HIGH UP IN THE TREES

Preparing to hand over the reins to spring.

"Last day!" she cried.
"Last day!" they all cried.

Our 25% OFF EVERYTHING SALE IN OUR ONLINE STORE ends at midnight tomorrow night when winter hands over the reins to spring.

Simply enter the word ADVENTUREBOUND when prompted to receive the super discount.


{To give chase.}


{Surrounded by what seemed to be tiny priceless treasures.}


{Keeping in line.}


{If you'd only still remained with me.}

+ "Do they ever sleep?"

+ Javier Pérez's video installation En Puntas (pointe shoes, and stainless steel knives, and gruesomeness in the theatre)
+ David Hockney and technology

So much joy!

{Hand-coloured lithograhic print depicting Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide (Souvenir d'adieu, No. 3) by Edward Morton after a drawing by A. E. Chalon, in the collection of the V&A.}

Many things constitute a treat, but perhaps, for me, one of the greatest treats is that of seeing something in preview to opening. The very phrase behind-the-scenes, for me, is imbued with secrecy, rareness, and thrill. It cannot be anything other than this, a pleasure bound to privilege and a privilege bound to pleasure, to see an artwork in any stage of progress from germ of idea to final alterations. It carries a unique excitement all of its own that comes chiefly, I suspect, from being allowed to see a part of the process before the varnish has set and all is fixed. A composition in its still fluid stage being mapped out. A drawing near-to complete aside for tonal adjustments to be made in the area of the foreground. An exhibition being installed in the gallery before tools are packed away and lighting adjusted. A written draft of raw ideas, sections crossed out and reworked in the margin. A full dress rehearsal in the theatre on the evening before opening night. The unguarded moment perhaps here, for me, the link, and I am reminded of Philippe Béziat’s film Becoming Traviata which allows you to see up close the physical and emotional demands of the rehearsal process. A private moment made public. Who would refuse a peep at this? Who could say no to such an electrically charged thrill? Not me. And so it was that last night I found myself at the State Theatre with Louise delighting in the unattainable and otherworldly, at The Australian Ballet’s full dress rehearsal of Marius Petipa’s Paquita and Erik Bruhn after August Bournoville’s two-act work La Sylphide. The orchestra in the pit wears not their standard black attire and I enjoy being able to see them in their array of coloured tops, no need yet to disappear into dark cavern. A couple of slightly faster tempo requests are made, lost to my untrained ear, and through James’ farmhouse window, a technician not a sylph can for briefest moment be seen. These brief episodes made for the cherry top to the evening and it was strange to think that only hours earlier I sat in the dentists’ chair for the second time this week with my mouth opened wide and my eyes clamped shut. But for rehearsal’s duration, I forgot about my teeth that earlier felt as though they’d been knocked out and in their place tiny hot coals placed. A beautiful distraction if ever there was! Like our young Scottish farmer, I was permitted to inhabit a charmed other world in which I being of the earth cannot long stay. And like all treats, I was left that curious meld of sated yet wanting more and I cannot wait to see this work (twice) next week. Kilts, woodland sylphs, tutus, and longing, carry me quickly, days, to the romance of it all.

La Sylphide opens tonight, float along and see. I am looking forward to writing about these works in detail, and hope, as always, that you can get to see these performances I share with your own eyes too.


{Marie Taglioni in the title role of the ballet La Sylphide, Paris, 1832, lithograph from Harry Beard Collection, V&A.}


{Published in 1860, when Taglioni was teaching at the Paris Opera, this hand-coloured lithographic print is a copy of an 1830 image, given by Dame Marie Rambert to the V&A collection.}

In Marie Taglioni, the ballerina who created the role of the sylph, those elements fused to create an indelible impression of magic, mystery and ethereal loveliness.
(La Syl-fever by Caitlyn Lehmann, Behind Ballet)

