Adam Goodall, chief critic for the Dunedin Quarante-Huit Heures Film Festival. As I write the festival heats have now concluded and I have born witness to forty-one of Dunedin’s forty-four 48 Hour films. The sad consequence of both technical mishaps and timetabling concerns, I have missed out on In Competition entry ‘36-45’ (from small-town battlers Team Cromwell) and Out of Competition entries ‘Rudi’s Way’ (from last year’s Dunedin grand prix winners SML Productions) and ‘ ’ (by the wittily-named Extremely Funky Gentlemen). Alas, such are the trials and tribulations of filmmaking; we continue apace.
HEAT TWO: THURSDAY
Film #1. St Leonard’s - Attack Pigeons - ‘Rom-Com’.
The real discovery in Attack Pigeons is its lead actress, who exhibits a gift for physical comedy I have not witnessed since Danny Kaye’s heyday - her reaction to a young lad trying to grab a smooch calls to mind Kaye’s remarkable facial contortions in The Court Jester. She may have a great future; however, as a serious critic of the form, I object most strongly to nine year old children being permitted to take creative roles on a film set. This is a medium for adults to weave mature tales, as all adult submissions to this festival do without fail. Given the opportunity to write, children become anathema to cinema and should be exiled to that juvenile medium, thetheatre.
Film #2. Parental Guidance - Withdrawn - Fantasy or Adventure.
And so the adults make their presence known in this tale of addiction and broken promises. The halogen-yellow night cinematography calls to mind that master of the urban, Michael Mann, the reverse structure a clear homage to Pinter’s peerless relationship drama Betrayal. I do experience fury as the film progresses, however – fury reserved for their use of POPULAR MUSIC AS A DIEGETIC SOUNDTRACK.
Film #3. Platinum Productions - Teddy Fear - Horror.
On viewing Teddy Fear, I call to mind Ealing Studios’ 1945 anthology horror Dead of Night – the light camaraderie of the Golfing Story, the possession terror of The Ventriloquist’s Dummy, the framing narrative’s astonishing twist ending. There are crude modern elements – an outrageous joke about HIV in the African continent, special effects sourced from that internet hub ‘Geo Towns’ – but, as they say in London, swings and roundabouts.
Film #4. Puzzelz - Killing Time - Time-Travel.
Bringing Andrei Tarkovsky’s oblique style to that most base of modern subgenres, the serial killer film, Killing Time calls to mind Solaris were Solaris chopped and screwed and turned into an interview between detective and convict. The full ramifications of the narrative are difficult to parse, but something transcendent perhaps emerges from that difficulty.
Film #5. SciCo - Terms & Conditions - ‘Rom-Com’.
The film initially toys with a verite style that calls to mind the great Direct Cinema documentarians – Pennebaker, the Maysles. However, in an audacious and challenging gesture, SciCo subverts audience expectations by shifting to adapt Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Lifefor fetishists and kink aficionados.
Film #6. Seventh Time Lucky - The J-Boyz Movie - Musical or Dance.
O, for a voice so high as to sing this film’s praises with sufficient clarity! What class! What beauty! What humour and drama and emotion! It calls to mind my first viewing of Citizen Kane. Essential viewing for all who can feel. [NB: The critic participated in the writing of this film, but be assured that the critic performs his duties without bias.]
It is not every day one sees a performer with the bravado to lionise Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Film #7. Super-Lethologica - Too Far? - Vengeance (Revenge).
A low fidelity battle of wits is waged between two office drones in this vicious takedown of modern corporatism. It is not each other they battle, but the capitalist machine the machine that requires they sell their labour to the same master, the machine that necessitates the theft of stationery, the machine that makes their tools of war so effective. Super – Lethologica have made a vicious satire that calls to mind the wit of Jean-Luc Godard’sPierrot le fou and the aestheticism of Susumu Hani’s Furyo shonen.
Film #8. The Dudes on Caffeine - CUT - Film Within A Film.
The ‘Dudes’ weave an eerie campfire ‘spooker’ of a film shoot gone wrong – one could be forgiven for mistaking it for Poe. The horror film is an avant-garde marvel, a hushed, partially green screened affair calling to mind Zbigniew Rybczynski’s groundbreaking 1981 short Tango; the shoot, out-of-focus and naturalistic, a contrast becoming of experimental fare such as this.
