Yesterday as I waited to be served at an electronic store I watched a nearby HD television that was looping the DVD menu for Avatar. Readers of my blog will already be familiar with my distaste toward James Cameron’s film and as I watched ridiculous looking blue creatures running across tree trunks and space craft flying over impossible waterfalls I could hardly suppress my smirk.

And then suddenly I had a revelation. I was truly taken aback. There for less than 3 seconds was Sigourney Weavers face in the most extraordinary detail I have ever witnessed. No longer feeling anxious about when I was to be served I instead felt anxious waiting for this brief image to return to the screen. I was able to watch it four more times and each time the effect was just as significant.

I realised that I was experiencing the “irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith” (Bazin, 14). Although Bazin does not believe that the quality of the image is the important thing, suggesting “No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.” There is something to be said for the sheer sublime quality of the high definition image. For the first time in my lifetime I was confronted with an image with the same visual quality as my own reflection.

A wee while ago me and my pals entered New Zealand’s V48 Hours film competition. For the uninitiated, this is a competition where you are given 48 hours to make a 1-7 minute film. Each film must be made in a certain genre that is drawn by each team (out of a possible 12). It must also include a certain prop, a line of dialogue, a character and as of last year a certain technical feature. This year our film had to fit the following guidelines.

• GENRE: We drew ‘Fad Film’ the example being ‘Planking’ which is very popular these crazy days.
• PROP: A bent piece of wire.
• CHARACTER: Bobby Young (an Ex-Bully)
• TECHNICAL FEATURE: A freeze-frame ending (à la The 400 Blows)

The result was Blanking: The Unseen Art which you can view below.

Blanking was pretty well received. My mum laughed which was a big plus. And we didn’t hate watching it which was a big plus. We also got through to the Wellington Finals which was completely unexpected. There, we got nominated for ‘Best Script’ which was pretty funny because Blanking was largely improvised (although improvisation is still scripting in a sense, aye John Downie?). The lovely Stella Reid was also nominated for ‘Best Actress’ which was very well deserved I thought. Best of all though was having Graeme Tuckett tell us he loved our film and also having the guys who made Fistfull of Crime say they liked it too. You should watch their utterly insane and wonderful movie below.

Funnily enough a fellow Whanganui team ‘The Couch Kumaras’ made up of some rad high-school guys took out the Wellington Finals and, in my opinion, were robbed at the National Final. You should also check out their beautifully shot film Sketch, winner of way too many awards to list here.

Anyways please enjoy ours too. Please.

*Also please note this is a slightly altered version. The film itself is still exactly the same, I just re-did the credits so we could thank everyone that was involved. I did however forget to thank my buddy Tyrone Ohia who was ‘Typography Advisor’.

Expect a longer post on Falk soon. In the mean time here is a favourite scene of mine.

As a would-be filmmaker, sometimes the most inspiring pictures are the lowest low-budget ones. These films, made on a shoestring, shot on digital video in a rough and ready style are often innovative in all the ways films with massive budgets aren’t. Without millions of dollars at their disposal these ‘guerrilla’ films often tailor there stories toward real locations, focus their attention on regular folk struggling with day-to-day existence or frequently detail the chance encounter of a boy and a girl. They place emphasis on character, performance, and pace, three elements that should be the crux of all films regardless of budget.

This isn’t to say all low budget films are great. I’ve seen many that aren’t. Films trying to reach beyond their budget or schlock genre fare offering nothing new are the most common crimes. There are however many worthy low budget films that have reached us primarily because of two technological innovations. The first being the availability of cheap digital video cameras (most recently digital SLR camera’s with extraordinary video capabilities) and the second being the internet and it’s marketing power. Desktop filmmakers can operate a one-stop-shop editing their features on laptops and then using the net to market or distribute the finished product.

Whole digital cinema movements have started, including one in my country that has probably influenced me as a filmmaker more than anything else. The Aro Valley film movement, named by Dr. Russell Campbell and chronicled in the wonderful documentary Campbell Walker is a Friend of Mine will be detailed further on this blog in an upcoming post. The films made by proponents of this school of cinema including Campbell Walker, Alex Greenhough and Elric Kane, and Dick Whyte, are influenced by ‘realist’ filmmakers like Jean Eustache and Maurice Pialat, and often focus on the tenuous relationships of 20-something kiwis. Greenhough and Kane’s Murmurs and Kissy Kissy were utter revelations to me when I first encountered them and are shining lights in a national cinema starved for originality in recent times.