{Achille Jacques Jean Marie Devéria lithographic print by Cattier, published by Goupil & Vibert in the 1830s, given by Dame Marie Rambert to the V&A collection.}


{Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide (Souvenir d'adieu, No. 1) by Chalon, published 8th of September, 1845}

La Sylphide remains popular for more than its history and style. With its supernatural themes and its tragic hero seeking escape from the mundane world through his dreams, La Sylphide encapsulates the Romantic fixation with the restless outsider who cannot find a spiritual home in the modern world. The ghostly whiteness of the sylph, coupled with the dark irrationality of the hero’s desires, creates a Romantic world delicately balanced between light and dark, natural and supernatural.
(Styling La Sylphide by Hila Shachar, Behind Ballet)

{Madlle Fanny Cerito (sic) hand-coloured lithographic print by John Deffett Francis printed by Dickinson Brothers, 20th of April 1846, in the collection of the V&A.}

+ La Sylphide, Ellen Price, filmed 1906
+ La Sylphide in the studio, 2013

The Monday morning look back at the Sunday worktable.

{Our part of Nice Work on a Sunday.}

Sunday, 25th August 2013
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Whilst our timetable is rather organic in that what needs doing first determines flow, there are still patterns to be found upon closer inspection. Sunday is often a day for tasks that need completion. Sunday is for the tying of rogue loose ends and preparation for the week that lies in wait. Here, in our home-based studio, an edition of our artists’ book, As inclination directs, that earlier in the week has been hand-coloured with pencil, scored and folded, is ready for its collaged menagerie. In wait, you can see a koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) to be cut out and a Spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) too. This is the fifth edition of ten, and it is bound for the 2013 Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards to sit in a display case alongside the first of the edition so that you can see both the work’s cover and guts at the one time. Behind this scene, pets lie sleeping, and on the stove in the kitchen, homemade vegetable soup bubbles. This is Sunday and it is quietly glorious.

Yesterday, we sent our Least weasels (Mustela nivalis), Horned frogs (Ceratophrys cornuta), and Wrestling halfbeaks (Dermogenys pusillus), and our Koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) too, to Milly Sleeping by way of a Sunday workspace peep. Let not the words ‘least’, ‘horned’ and ‘wrestling’ lead you astray. No hostile barb was sent, no unfriendly missive, but great paper play. Louise and I were thrilled to play our part in Milly Sleeping’s Nice Work 2013 project in conjunction with the Craft Cubed festival. We have had the good fortune to take part in earlier Nice Work and related projects and always relish the chance to look at the things we make and do with different eyes and a different agenda. One year, (in smallest of small nutshell) what is Nice Work to you, and this year (and again, I simplify) where is your Nice Work made.
 
For the entire month of August (and archived thereafter), you can see a little of the daily working process siphoned into one defining photograph taken and sent to Milly Sleeping. Thirty-one images will be the result. Thirty-one different images from thirty-one different makers, designers, and artists that tell the tale of Nice Work and how it can be made. Twenty-six days into August, and the look into the spaces and processes of others is a charmer, a real tease of a project. From detailed tight crops (please, show me more!) to pulled back floor sweeps (please, show me detail!), each tells of the owner oft just out of frame. Yes, we are defined by our space. Defined by our tools laid out at neat right angles or our bottles and jars all placed with labels shown all at the one angle. Defined by the lamp that ensures work can be done on gloomy afternoons and into the night. Defined by the hole that is made in a wall of useful things all at arm’s reach — sketchbooks, tools, coffee mugs, laptops, iPhones, pencils, scissors, needles, pens, scraps of paper. These images make me greedy to see and know more. (Several feature handsome pets too.)
 
Louise and I were invited to play along and submit our own make-someone-ravenous view. We were allotted Sunday, a favourite day of mine it transpires. I like the quietness it often brings, and of all the working days it seems to yield the greatest tick, tick, done sensation. To my way of thinking, Sunday equals loose ends tied.
 
