HIGH UP IN THE TREES

“A person doesn't change just because you find out more.”

{"I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better." Scenes from Carol Reed's The Third Man.}

Pass me a zither and I’ll play you my response; I’ve no words you’ve not already read for the brilliance that is The Third Man. That classic film, see it, revisit it, watch it on the big screen, Here’s to one of my Mum’s favourite films and perhaps yours too.

Adrian Wootton’s talk beforehand was a beautiful and insightful lead into this MIFF screening of The Third Man. Something of a Greene fan (The End of the Affair a firm favourite), this made for a great festival morning for me. He spoke of Greene’s role as a film critic; his extreme dislike of Hitchcock’s films, all of them, and the man himself; how The Third Man came to be, both book and film; Greene’s working relationship with Carol Reed. He spoke of Orson Wells and that improvised “cuckoo clock” speech and his refusal to stay and work in those sewerage system tunnels beneath the city of Vienna; how his chase scene in the tunnel was actually filmed on reconstructed set at Shepperton Studios in London. This footage collaged in with the actual tunnel scenes that make use of a Harry Lime double on the run. And it is assistant director Guy Hamilton's shadow you see on the wall as Harry Lime disappears into the night in an earlier scene. (Though this is not what I saw as I watched the film on the big screen; I was too busy in the moment.) Welles was as elusive as the character Lime, it seems. Wootton’s illustrated talk was a joy to listen to. He spoke as a fan, a lover of cinema, an admirer of the breadth and talent of the work of Greene, and I look forward to catching what he presents as promised at next year’s festival. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am on the hunt for a copy of The Green Cockatoo.

No director [Carol Reed] ever served a screenwriter as well. But it’s still Greene’s picture. You may not see him in the film, but Greene is always there, lurking in every shadowy, bullet-scarred doorway, watching the action with a raised eyebrow and a cynical smile. A ubiquitous piece of zither music by Anton Karas may have helped to brand the film (such was the film’s success that it did indeed establish an early version of that modern Hollywood obsession, the screen franchise), but it’s Greene’s cooler, harsher tune that we’re dancing to. His top-line melody may sound like an atmospheric story of love and friendship and betrayal, but lying just underneath the plinky-plinky-plinky-plink, rubble-strewn surface is a counterpoint that uses a darker theme of moral hypocrisy.
(The Third Man: Seeing Greene by Philip Kerr)

Paired.

{It was beautiful to bathe in those Yasujiro Ozu painted scenes in An Autumn Afternoon.}




{How beautiful the landscape in Norwegian Wood.}

Not solely indoors have I been. I’ve found time to let the wind run in through my left ear, sweeping out cobwebs, fuzz and confusion as it leaves through the right. My film festival schedule is light compared to others I know of, but the eyelids they can grow heavy in even the best of films.

So here for you, two new greeting cards by Louise and me. They may be familiar to you. They feature two of our relatively recent prints, Something mighty peculiar was afoot but I was hard-pressed to say for certain what it was (I) and (II).

I do hope you like them.

You can purchase them through our online store individually, as a pair, or as a set of five (of the one design).

{Something mighty peculiar was afoot but I was hard-pressed to say for certain what it was (I) and (II) in hand.}

+ Thank-you to our friends on our occasional mailing list for your recent card and zine orders. If you are not already on our mailing list, you may like to add yourself, or peruse earlier newsletters here.

+ Beauty and the Beast: Dark Magic by Geoffrey O’Brien for those bewildered by Cocteau’s “happily ever after”.

Nothing done and nothing doing...

Dear you,

In Lebanon, a sperm whale of truly gigantic proportions has taken up lodgings. It is so very large that the village that once nestled by water’s edge is now completely flattened. There is talk of wedging a giant manmade shoehorn-type structure under its lower right side in order to let the locals beneath a little more air and light but little has come of this plan. Like many plans, it remains an idea not put into action or to the test. Talk. Hot air. Waffle. Nothing done and nothing doing. Perhaps soon the whale will move on. We hope.

Yours, an onlooker peering at the world and its turnings,
X

"What will be left if it is forgotten?"