Today however, I want to talk about the so-called ‘mumblecore’ movies that have been conquering the festival circuits in the US. The film in particular is Quiet City, a minor masterpiece made for a paltry sum and shot on HD video. Though Quiet City might not be made with the intellectual rigour of some of the Aro Valley films, it progresses at a poetic pace and represents to me the zenith of the boy-meets-girl-in-chance-encounter tale that was less successfully explored in mumblecore’s break out success In Search of a Midnight Kiss.

Quiet City follows a very familiar premise, one that had me very wary to begin with. Jamie (Erin Fischer) has arrived in New York only to discover the friend who she has come to visit is nowhere to be seen in a deserted subway station. As luck would have it she meets Charlie (Cris Lankenau), a goofy unshaven musician who more than fills Quiet City’s mumble quota. Charlie offers Jamie a place to stay and over the next few days they gently forge a connection. On paper this seems terribly boring and trite but director Aaron Katz lets the film unfold at a glorious pace and follows a series of events that are wholly realistic.

While some of the supporting roles are irritating the central performances of Fischer and Lankenau are rather charming and the slow deepening of their bond manages to remain indistinct but still carry an emotional weight. It’s a film built on subtlety, something I was convinced was non-existent in recent American cinema. Nothing is overbearing. The music, the performances, the dialogue, the visuals and most wonderfully the resolution are all understated. Just shy of ninety minutes Quiet City is lean too, Katz never letting his images linger longer than they need to or his dialogue drift into redundancy. The overall feeling is that there are a million stories in the Quiet City, and this is just one of them.

As I suggested in my post on Three Blind Mice, this is the type of cinema that should be championed. But I’ve slightly rethought this conclusion. I now think it’s exactly the type of cinema filmmakers need to remember how to make. Without the buffer of a huge budget, overzealous use of CGI, the draw card of a well-known star, or the marketing machine that can sell the very worst forms of the art, these low budget filmmakers are fuelling a renaissance of films that exercise simplicity and reflect the reality of everyday life. Furthermore, these films transcend their meagre running times by leaving the viewer with something to think about well after the credits have rolled.

If you can find a copy of Quiet City give it a go. Below is a trailer for Aaron Katz’s follow up film which looks promising, I only hope I’m not forced to eat my words re: ‘…genre fare that offering nothing new…’

Cold Weather Trailer from Alex Bickel on Vimeo.

That just about sums up the Kiwi/Aussie relationship, we love to hate them, but when it comes to the crunch we get all ANZAC and go to war together. Brothers-in-arms and all that. They’re okay really aye? Anyway, this post is meant to be about cinema, something I think the Aussies have been doing better than us lately.

By pure happenstance I stumbled across Three Blind Mice, an Australian picture directed by bad-boy Matthew Newton (familiar to Kiwi audiences as ‘Mr Asia’ in the most recent series of Underbelly). The film sounded like an Australian version of The Last Detail, a picture I’m greatly fond of. It follows three young Navy men the night before they were to be shipped to the Gulf. Cue revelry and regret as the trio come to terms with their past actions and their future horizons.

It’s an indie film and one that doesn’t aim beyond its means. Newton does a great job performance wise (he’s largely got a great cast to thank for that) and to my great joy allows scenes to play out casually. Despite the impending time-pressure of the gents’ departure some conversations last minutes longer than they would in any conventional film and yet Three Blind Mice still manages to cram a heap of stuff into 100 minutes.

I’m into films that take place over a short time span. Even better when it’s just the course of a night like Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Paul Thomas Andersons Magnolia or Mike Nichols’ Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf. These movies are massively eventful, packed full of great dialogue and work as a well rounded whole due to the arc of their timeframe. Three Blind Mice is in the same vein. It’s full of quiet, sometimes painful revelations that add layers to the storyline in the most simple way. The end result is the feeling that we’ve survived the night ourselves and taken an equally emotional journey.

As one review of Three Blind Mice states “This is the kind of Australian cinema we should get excited about.” Well in my opinion this is the type of cinema we should be excited about full stop. These things must be dead easy to fund and there must be screeds of young filmmakers who could make films like this in a cinch if they were given half a chance. I know I always say it but we need to derail mainstream cinema because it is killing the small films like this one. Three Blind Mice is a rare picture; realistic, funny, well acted, and with something meaningful to say.

Here’s a link to a Guardian article about Newton.

Last year Sight and Sound polled a multitude of film Critics on what were the seminal film texts. Before getting the issue I had guessed that Andre Bazin would almost certainly rank toward the top, as would Andrew Sarris. Sure enough the most commonly picked texts were Bazin’s dual ‘What is Cinema?’ texts, Sarris’ ‘The American Cinema’, David Thomson’s mammoth achievement ‘A Biographical Dictionary of Film’, as well as Francois Truffaut’s ‘Hitchcock’, a transcription of the French directors interviews with the British master.