We are August’s day 25. Here you can see that which is needed to complete one of our collaborative collaged artists’ books. The animals to the right await the sharp snip of the Honeybee scissors. A vessel of water will soon be placed on the table for the brush in between gluing half a Spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) in predetermined position. It is, in this photo, a space to both collage in and finish a task. Afterwards, the table will be cleared for something else.
 


+ The very same worktable in 2008 shows little change

Keeping the very best company.

{Keeping the very best company.}

Finding in a novel exactly what you needed to find is one of the joys of reading. There on the page, words that you allow yourself to feel are written exactly for you at that very moment. No one else, just you. A conversation between the two of you. A looking-glass. That frozen sea taken to with axe. Tove Jansson’s quiet tale, The True Deceiver (translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and published by Sort Of books in 2009), crept up on me much like the character Katri and her “big strange” dog. A haunting piece set in deep winter that has left me with a curious aftertaste. As with many of her books, this one looks at the link between art and nature, and as the elderly artist, Anna, waits for the snow to thaw before the spring when she can start her work again, I found my own process mirrored. I’ve a new body of work in mind. I’ve the paper cut and ready. I am, it occurs to me now, waiting for the snow to melt and the ground to be revealed. What was there all along but now shown as clean brown earth.

By story’s end, and here I give nothing away should you have it on your to-read list, the two characters Katri and Anna have shifted poles, a process neither easy nor quick. Nor painless. It takes a season. It takes some pushing. It is like the paths that fill “with snow as quickly as they are shovelled out”. Moreover, it cannot be undone. But a fixed way of being and seeing needs a shake-up. It is good to move this point, this footing, and it is perhaps from moving from this previously believed to be fixed point or standing that new things in all guises can come. Don’t get too settled. The inevitable shake-up.

At yoga recently, a leak in the ceiling caused a shuffling of place on a smaller scale. The space of the large hall was thus halved and we couldn’t all head to our usual fixed points. Instead, we had to go to different parts of the room to accommodate the leak. The yoga mats too needed to be placed in an arc shape instead of their usual ordered rows and columns. And we were now facing the opposite end of the room. Facing away from the window and the ceiling with the leak. We were facing the back of the room. We were staggered and stepped. The room with its leak made us change. Forced our hand. Forced our bodies. And afterwards we found we liked this shake-up. Don’t get too fixed. Bend a little or break. Learn to shift position.

Learn to adjust. Anna (who had previously lived alone) finds her house is not her own and the chance to vanish into sleep in daylight hours is not possible.

“No one knew, no one disturbed her, but still the simple and irresistible need to vanish into a nap became a forbidden thing. She would wake up with a start, open her eyes wide, grab her book, and listen. It was completely quiet. But someone had walked across the floor upstairs.”

...
 
“Anna Aemelin got used to having her house invisibly inhabited. All her life she’d been getting used to things until they no longer seemed dangerous, and now she did it again. Soon she no longer heard the footsteps overhead, no more than she heard the wind and the rain and the parlour clock.”

Yes, this is a book that creeps up on you. And lingers long after you’ve closed the cover. (A good sign, I think). “It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light” it begins. It appears disarmingly simple but this is never the case with either her work or things frequently mistaken for simple. This simpleness is all of her hard work made to appear this way as we read. The swan’s legs whirling under the water’s surface to make for appearance of effortless glide. Things are understated. The simpleness or the ease with which we think we understand what is being told to us speaks more of her skill and knowledge. It was Einstein, wasn’t it, who wrote (and here I paraphrase) that if you couldn’t explain it simply you didn’t know your subject.

I can still see clearly the rubbish from the house that has been piled up on the ice waiting for it to melt. A giant monument awaiting snow’s thaw. All those discarded things, waiting.

“One morning, Anna went down to the fish pier and looked out across the ice trying to catch sight of the big pile of furniture that Katri had condemned to sink, but the light from the sky blinded her and she saw nothing.”

