Three More From SIFF
Jun. 3rd, 2010 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
An Australian musical, a documentary about academics, and a restored Polish 1960s classic.
First of this batch was Bran Nue Dae, a film version of an Australian musical. Aboriginal teenager Willie is sent to seminary school by his mother, but he has no desire to be a priest and he runs away. He heads for home, with an odd collection of people who accumulate along the way.
I always knew I was taking a risk with this one - there are some bad musicals, and some good musicals from which very bad films have been made - but I decided to give it a whirl anyway. Well, it sucked. Its characters are all stereotypes, and it has a ridiculous ending that Beaumarchais and Mozart could get away with because their comedy was actually funny. There were about three entertaining songs in it, all sadly within the first half an hour. Even worse, all the songs seemed very short, and I was left with the impression that the musical numbers had been hacked to keep the film down to a 90 minute running time. There are a few good visual moments, which kept it off rock bottom. 2/5. I'd been doing so well, too; this was the first bad film I've seen this year.
Thankfully, the next film lifted the game again, with the documentary Secrets of the Tribe. The Yanomami people of the remote Amazon were 'discovered' only in the 1960s, but the film isn't about them. The film is about the anthropologists who descended on them over the next twenty years, to study this 'untouched' civilisation, and the effects that their behaviour had on the Yanomami.
The interviews in this documentary are almost universally poisonous. The academics who built their reputations and careers while writing their books about the Yanomami loathe their competitors. The accusations predictably start with data manipulation and false reporting, as each man looked for backing for his own pet theory about the fundamental nature of humanity. But the film exposes far more than the usual sniping, back-stabbing, personality cult of academia, with ongoing appalling breaches of any professional or ethical standards. The often contradictory accounts of the various anthropologists are intertwined with archival footage, and interviews with the Yanamami themselves, which only go to prove that House has it right - everybody lies. Nobody comes out of this film looking good, not even the Yanomami. The anthropologists trying to understand the most basic nature of mankind may have inadvertently exposed more than they intended, and it isn't pretty.
This film was made by Jose Padhila, whose Elite Squad impressed me a couple of years ago. He has built his career as a documentary film-maker, with Elite Squad his only non-documentary released to date, so it was interesting to see one of his more typical works. (Elite Squad was shot as fiction after Padhila realised that trying to make a documentary about Rio's drug dealers and corrupt cops would get him killed.) I scored Secrets of the Tribes 4/5, but it was more a 9/10.
Every year, SIFF puts on a few archival screenings, and yesterday I went to see the recently restored Polish classic Mother Joan of the Angels. Based on the famous 17thC events in France, a Catholic official is sent to perform exorcisms at a convent where the nuns are supposedly possessed by devils, and one of the priests before him was burned at the stake for becoming sexually involved with a nun. Father Suryn spends his nights at the inn, where the locals discuss with gusto the strange goings-on at the convent, and in his daily contact with the 'possessed' Mother Joan, he finds himself increasingly drawn to her.
The film's central theme of demonic possession is inevitably a veil for discussion of sexuality and repression, but there is nothing overt here - the Polish morality of the 1960s would not have allowed explicit filming, so everything is implied. The film is sadly very slow-moving and rather static in direction, so it does seem to drag somewhat in parts, but there are some absolutely fantastic visuals in there - the scene with the nuns all prostrate on the floor, like white crosses, and the lighting on Father Suryn's face as he talks to himself in a scene near the end stand out in particular. The subtitles were also bad, with typos and missing words a regular feature, and one commentator on imdb has pointed out that the translation is as poor as that kind of laziness would imply. 7/10
First of this batch was Bran Nue Dae, a film version of an Australian musical. Aboriginal teenager Willie is sent to seminary school by his mother, but he has no desire to be a priest and he runs away. He heads for home, with an odd collection of people who accumulate along the way.
I always knew I was taking a risk with this one - there are some bad musicals, and some good musicals from which very bad films have been made - but I decided to give it a whirl anyway. Well, it sucked. Its characters are all stereotypes, and it has a ridiculous ending that Beaumarchais and Mozart could get away with because their comedy was actually funny. There were about three entertaining songs in it, all sadly within the first half an hour. Even worse, all the songs seemed very short, and I was left with the impression that the musical numbers had been hacked to keep the film down to a 90 minute running time. There are a few good visual moments, which kept it off rock bottom. 2/5. I'd been doing so well, too; this was the first bad film I've seen this year.
Thankfully, the next film lifted the game again, with the documentary Secrets of the Tribe. The Yanomami people of the remote Amazon were 'discovered' only in the 1960s, but the film isn't about them. The film is about the anthropologists who descended on them over the next twenty years, to study this 'untouched' civilisation, and the effects that their behaviour had on the Yanomami.
The interviews in this documentary are almost universally poisonous. The academics who built their reputations and careers while writing their books about the Yanomami loathe their competitors. The accusations predictably start with data manipulation and false reporting, as each man looked for backing for his own pet theory about the fundamental nature of humanity. But the film exposes far more than the usual sniping, back-stabbing, personality cult of academia, with ongoing appalling breaches of any professional or ethical standards. The often contradictory accounts of the various anthropologists are intertwined with archival footage, and interviews with the Yanamami themselves, which only go to prove that House has it right - everybody lies. Nobody comes out of this film looking good, not even the Yanomami. The anthropologists trying to understand the most basic nature of mankind may have inadvertently exposed more than they intended, and it isn't pretty.
This film was made by Jose Padhila, whose Elite Squad impressed me a couple of years ago. He has built his career as a documentary film-maker, with Elite Squad his only non-documentary released to date, so it was interesting to see one of his more typical works. (Elite Squad was shot as fiction after Padhila realised that trying to make a documentary about Rio's drug dealers and corrupt cops would get him killed.) I scored Secrets of the Tribes 4/5, but it was more a 9/10.
Every year, SIFF puts on a few archival screenings, and yesterday I went to see the recently restored Polish classic Mother Joan of the Angels. Based on the famous 17thC events in France, a Catholic official is sent to perform exorcisms at a convent where the nuns are supposedly possessed by devils, and one of the priests before him was burned at the stake for becoming sexually involved with a nun. Father Suryn spends his nights at the inn, where the locals discuss with gusto the strange goings-on at the convent, and in his daily contact with the 'possessed' Mother Joan, he finds himself increasingly drawn to her.
The film's central theme of demonic possession is inevitably a veil for discussion of sexuality and repression, but there is nothing overt here - the Polish morality of the 1960s would not have allowed explicit filming, so everything is implied. The film is sadly very slow-moving and rather static in direction, so it does seem to drag somewhat in parts, but there are some absolutely fantastic visuals in there - the scene with the nuns all prostrate on the floor, like white crosses, and the lighting on Father Suryn's face as he talks to himself in a scene near the end stand out in particular. The subtitles were also bad, with typos and missing words a regular feature, and one commentator on imdb has pointed out that the translation is as poor as that kind of laziness would imply. 7/10