{Silent Souls}


{Intimate Grammar}

Delightfully exhausted is how I feel. I may have seen only six films in three days, but it has been a wild ride for the senses and in each and every film, every journey, I have found something to enthral me, delight me, educate me, and to alter the tempo of my heart’s beat. I began in France with Jeanne (The Silence of Joan) and I found the stillness mesmerising. For me, film is sometimes a painting, a collage, a still life, a song, a poem. It is the beauty of these painted scenes I look for, often above all narrative. Beautiful scenes I find are not always obvious. Jeanne’s ashes a dusty streak floating across the surface of the water. The realisation and flicker of disappointment on Beauty’s face as she realises she is to live happily ever after with not a Beast but handsome mortal prince (Beauty and the Beast). It is the sand and steel palette of the Russian landscape at the water’s edge (Silent Souls). And it is Kaurismäki's blue, red, ochre, and green colour palette that frames beautifully the characters & still lifes he draws to music (Le Harve). It is the woman losing her mind to old age and catching sight of giant dancing bumblebees in the public gardens (in Sebastián Silva and Pedro Peirano’s Old Cats). It is all of these things.








{Those Kaurismäki blues.}

Recently I have seen Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls and in poem with few words learnt of an ancient Finno-Ugric people, the Merja. To the Merja, love and water were their gods, as is told through the allegory of Miron, a factory manager, as he bids farewell to his recently deceased wife, Tanja. With the help of his friend, Aist, they prepare her body according to the rituals of the Merja. Two Buntings in a tiny cage, oversee their tender journey to return her bodily ashes to the water.

"We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. We wanted to recreate this world that didn't exist any longer, but was constantly present with us."
(Aleksei Fedorchenko, Silent Souls)

{Silent Souls}

From this quiet world to Israel in the mid 60s just before the Six Day War (Intimate Grammar), the walk between cinemas gives me time to prepare, but this is not always the case. Next up, I travel to Japan, I think, but I cannot be sure. I’ll send postcard soon.

Captivated.

{The Silence of Joan}






{Le Havre}






{Beauty and the Beast}






{Old Cats}

MIFF thus far
4 films, tweeted and rated accordingly:
The Silence of Joan (Jeanne Captive)
Le Havre
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête)
Old Cats (Gatos Viejos)

369 minutes of film
1 man with a docile cockatiel on the tram (on way to first film)
A conversation with a man who was raised by cinephiles and 8 years of age when Beauty and the Beast premiered at the festival in 1952
4 bridal parties (sighted on way home from fourth film and all making most of the winter sunlight)

My Melbourne International Film Festival began with a man and a cockatiel on the 112. So tame was this man’s pet cockatiel, she sat perched on the top of the seat opposite him. Upon occasion, he would reach over and with forefinger caress her neck and run his palm over her back. All the way into the city, this pair travelled on crowded tram, and I took it to be a good festival omen. He proclaimed her “the best cockatiel in all of Australia” and I deemed this somewhat quietly surreal encounter a good cinematic beginning.

Indeed, thus far, I have yet to see a film without an animal. From a canine who follows a preacher, Laiki in Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Harve, and Isadora and Enrique's adorable old cats by way of those hissing swans in Cocteau’s surrealist poem.

Past. Blur.

Here is to the failed photo. The blurry-edged photo. Here’s to the photos one never posts. Those photos too out-of-focus to be legible. And to those photos that have been done better by thousand countless nameless others. Here is to trying to capture a squirrel in motion, failing at the task, and dressing up said blur to look like a memory of days since past. The blur befits the distant memory. The squint. The fuzziness of time. Doesn’t it? I’m tipping my hat to the abstract. Kind of. The ambiguous. Always.

Was this really only last year? Autumn. London. Yes, it was. Could it be my feet are itchy? Thank goodness there is a film festival around the corner offering, for small fee, to transport the willing to some place else be it dark or light or in between.
 
Posted here for reason of squirrels alone. It is enough for me.

























Interspersed throughout, a little Rothko in detail, including:
Earth & Green, 1955
Mark Rothko

No. 1 (Untitled), 1948
Mark Rothko

No. 10, 1950
Mark Rothko

No. 2 (No. 7 and No. 2), 1951 (alternatively dated to 1950),
Mark Rothko

+ Following Louise's polite lead, thank-you for the compliments and words of encouragement in regards to our online exhibition, Our boat was the lightest feather.

A feather in one's cap.