As Ali Smith explains (in the introduction), this is a book “very much about the way you look — and the double-take of what a phrase like ‘the way you look’ means: the way you perceive things as well as the way you are perceived by others.” It is about an awareness that cannot be undone once known. It is an un-romanticised look at the creative process. It is about the space between the imagined and the real, between wild and tame. About our place in nature. It is deceptively simple, and the true deceiver of the title is the author herself. It gave me much to think about, but most of all, it give me a kick. It has made me keen to start on the new body of work I’ve long had in mind.

Pastels. Paint. Collage. All straightforward. Illusions stripped. To my drawing board I go.


{This photo of Tove Jansson working in her studio reminds me that you can work anywhere and with anything. You don't need today's perfect white studio. You can always find a way.}

Saturday afternoon links,
+ Collage is brutal (NB: Background noise is actually Percy chatting not a penguin crying)
+ The two of us (here and here) on the local telly with Stephen Wickham, chatting in animated fashion about our work at Geelong Gallery as part of All breathing in heaven
+ Eclectic Array from the Outer Limits (Peter Fay's collection)

+ Kai Fagerström's beautiful photographic series The House in the Woods
+ Condors Released in Chile

Come along, do.

{You're invited. Click, enlarge, read, print, come along.}

in•vi•ta•tion
noun
a written or verbal request inviting someone to go somewhere or to do something : an invitation to come and see our exhibition All breathing in heaven at Geelong Gallery.

Gracia Haby, Louise Jennison, Stephen Wickham
All breathing in heaven
Until Sunday 13th of October, 2013
Geelong region artists program
Geelong Gallery, Little Malop Street, Geelong

This time last week, in the last of the day’s light, we drove home from Geelong Gallery feeling that curious blend of elated and tired. This time last week, we had finished installing our work and save final gallery signage, all was ready to be declared open on the Saturday. We stopped at the service station near to Avalon airport and celebrated with a packet of crisps as dusk fell. Contented silence took possession of the car as we were each of us lost to our thoughts about what had transpired these past few days. You’ll not be surprised if I tell you that it feels much longer than one week ago. Nor will you be surprised if I tell you that I miss this period spent in the gallery's hull with tools in hand. Dancing with ladders, tweaking corners, smoothing labels, and checking things twice. Little can compare.


{Preparing once more to visit the empty home near to forgotten.}


{In wait at Lavender Bay.}


{Blending in.}


{Foreseeing a conclusion in Killarney.}

Related links,
+ Q&A
+ All flying, all done

...and otherwise,
+ In 1921, A.A. Milne gave his son Christopher Robin a teddy bear for his first birthday
+ 12 Animal Adjectives to Bolster Your Vocabulary
+ Magic (Camilla Engman) and moss found (Fine Little Day)
+ The perfect middle-of-day interlude, with giant penguin sighting

The beautiful set-up.

{The slow but steady setting-up process.}

Our exhibition with Stephen Wickham, All breathing in heaven, is, as of Saturday, open (with an official opening to follow come the end of August). Having an exhibition to set up, as Louise expressed, proved the strongest antidote for the to-be-expected post-MIFF 2013 blues. With one day between the 53-films-seen festival's brilliant, self-inflicted and I'd-do-it-all-again-in-a-flash exhaustion and the installation of 464 postcard collages, 23 hand-drawn birds, and one butterfly, we've adhered to the Don't Stop Moving principle (which may or may not prove September ghastly).

Our work took three days to install in response to Stephen's grid that takes you under the sea and shoots you high so as to tickle the ceiling, and here is a little of that long, always enjoyable, fantastical roller-coaster process. Two favourite things back-to-back: immersion through cinema and exhibition installation. I love the absolute focus that comes with both. All else fades into the background. I love the privilege of being let loose in the gallery to install a work over several days. It is for me, I guess, a twin to the sanctum of the theatre. A space quite 'other' into which you've stepped. Things feel different, and senses are amplified. It is for the explorer! I'd bottle and live off that keenly-aware elation for days on end if I could.
























