoria (haiku style)

Masterfully cut
Elides coming of age, and
Coming to power.

September 17 by Sarah Stollman – AFTRS Head of Screen Design
Mad Men (haiku style)

Observations on
a movement, a look, a word
Unfurls a moment.

August 13 by Ruth Saunders – AFTRS Distribution Manager
Balibo ( haiku style)

In Balibo
it was time to go.
Would the five
still be alive?

July 28 by Ian Brown – AFTRS VFX Lecturer
Red Cliff ( haiku style)

John Woo brings movies
From the US to China
and then back again

July 24 – by the redset
The Last Ride (haiku style)

Light blue, beautiful
About a father and son
Confronting and tough

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Old school long form reviews

August 14 2008
Peter Herbert, Head of Producing at AFTRS comments on some Australian films of old…

FOXTEL did us all a great favour a couple of weeks ago when they ran a series of early Australian Films. Two of them really caught my eye: They’re a Weird Mob (66) and Alvin Purple (73). Good Films? Good enough to stop me channel-surfing for a couple of hours. Both were huge commercial successes: the Mob took more than $2.5million box against a $600,000 budget; Alvin was 4M/200K split. How outrageous are those numbers? They’re argument stoppers, really; especially when you consider the amount of foam mouthed off these days if a film manages to make its investors a mere fraction of its cost. Somehow we have kidded ourselves into thinking Aussie films can’t recoup when in fact there’s history to tell us otherwise. They’re a Weird Mob was made by the distinguished UK filmmakers Powell & Pressburger, right at the end of their careers. Perhaps not their best work but it’s ever so significant that it was an adaptation of a bestseller (of the same name). Now adapting Aussie bestsellers is rare these days, which is shameful. Take home point: stop jollying the auteur, start scouring the bestseller lists.

Alvin Purple was a turning point for its director, Tim Burstall, who’d tried his hand at the auteur gig with 2000 Weeks (the first all-Australian film since 1954!). It was a piece of, how to put it, existentialist art that didn’t make any money for anyone. Burstall’s nascent career was underwater. Then he made an incredible decision – by our arts-subsidised, funding-driven standards – and went for commercial appeal, first with Stork (71), then Alvin. Big audiences; big numbers. A touch vulgar and gross these films may be but they still tilt at cultural comment in interesting ways: the Mob ever so gently pokes Aussie xenophobia and Alvin’s spoofs the sexually liberation of the 70’s. And like Kenny (06) they talk loud to the folk who pay for the tickets.

March 4 2008
Dr Teresa Rizzo, Screen Studies lecturer at AFTRS, reviews Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Based on a best selling autobiography Julian Schnabel’s film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one of the most exciting films made over the last decade. What makes it so exciting is that it departs from the conventions of the bio-pic, giving the genre new life. Most bio-pics drag their audiences through a tedious psychological journey that over explains the character’s every thought and action. As if a person’s life could ever be solely understood through psychology. Schnabel’s film is different to the average bio-pic because it expresses an aesthetics of living rather than a psychological state.

The story centres around Jean-Dominique Bauby, or Jean-Do as he is known to his friends, and what happens to him after a massive stroke leaves him totally paralysed except for his left eye. He is diagnosed as having ‘locked-in-syndrome’.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly allows us into the main character’s mind in order to give us insight into a view of the world and of life that is about the imagination and beauty. Jean-Do learns to communicate through a system of blinks by which he manages to write his autobiography. In doing so we see the world as he sees it, both his present and his past. The world we are invited to inhabit with him is one that understands life as something that deserves to be lived to the fullest regardless of circumstance. Yes we see Jean-Do struggle through the frustrations of illness and therapy, and as we all know struggle can be painful and messy, but within the struggle there can also be beauty and grace.

Many filmmakers would shy away from a character that is not capable of any physical movement or speech. It is also very rare to find a film that is shot primarily in the first person perspective, that is the point of view of the main character. First person perspective films are notoriously bad.

What makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly exhilarating is the risky way it is shot. It is a courageous film not just because it is about a person’s struggle with an almost impossible situation, but also because the way it is shot challenges conventional cinematic codes. Its cinematic style manages to capture perfectly Jean-Do’s aesthetics of living. The world we see through his eye is in the most part a cantered world. Without the ability to move we see the world from a fixed position with characters moving in and out of our range.

Like Jean-Do we have to adjust to a world that forces us to see in new ways. These restrictions broaden our perspective rather than diminish it. The irony is that ‘locked-in-syndrome’ teaches us to see again and in doing so our imagination is liberated and we are put in touch with the aesthetics of living.

January 10, 2008
Peter Giles, Director of the Digital Media Division at AFTRS, records his unexpected delight with The Waterhorse.

It’s a rare occurrence for a kid’s film to really touch you emotionally – especially with the assault of CG animated features which just keep coming and kids seem to lap up like ice cream. I’m thinking of Bee Movie, Valiant, Madagascar - even Pixar’s offerings are getting stale and saccharine.

The kid’s ‘effects’ movie bundled-with-lovable-fictional-creature is a genre that’s been hard to crack since ET hit the screens. But the producers of The Water Horse just reinvented the wheel without ladelling on all the schmultz you’d expect from Hollywood.

This is a great movie whether you’re an adult or a kid. The performances are great from everyone including the digital creature who is portrayed in sensitive proportion to the demands of the story.

Although set in Scotland there is a New Zealand connection (Weta Digital did the effects and much of the movie was shot in New Zealand) and there are some story similarities with the inspired Whale Rider.

It’s a joy to see a film where effects are so well integrated – this is how it should be and even kids can spot the difference.

Good to see that it’s being promoted in a Godzilla kind of way in Japan but the movie itself is very much more understated.