Marieke Berghuis invited Louise and me to pull together an online exhibition of our work for SOLV Art. With gusto, we did just that. (Thanks, Marieke.)

At your leisure, please view our online exhibition.
 
And here is what I wrote about our work for this online exhibition. I am not a writer; I make collage, and when I do write, I see the words as I would the various collage elements. For me, the words are there to be shuffled about and to extend the visual narrative.
 
Our boat was the lightest feather
15th July, 2011 – 1st January, 2012

The animal features in our work made together in collaboration and otherwise. It is prominent in its feature and easily detectable, the centre of our paper stage. Hard to miss, over here and over there, the animal runs up hills, scales rooftops, and passes through a scene new or more familiar. It is present, always. For us, the animal is there to question our very behaviour, those moral principles one governs the self by, and to explore the relationship with the natural world.
 
The animal is our protagonist. It is the main character. Gliding through a scene it is too large to be contained within or perhaps too manmade to call home, that it has a tail or feathers or furred muzzle is not solely why its form appears. It is what the animal, our principal on aforementioned paper stage lit by moon or sun above, is doing that is where our interest lays. It is the physical act they are caught in, that is our focus. It is that they do not always fit in with their surrounds, even though sometimes, sometimes they are hard to see. It is what we relate to, in part, the act of looking for shelter or safe lodgings, running home or travelling far. It could be you. You, shown this time with a tail, but still very much you. They illustrate our traits, and our longings, those things common to us all.
 
The animal also illustrates our relationship and fascination with the natural world. The birds, in Louise’s drawings in particular, are depicted on the page with space for you to determine their landscapes, nest, or habitat. They are portraits with room for you to decide the setting. Defined by our environment, by where we dwell, these birds are shown on but a faint pencil line of a branch, if that.
 
The drawings and collages in this exhibition, Our Boat was the lightest feather, feature chiefly in the recent zines: The interloper; Looking and almost never finding; It was quite a wilderness; That in the moon did glitter.
 
We strive to create beautiful images, but beauty underpinned by certain sadness, a lack of fit.
 
(The title of this exhibition we have borrowed from a sentence in Edgar Allan Poe’s A Descent into the Maelström.)

+ Lapponensis (Michiel Brouwer) and Traces (Marieke Berghuis and her father Bert Berghuis) are two earlier exhibitions you should explore.

Silent Celebration.

{My Dad.}

For his 68th birthday, my Mum and I took my Dad to the opening night performance of Nederlands Dans Theatre I. I knew we were in for a treat of spectacular proportions. Like one dancer in several bodies, such was the synchronicity & magical fluid trickery witnessed in The Second Person. Twenty-four dancers in dark suits before darkened clouds, falling, dropping, tumbling. It was as if watching time rewinding, paused, fast-forwarded, sped up, slowed down, a physical manifestation of time altered, flipped, toyed with and spun before one’s very eyes. And dark clouds. Those beautiful dark clouds looming large, framing the pull between group and individual.
 
Mesmerizing, all of it. Go and see for yourself. See if you do not want to run away and join the company as the curtain closes on Silent Screen and you are returned to your seat once more after intoxicating voyage through dream. Do.
 
Jiří Kylián / Double You
Crystal Pite / The Second Person
Paul Lightfoot and Sol León / Silent Screen
13 – 17 July, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
 
Happy Birthday for the 21st, Dad. XO

{Paul Lightfoot and Sol León / Silent Screen}

The Interloper in the circle.

{This is Louise's most recent zine, The Interloper. It is one of my favourites. A $2 marvel that you can purchase here.}

Having had this blog now since the early days of January 2006, one of the dangers I run is that of repetition. My tastes have changed little in this time. I enjoy the same things, and most of what I do involves me sitting on my own in quiet space. I work better, when it is quiet. My thoughts are uninterrupted this way, and ideas are always sparked by water. A swim (a rare thing), a shower, a bath, washing my hands at the sink, watering the garden, emptying the water catcher; if I am stuck for an idea or feeling stilted, to water I head.
 
Often when I sit down to pen a post I think, I have said this before. Aren’t you bored? It is winter, you see. In winter, as I’ve written previous, I seek out inspiration. I gather visuals from novels read and large books borrowed from the library from which to scan imagery. I go to the film festival. I’ve twenty-six booked thus far.
 