{Where ladders appear to dance and paper towel proves ever handy for the laying out of 70 columns in neat sequence.}

Gracia Haby, Louise Jennison, Stephen Wickham
All breathing in heaven
Until Sunday 13th of October, 2013
Geelong region artists program
Geelong Gallery, Little Malop Street, Geelong

+ The initial map
+ In earlier guise
+ Geelong Gallery media release

+ Soon! Swoon! "Like so many Romantic ballets, the appeal of La Sylphide lies within its exquisite deceptions."

In 17 days, we’ve seen 6,030 minutes of footage.

Ah, MIFF 2013, you took the last of my health and stamina, but gave so much in return. You cracked open my head, as you broke my back and turned the tap on in my nose, and placed inside my brain thousand upon thousand of beautiful, inspiring, brilliant, grainy, symbolic, challenging, crisp and digitally restored, enchanting, bewildering and grim image after image. 53 films did Louise and I make it to see. 53 sessions that all in some way gave us something for the little we had paid. It has been, as I expected it to be, a bloody delight.

In 17 days, we’ve been to Romania, Denmark, Quebec, Chad, Kurdistan, Turkey, Vienna, Iran, Japan, Russia, Scotland, and Mexico. We’ve seen 6,030 minutes of footage. We’ve queued for food rations at a refuge camp, seen inside hospital wards, chemists, school rooms, bathrooms, and tiny bedrooms. We’ve seen homes like our own cluttered one, and those like paintings neatly orchestrated. We’ve seen the wilderness torn apart. People torn apart. Families too, and their subsequent mending. We’ve stepped inside bull rings in Serville which will forever be linked to the pleasant smell of beer owing to the unknown person who sat to my left who sipped his way through the black and white beauty of Blancaneives. We’ve fished, danced, galloped. Heck, we’ve even heard the moon talk.

Now that it’s over, I am left with ideas. You’ve winged my feet. You’ve given me the world to mull over. But first, we’ve the final weekend of the festival to catalogue here, to sate my small librarian’s heart.













La Pointe Courte (Director: Agnès Varda)

When I Saw You (Director: Annemarie Jacir)
Ain't Misbehavin (Director: Marcel Ophüls)

Camille Claudel 1915 (Director: Bruno Dumont)

The Past (Director: Asghar Farhadi)

Hand in Hand (Director: Valérie Donzelli)

A mixed bag, this six, but the relationships covered in all in some way delighted. Especially Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte, Annemarie Jacir’s When I Saw You, and Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915. How we mirror our loved ones or together make something else long has fascinated me. Often when I write of Louise and my collaborative process, I talk about the two of us making a third image, an image not possible without the other. For as much as we are similar and our collaboration is based on harmony as opposed to discord, we both bring different things to our work. On the eve of setting up our part of All breathing in heaven at Geelong Gallery, this is now very much on my mind.

In When I Saw You, the relationship between the mother and son was beautifully told, culminating in that final scene, that near-to  joyous leap taken together, hand in hand. In Agnès Varda’s black and white beauty, with the fishing village of my dreams with its contented cats dozing on kitchen tables and in balls of snooze in fishing baskets, and its salty air, I loved seeing and hearing how the couple came to terms with the shift from passionate love to the more unconditional and almost maternal love that follows on its heels. I loved his remark to her along the lines of "if I bring stillness and quiet to your noise, why don’t you sit still now?", and his later observation of "you stay, for now, at least." And in The Past, I enjoyed, too, that the love story that transpires is not about the two I initially thought it was about (without giving too much away). I liked how the various arguments were shown as loud and messy and full of the stupid things you say when pushed. (Watching this film I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Cranford maxim my Mum, Louise and myself oft employ, speculation is the enemy of calm.) Add to that Camille Claudel’s own relationship not with Rodin, but with her art. Deprived of it, she languished in an asylum until her death. The women seated in the row behind me took great offence to Camille’s "little bastard of a brother" and this too I took delight in. And though Valérie Donzelli’s Hand in Hand was not a favourite of mine, I did enjoy the dance-like scenes of two presumed opposites mirroring each other after spell-binding kiss.

