Return of the Film Festival

Rip It Up, Issue 215, 1 July 1995, Page 41

Return of the Film Festival

International Film Festival mania is almost upon the country again, and the indefatigable Bill Gosden is at the helm once more. He feels this year’s selection has “more coherent lines running through it than was possible in the past", and is more relaxed this time around, knowing the festival has “a great deal more economic freedom”. “Although this isn’t to say we’re in clover,” Gosden says. “There are still far too few of us doing far too much work!” Although Gosden has a penchant for French fare, he’s dealing out some choice slices of Hollywood nostalgia. Scary Women offers six noirish femme fatale films of the 40s. It was occasioned by the popularity of John Dahl’s The Last Seduction, a movie which Gosden dismisses as “simply not as good as the films it apes”. The ladies range from Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s martini-cool Double Indemnity, to Maria Montez in Robert Siodmak’s hysterically camp Cobra Women. Gosden swears all six movies are “the best prints available” (Cobra Women, in all its technicolour glory, has only survived in one 16mm print!), and even if Double Indemnity “is a little bit milky, it’s better than no Double Indemnity at all, which is what we’ve had for the last 30 years”. Gosden enthuses over the series Tousles Garcons, in which nine directors contributed a film set in the year in which they turned 18. We see seven of these, spanning 1962 to 1991, with period soundtracks to swoon for (each film has a ‘reunion party’ in it). While praising the sheer energy of David 0 Russell’s Spanking the Monkey (one of the films creating the most interest amongst Wellington punters), Gosden admits that first films by American directors often feel like “bright career moves, whereas, when you look at the French, there’s a wonderful lucid expression taking place. They really speak to audiences”. Not all the speaking will be from the screens this year. A number of film-makers, including Anand Patwardhan from India, will introduce their movies. Gosden has wanted this for some time. “It will be interesting to see how audiences respond to films that ‘talk back’. I’ve thought that with some of the work, we show it in a vacuum — you can only present a certain amount of context in a programme note. The film-maker is going to be much more eloquent and respond to whatever response the film evokes from the audience. It’s particularly appropriate that we’ve got a few more documentary makers this time.” Gosden and I talk about the lack of theatrical venues for documentary in this country. Although Gosden blames television for not doing more here, he admits that some docos need the big screen (Atlantic and Mother Dao are “spectacles on a grand scale”). Personally, of all the preview cassettes I’ve been working through over the last weeks, it’s the documentaries that have given me the most consistent rewards. Films like the late Marlon Riggs’ Black 15... Black Ain’t, completed after the director’s death from AIDS, is a rich tapestry of observations on ethnic and personal identity, in which an interview with Angela Davis jostles with flamboyant gay church services on the West Coast, and gumbo cooking in

Louisiana. Many of the documentaries, fascinating in themselves, have fringe bonuses. In Theremin: An Odyssey, there’s Brian Wilson, almost totally out to lunch, and an almost balletic Jerry Lewis sequence from The Delicate Delinquent. In James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Fiction, the ghoulish can experience rare footage and photos of LAPD murder investigations. Crumb, a disturbing portrait of Robert Crumb, the maker of raunchy comix, and his dysfunctional family, is graced, often ironically, by the languorous rags of Scott Joplin on the soundtrack. One film is an unequivocal gem. In Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, Deborah Hoffmann traces the development of her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease with wry humour and rare compassion. Much of the film is hysterically funny, as Hoffmann as presenter spiels with real schtick, but when it is moving, have a hanky at hand. With increasing amounts of people in the 90s finding themselves in the situation of being a ‘care-giver’, this is a film that deserves a wider audience than any festival could ever manage. Television, where are you? Would there, I wondered, be another local hit like Heavenly Creatures this year? Gosden wouldn’t be drawn out on this one. He sees Anna Campion’s first feature Loaded as “a very strange and suggestive blend of 90s and 70s sensibilities”, and quickly compares it with Olivier Assayas’ L’Eau froide from the Tousles Garcons series, which also deals with the youth phenomenon: “They’re an interesting pair.” This really sums up the ultimate benefit of such a festival in the first place — providing the luxury (and rewards) of being able to make such comparisons, which is so good for our film-makers and audiences alike.

WILLIAM DART