This week, I’ve dipped my toes into the cinematic waters earlier than is my usual pattern for I have had a spot of tremendous luck of late. I won a double pass to the Arab Film Festival and saw Georges Hachem’s Stray Bullet (screening with the short films Mary and A Tuesday) over the weekend. Set in Beirut in the summer of 1976, the film featured Nadine Labaki and her performance as Noha was mesmerising.

Now I am off to The Cherry Orchard with Ranyevskaya played by Zoë Wanamaker, courtesy of the MTC. Entering competitions has proven fruitful thus far. Note to self: continue.
 
“…The overwhelming sense is that everything changes, and nothing does” rings ever true.

+ Thanks to SBS for the double pass to the Arab Film Festival
+ Thanks to the Melbourne Theatre Company for the double pass to The Cherry Orchard

He has voyaged through Venezuela but never the beyond.

{One more voyage and then I am done.}

Especially for the Happy Journey Collective, my contribution most late. Asked long ago to participate, I, to my shame, failed to do so in time. So here, better late than never, as is often said, is my coffin and its twin. Or is that a mirror? Either way, either one, I’m fine with that.
 
"The Happy Journey Collective is the product of the imaginative heads of illustrators Thereza Rowe, Lesley Barnes and Abi Daker." Sarajo Frieden, Alexandra Hedberg, Estibaliz Hernandez, Lotte Andkilde, Laura Gee, Simon Wild, and Maria Mantella are but a few others who have created delightful coffins for this clever project. Here, too, is Louise's feathered coffin, With the help of a black-capped screech owl's feathers.

Thanks for the chance to play along, Thereza. (Sorry for being late to own funeral. Rather apt to be working on coffin collage not long after tweeting this.)
 
+ The Happy Journey Collective have a flickr group and the call for submissions is now open.

In preparation for...

{All became clear by moonlight.}

In quiet anticipation, pottering slowly along, this has been the order of my morning. Much action is around the corner, I feel it and know it. I am sitting here, with Omar by the heater, and whilst he sleeps, I am tying up loose ends, finishing small tasks, whittling a to do list into manageable size. Louise, at the printers, is on the factory floor with Percy in tow, checking the colour on the proofs for a second print run of Dear Dad. For it, we’ve created a new collage to wrap around its cover, and the spines for this second edition will be brilliant red. A red true and ruby in hue, I like the sound of that. I anticipate the work to come, when we will sit and collate all 1,000 copies by hand, a drawing board before us both. Collating is a slow task and one I enjoy (for it comes about infrequently). I look forward to compiling paper towers in the lounge room.
 
Looking forward to something is almost as good as the thing itself. And so, too, I am looking forward to the Melbourne International Film Festival. Anticipation! Sweet anticipation. Who’d be without it?
 
Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse are on my list already. For the rest, I wait until Friday’s guide is released in the paper. Pen, pencil, and highlighter. Yes. I am ready.
 
+ I have a spot most soft for Le Havre

+ In Padova, looking for you (our artists' book made for Milly Sleeping's Loved & Lost Society) can currently be seen at the new Loved & Lost Society collection site at Since Grey (122 Gertrude Steet, Fitzroy, Melbourne).

+ Forêts et oiseaux: works by Marie Morel

"the chirrup of blackbirds"

{A deliciously long winter's day of it, thanks to those prevailing trade winds, I am told.}

Thirteen Seasons (in one day) is words masterfully playfully arranged by Francesca Sasnaitis and drawings beautiful and detailed by Louise Jennison. On Friday of last week, in our lounge room it was bound by hand, under supervision of Percy and Omar and Olive.

Coffee strong and sweets sticky was our production line kindling. We took our time and broke for a leisurely lunch at The Green Grocer. A fruit compote with brioche, an unforeseen afternoon essential. One can’t tear pages without sustenance.
 
An edition of 50, we have several copies of this signed limited edition available through our online store. Louise’s birds, in order of appearance, are a Yellow-headed Blackbird, Budgerigar, Eurasian Blackbird and a Ross Gull.
 
II
hanging upside down
a rustle of lorikeet—
mistaken for a leaf
 
VII
the ceaseless whir of cicadas
the chirrup of blackbirds
in the clinging heat of dusk
 
XIII
in one ear
and out the other —
the wind blows
 
are three of my favourite ones, for what it counts.