December 8, 2007
Dr Ben Goldsmith, AFTRS Screen studies lecturer, analyses Elizabeth: The Golden Age from the perspective of the film maker’s use of light.

Woman. Warrior. Queen’ reads the tag line for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But to engage with these ideas is to enter a discussion about the film’s fidelity to history, or rather its adaptations of history, and risk not treating this film as a film. I’ll leave the historical debate to others. For me this film is not about Elizabeth in any of these guises. This film is about light: how it is cast, how it is reflected, what it means symbolically and metaphorically, what it illuminates, what its absence foretells.

The film opens with Philip II, King of Spain, muttering prayers by the light of a single candle. Towards the end of the film in a similar setting he declares “I am the light. Elizabeth is the darkness”. How wrong could a king be. His hopes like the candle are about to be snuffed out; as the film repeatedly shows us, it is Elizabeth’s incandescence that will confine her black-clad enemies’ plots to shadowy failure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the failed assassination scene. Elizabeth dressed all in white, her face ghostly pale, turns to stare down the regicide. As she starts to walk towards him she begins to luminesce. Whiter and whiter she glows, pure power radiating an impenetrable aureole. We later learn that the attacker’s pistol had already been disarmed, but the intrigue like so many before was doomed to fail, burnt up by the intensity of the monarch’s corona.

And there are many other examples. Elizabeth dresses in starched lace with white maribou feathers in her hair, or in sumptuous red, green and purple silk damask, satin and velvet, with high, stiff lace ruffs like halos offset with silver, crystals and pearls. She and her courtiers conduct their business in sunlit palaces, cathedrals or halls, or in more intimate spaces illuminated by ornate candelabras or roaring fires. The Spaniards and their co-conspirators by contrast dress in black and seek the shelter of shadows. There are wonderful notes and images about the costumes and sets on the film’s official website.

The exceptions among the bright sparks of Elizabeth’s court are those characters caught between the worlds of light and darkness: Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), the Queen’s spymaster, overseer of torture on her behalf, and brother of a traitor also dresses in black; Bess (Abbie Cornish), the Queen’s favourite handmaiden and cousin of a conspirator, on learning of her cousin’s arrest and certain death weeps in a dim alcove where she is discovered by Raleigh (Clive Owen). She passes through shadows to stand in almost total darkness and confess to him. His face is cut diagonally by a shaft of light as he explains that court life and politics are not black and white, but murky spaces. He stands centre screen, she on the left with only a very thin edge of light tracing the finest silhouette.

The burning ships of the Armada represent the nascent promise of Enlightenment still a hundred years hence, the darkness of religious fundamentalism banished.

The film’s website and attendant commentary rightly celebrate the artistry and achievements of costume designer Alexandra Byrne and production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas. But for me they downplay the real triumph of the film: the cinematography of Remi Adefarasin, and his use of light. To be fair, there are some questionable shot choices – action glimpsed through or from behind furniture – but these are mostly (all?) B-camera shots. I could not disagree more with one critic’s description of the ’shoddiness’ of the camerawork or the view of director Kapur as a ‘hack’. The mise en scène for the most part is expressionist rather than mannerist, to use Adrian Martin’s categories.

In an article in the October 2007 edition of American Cinematographer, Adefarasin describes his artistic influences (Rembrandt’s “tendency to illuminate the central area of an image and allow the edges to drop away into darkness”, and JMW Turner’s seascapes), the simplicity of his lighting style, and his use of a variety of fabric masks and filters:

“A feature of Adefarasin’s photography over the years has been his use of materials and fabrics to add detail, texture and realism to lighting. On Elizabeth he often shot through glass, nets, drapes or flames, and he also broke up light from fixtures by placing them behind lengths of silk or lace. For The Golden Age he found Lowel Rifa-lites useful because he could hang lace in front of them to reduce light levels without changing the color temperature that had been set on the dimmer board. Black lace also served to ‘break down the clinical and precise look of electric light,’ he says.Much of the film was shot with a very fine net stretched across the lens, out of which Adefarasin cut a custom hole for every setup. Then he would tease out some of the strands to give the hole a soft rim, through which the key point of interest in each shot would be framed. ‘The effect is very slight, but it adds a little mellowing to the image, especially the edges.’ For certain scenes he also mounted two peanut bulbs on the 19mm support bars and aimed them at the net on the lens. The bulbs were on dimmers and could be brought up in order to gently fog different sides of the net, sometimes with warm or cold gels, or even a mixture of the two…”

He used a number of ‘jungle mirrors’ to help create the effect of dappled sunlight inside Elizabethan buildings. ‘A “jungle mirror” is a set of 12 9-inch square mirrors, each of which is on a gimbal attached to a 5-foot-square frame,’ he explains. ‘We hit them with Molebeams and got lots of different shapes, splashes of light thrown in all directions that gave interest to the background.’

One other shot is worth mentioning, a late entry to the recent close-up blogathon hosted by Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door. (See also David Bordwell’s history of the close-up on his blog.) After the Armada has been defeated, the Catholic church and the Spanish court acknowledge their failings. The camera closes in to an XCU of Philip, from the nose up, with a row of scarlet clad bishops behind him. His eyes stare blankly, then his face crumples and he turns to look screen right. The bishops behind, out of focus, shuffle and begin to break ranks. As Philip’s face gives way to the enormity of his failure, the bishops dispersal signifies the collapse of the alliance between the Spanish king – the Holy Roman Emperor – and the Catholic Church. Though he will survive another decade and more, never will his power – the light – reach its former magnitude. A new empire is shining.

Read more of Dr Ben Goldsmith’s thoughts and ideas at his blog: I Screen Studies