Film #9. The Underdogs - Where Did Yesterday Go? - Mystery or Puzzle.
The Underdogs survey the death of the New Zealand family farm – and with it, the death of New Zealand’s capitalist dream – in this narrative about two southern boys searching for their father’s hidden treasure. It calls to mind Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari, although that film’s tragic supernaturalism is not replicated in this decidedly more kind-hearted film.
Film #10. The Vagrant Eighters - All In - Against The Odds.
A young lad participates in an underground poker game to pay off a loan shark – a concept one expects would find home with Elia Kazan or Clifford Odets, but the audacious Vagrant Eighters bring a live-action cartoon sensibility to it that calls to mind Blake Edwards’ sublime high-art masterpiece, The Great Race. The loss of social commentary is a shame; the highbrow wordplay a delight.
Film #11. The Happy Little Peas - Drive; Badly - Vengeance (Revenge).
The heat ends as it (almost) began – halogen lights and dark secrets. The Happy Little Peas’ debt to Mann, however, gives way to a Sirkian angst over the dark heart of suburban spaces, as they follow quick-to-anger young woman taking a driving test with a meek instructor. The second half of the story, violent and despondent, calls to mind Japanese studio Nikkatsu’s fatalist noirfilms.
HEAT THREE: SCHOOLCHILDREN
As a professional film critic, I pride myself on my ability to speak truth to power and to express my opinions openly and with great force. It would appear that the organisers of the Quarante-Huit Heures do not agree with my freedom of speech. Two minutes into the first film of this heat, Cant Remember’s ‘Shock Ending’ film Next Door (a Rear Window homage with a symmetrical aesthetic that called to mind the fussy Mr Anderson), organisers requested I leave the screening room, apparently scandalised that I would have strong opinions about children who make films.They professed I was being “gauche”, “unfair to the children” and “an asshole” by hollering, with gusto, about how the young brats should go back to the pantomime and stop sullying the screen with the immature fumbling of their stubby fingers and stubbier minds.
I did take notes on snippets seen through the door – the Harvey-for-Millenials fake-dog musicalCarlito; the comedy Soul’d, updating Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus for fans of Jerry Lewis; the raw My Life In Lies, a kitchen sink drama about domestic abuse that called to mind the greats of that British tradition. However, because modern criticism is under attack in the western world, I was told to leave the premises after shouting through the door about how these Dead End Kids would be making a more impressive contribution to society if they threw dice down at the docks.
HEAT FOUR: RESIDENTS OF THE SMALLER CENTRES
Film #1. Begged, Borrowed, Stolen – A Right Tool – Mistaken Identity.
After much terse discussion with the local exhibitors, I was permitted to view the competition’s out-of-town entries. The first, A Right Tool, is a cartoon Bresson; it calls to mind the master’s coolness towards a selfish, unempathetic humanity, but adopts an acting style more in line with Jean Hagen in Singin’ In The Rain.
I have written time and again about POPULAR MUSIC and how its use in a film’s non-diegetic soundtrack is LOW ART, and yet time and again rank amateurs roll it out like a terrible red carpet.
Film #2. Electric Shoelace – Rubix3 – Mystery or Puzzle.
Electric Shoelace sets up a winning chemistry between their blundering thieves, the performers’ strong comic presences calling to mind Golden Age buffoons Laurel and Hardy. However, the film soon explores a different, more fascinating direction, employing the supernatural and the comedy of imagery in a narrative sharing bloodties with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu.
Film #3. Epically Awesome - The Rough Patch - Against All Odds.
A warm, shambolic underdog film, it calls to mind a light counterpoint to Mark Robson’s classic 1949 picture Champion. Here, our hero is a stunt-cyclist, off the boil after losing his eye in a freak childhood accident and called back into the game by pleasant friends and a requisite lady - there, Kirk Douglas is the boxer, striving for glory in a hostile world. The only similarity, an ending tinged with tragedy.
Film #4. Happy Daze - Basketball Dreams - Shock Ending.
I am sorry, but I cannot take it any longer. I have written time and again about POPULAR MUSIC and how its use in a film’s non-diegetic soundtrack is LOW ART, and yet time and again rank amateurs roll it out like a terrible red carpet. This modern Tinder romance calls to mind Ernst Lubitsch’s winning Shop Around the Corner, but that POPULAR MUSIC! It is infernal.