However there was another book at the top and it was one that surprised me greatly. It was Robert Bresson’s ‘Notes on Cinematography’, a collection of notes, ideas and general thoughts on cinema that culminate in somewhat of a manifesto in many ways. I remember reading excerpts from it at University, most notably Bresson’s quotes on actors, whom he referred to as ‘models’. They were peculiar, often ambiguous notes that made a great deal more sense once I was familiar with Bresson’s cinema.

Bresson is a master, a director I admire greatly. He was uncompromising and his films never strike a false note in my opinion. Bresson’s style was rigid in its simplicity and his films are deft, careful creations. Like many film directors work I am often most drawn to my first encounter with it. In my case A Man Escaped is my favourite of his pictures. A terse escape movie it boasts a superb climax and creates tension through its quietness.

Today, not for any reason in particular I dusted off ‘Notes on Cinematography’ and devoted my full attention to it. It is a truly fantastic read which is much like Bresson’s films in its care, precision of statement, and truthfulness. It is endlessly quotable and any number of its truisms could form a manifesto for any idealistic young director.

Here is some food for thought…

Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance.

Let it be the intimate union of the images that charges them with emotion.

What no human eye is capable of catching, no pencil, brush, pen of pinning down, your camera catches without knowing what it is, and pins its down with a machine’s scrupulous indifference.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Each statement is so simple and possesses a clarity that renders it nothing short of a revelation.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Having now read it, it appears obvious why it is a critical favourite. It justifies and encourages everything about cinema that is ideal. Perhaps then it is idealistic, but show me a single manifesto that isn’t.

This is a great collection of writing by a great film director and at a meagre 75 pages it can be read very quickly. Furthermore, it’s the type of book that you can pick up and read from any page. Each sentence is stimulating and I’m hell bent on committing them to memory. Read it today if you can, and if you can’t go watch A Man Escaped.

Well not only have I heard of music, I can actually confirm that I have heard music.

And now, through the power of the infonet you can see what music I have heard. And when I heard it. How bout that?

Lastfm is a rad program that you can download. Once installed the audioscrobbler takes note of all the music you listen to, not only on your computer but even on your ipod! It then gives you charts and stats and the like showing you what you have listened to.

I’m posting this because I recently signed up for a new lastfm account which you can follow here. I got a new one after my girlfriends sister plugged in her ipod one time making ‘Sex on Fire’ my favourite song by a whopping 300 plays.

Lately, as you can see, I’ve been pumping my fist to ‘Tao of the Dead’ by …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of the Dead (check out the cover!) and ‘Age of Adz’ by Sufjan Stevens whose show in Wellington last week was one of the best I’ve ever been to.

So now you can see that I’m a cool guy that knows about music as well as movies. Next I’m gonna check out books. I might even read one. Maybe.

My good friend Brandon Sayring is a bona fide cool guy and he runs an impressive new musical venue in my hometown Whanganui. It’s called The ARC Theatre (in honour of well known Whanganui musical figurehead Al Cameron) and lately some pretty radical bands have been playing there.

Here are some clips I shot at the Halloween grand opening show which was a pretty incredible spectacle. Using The ARC Theatre’s Vimeo channel I’ll upload more musical marvels, so keep an eye on it if you like what you see!

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD!

OL’ FOUR EYES!

OCELOT!

To come! The spooky sounds of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and the glitch banging beats of ITTERATA!

Truth be told, I’ve barely watched any movies of late, although like just about everyone else I did see The Social Network (Verdict: Superb). The reason I’ve been avoiding my first love is because I’ve been indulging my second; Television. And how about that show Deadwood? Good grief, what a stellar effort in just about every way. And HBO canned it! Travesty. I almost can’t fault the damn thing, except that her indoors has shifted her obsession from Eric Northman to Seth Bullock. What I wouldn’t give to have a wingman like Charlie Utter.

Now that I have filled my HBO quota for the time being I’m about to end my movie drought by watching Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens. And lo and behold it’s available in the most exciting Criterion collection release of recent times.

Can you believe this? All these pictures, including Jack Nicholson’s previously unreleased directorial debut Drive, He Said all in the same set with screeds of extras. Only Criterion could have done this and released it just in time for Xmas. So it should be fairly obvious what I’d like to see under the tree with my name on it.

When I do get this set (and I will get it so help me God) expect to see the odd post detailing my progress through the set. In the meantime go and watch Deadwood if you haven’t already. You’ll be growing a moustache in no time.

Is Elias Koteas the new Warren Oates?