And so to the inevitable ranking that occurs whether you mean it to or not. Here, in no particular order, my top fourteen (because ten was just too hard):


Tokyo Family (Director: Yôji Yamada) for the quiet triumph of the underdog, and the look at family relationships.


Child’s Pose (Director: Calin Peter Netzer) for its look at love and loss and how it can manifest in an uncomely shape.


The Patience Stone (Director: Atiq Rahimi) for the shift in power given from husband to wife (played by exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani) as she pours out her story to her comatose husband who can only but listen.


differently, Molussia (Director: Nicolas Rey) for allowing me to clamber into the spinning camera and the wind camera and be spun and blown about, and for showing me "that a country is also people, right?". Right.


Jîn (Director: Reha Erdem) for the way it conveyed our realtionship with animals and the natural world, shifting the familiar story of Little Red Riding Hood to the Kurdish mountains. Little Red’s stakes are high.


Blancanieves (Director: Pablo Berger) for all its beauty and links to the films I used to watch on TV or on Beta video cassette.


Museum Hours (Director: Jem Cohen) for taking me back to Vienna, showing me still-lifes in my everyday surrounds, and introducing me to Johann (Bobby Sommer) and Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara). To listen in on their conversation was a treat. This film brought W.H. Auden’s lines to life for me: "The old Master: how well they understood; It’s human position: how it takes place"


Like Father, Like Son  Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda) for taking the time such stories need. If ever in such a situation, I am sure, Masaharu Fukuyama’s character Ryota Nonomiya is who I’d most resemble.


Becoming Traviata (Director: Philippe Béziat) for showing that which is required in order to soar. Here’s to you, Dedication, Practice, Hard work, Understanding, and Guts.


Workers (Director: José Luis Valle) for its dark humor that spoke of poor working conditions and imbalance in Tijuana. (Psst, I think you are my favourite.)


The Selfish Giant (Director: Clio Barnard) for its timeless and necessarily grim fable about redemption.


Rhino Season (Director: Bahman Ghobadi) for its use of water to recall memory, for showing how something feels through symbolism, and those glorious inky hues that pulled me in close, anchored by the silence of exiled Iranian actor Behrouz Vossoughi.


La Pointe Courte (Director: Agnès Varda) for its beauty, its cats, its look at love as it shifts, and the day-to-day life of the locals in the fishing village (the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte). “Do you love me or our love?”. Ah, Agnès.


And 

Le Joli Mai (Director: Chris Marker) for the places it took me and how.


Almost, almost:




Michael H Profession: Director (Director: Yves Montmayeur) and Closed Curtain (Director: Jafar Panahi) for their (though wildly different) look at the creative process that did not make me wince.




Wadja (Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour) and When I Saw You for their delicate reveal of how to work within constraints beyond your control.



The Past (Director: Asghar Farhadi) for holding me until its beautiful end where all fell into place.





Bastards (Director: Claire Denis) for its darkness, and Grisgris (Director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) for its lightness in dance.

With a nod to:




A Hijacking (Director: Tobias Lindholm) for sustaining tension, and Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (Director:Denis Côté) for this reason too.


Bends (Director: Flora Lau) for its subtlety.





Shirley — Visions of Reality (Director: Gustav Deutsch) for the idea underpinning it and For Those in Peril (Director: Paul Wright) for this reason too.





The two documentaries The Villiage at the End of the World (Directors: Sarah Gavron/David Katznelson) and These Birds Walk (Directors: Omar Mullick, Bassam Tariq) for the way they let their different stories become known.