Film #5. Lady Bug Productions - A Fool’s Curse - Fantasy or Adventure.
This chilly tale of star-crossed lovers in a world of potions and witchery has no need for conventional structure, pacing, editing or emotion - this film lurches in the kind of idiosyncratic way one would normally expect of Tarr or Tarkovsky. Indeed, much of this film calls to mind Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, Andrei Rublev, though its roots in bucolic English druidry are more overt (a nod to Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages?).
Film #6. Pernoctation Productions - Strike! - Horror.
Pernoctation Productions appear to have mastered the style of noted American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. Strike!’s repetitive imagery, use of flashback and challenging performance style, vacant and self-conscious, calls to mind Deren’s influential Meshes of the Afternoon - even if its content is more in line with the dime-store chillers lining train station bookstores during Deren’s 1940s.
Film #7. Pretentious Artholes - Where were we when we were? - Time Travel.
As if to set the audience off on the wrong foot, so to speak, the Prententious Artholes begin their time-travel travails with two partakers of the marijuana discussing popular music in their car, a hearty mix of Kiarostami’s naturalism and Penn’s mind for pop art. However, it soon calls to mind a dark, illogical reworking of It’s A Wonderful Life, devolving with its characters’ consumption of that suspect mind-altering substance.
Film #8. Southern Swaggie - Southern Casanova - ‘Rom-Com’.
It is exciting to see a young man use those 48 Hours to pay homage to one of the greats, Sir Alec Guinness, in one - or rather, eight! - of his greatest roles, the D’Ascoyne family of Kind Hearts and Coronets. It is breathtakingly modern, then, to see that same young man pay homage to more than just Guinness! It is not every day one sees a performer with the bravado to lionise Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Pitches Be Crazy, however, has a far more fatalistic outlook.
Film #9. Stone Princess - Thrusting Pony - Musical or Dance.
Adopting an aesthetic that calls to mind transgressive American animator Ralph Bakshi’s early works, Stone Princess take a loose approach to the ‘musical’ genre. Thrusting Pony is one song only, though there is a lingering ugliness to its (aurally incomprehensible) description of a young straight man desirous to escape from the clutches of his camp gay parents. Dear readers, I may be a critic, but that does not mean I am a stone, unmoved by troubling content.
Film #10 - TESLA - Lying Fox - Race Against the Clock.
The Microsoft Paint character art and unashamedly cheap animation anchors TESLA’s vociferous reaction against modern animation’s perverted pursuit of ‘realism’ through rotoscoping and computer generated imagery. TESLA truly establish themselves as unapologetic anti-realists whose work calls to mind the post-Thaw output of revolutionary Soviet animator Fyodor Khitruk – their animation is alienating, aggressive and one-of-a-kind.
Film #11. Team Super Best Friends – Pitches Be Crazy – Film Within A Film.
An archetypal set-up from Team Super Best Friends, with a young ‘hipster’ visiting a production studio to pitch a “love story for the Facebook generation”. However, as the producers meddle with the idea, the film starts calling to mind Hong Sang-soo’s works – both he and Team Super Best Friends thoroughly explore the tension between artistic credibility and capitalism. Pitches Be Crazy, however, has a far more fatalistic outlook.
Film #12. Wanaka Division – SUNSHINE – Horror.
Perhaps we can see in Wanaka Division’s sombre drama a mirror to our own world, reflecting the ways in which we abuse each other and act without care. As in Nicholas Ray’s unsettlingBigger Than Life, the filmmakers call to mind a society of comfort and easy solutions, only to be undermined by the true nature of the people within it.
Film #13. Umbrella Fortress – Who Stole The Cookie From The Cookie Jar? – Mystery or Puzzle.
While parts of this offering, a combination of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Agatha Christie mysteries and baked goods, display a promise, it was to my outrage that, ONCE AGAIN, a team took it upon themselves to use popular music in the diegetic soundtrack. It is not a difficult lesson, and so it baffles me that people WILL NOT LEARN IT! I shouted as such during their film, and while I did end up missing its conclusion as a result of being forcibly removed from the premises, I would like to think that, for this Quarante-Huit Heures at least, I have created some change in our local industry.
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