And Blackfish (Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite) for the orcas.

Moon Man, Omar... Hang on, if I keep going in this manner, I’ll have listed almost all fifty-three.

+ How Agnès Varda "Invented” the New Wave
+ The Sunday morning office pre return to MIFF 2013. (Adding archival tabs to postcard collages & swilling coffee.)
+ To soothe the post-MIFF 2013 blues, my Mum sends me experimental but with clear narrative arc iPhone films of walking Percy in the rain.

Earlier MIFF posts:
Quickly now, we're twelve films in already
And so we are at twenty in the quiet of it all
Pepe and the finely dressed felines of Paris
Tragedy and delight in equal measure
And lo! the MIFF 2013 homeward dash
Fables and poems

Fables and poems.

The Day of the Crows (Director: Jean-Christophe Dessaint)
A Hijacking (Director: Tobias Lindholm)
Shirley — Visions of Reality (Director: Gustav Deutsch)
The Selfish Giant (Director: Clio Barnard)
Rhino Season (Director: Bahman Ghobadi)
The Major (Director: Yuri Bykov)

"My own garden is my own garden," said the Giant; "anyone can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself."
(Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant)

A secular fable unfolds in the seemingly perpetual winter landscape in Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant, one of many great films I’ve seen these past days. Oscar Wilde’s secular short story about the power of redemption has been shifted to a present day Bradford housing estate. Our fable now in our hands, we get to decide whom we will crown the Selfish Giant, and like all fables it could be today, it could be long ago. It is both of its time and timeless. It is, in this sense, like a painting. It speaks of the reality of the day but it also transcends time and, to some extent, place. Amidst the dark and hardship, a friendship between two boys, Arbor and Swifty. Meld for me social realism to a fairytale and I am hooked. Parts of the dialogue shoot so fast that to decipher and follow, listen for the rhythm. Drop your Hs from ‘horse’ and ‘house’, take out your joining words, and set your needle to ‘your’ wrong speed and away you go. An anthropologist like Mathieu Amalric’s Georges Devereau (Jimmy P.), looking at humanity and its pattern? No, one of the group. We’re not looking from outside in. This is up close. You’re up on the torn trampoline too.

Timeless and yet of its time, like an Edward Hopper painting. This is how Shirley could sound. This is Gustav Deutsch’s look at a game many play in galleries and museums. Looking closely at the scene and wondering whom the characters are. Will someone walk into the composition and pick up that letter on the table, that cup by the sink. Has someone just left or are those boots by the door theirs? Sometimes you might look to see the artist reflected in the sitter’s eye. Clue hunting in the gallery. Playing make-believe. Whilst I initially resisted Shirley — Visions of Reality for the reason that my own Hopper cast sound and think differently, once I pushed aside my ownership of the paintings and went with the film being a look at how someone else, in this case Deutsch, imagines these characters to be, I slipped easily into the tempo. At this end of the festival, as fatigue kicks in, it is this giving of yourself over to the film that ensures the preferred ride. The wireless plays in the moments before each of the thirteen paintings are reveled.  It, too, ensures a smooth ride as we move chronologically through thirteen paintings, beginning in the 1930s before landing in the mid-‘60s. Ever-neat, timeless, ageless Shirley and her partner creaseless Stephen show us "history is made up of personal stories". They show us what it could look like inside a painting. Peering from the inside out. Peering out from Night Windows (1938) and Intermission (1963). Peering out at you.

And in Bahman Ghobadi’s Rhino Season, here is what a poet’s soul could look like. Here, again, the animal is given beautiful weight, as with A Time for Drunken Horses. In the morning before this session, I was thinking about the man who spent years creating a form that autocorrects itself to upright position when tipped on its side or placed upside down. He gave the form, the shape he made, a name, but I cannot recall it now. He then discovered that his creation, his marvellous self-correcting form already existed in nature. It was created long ago now. It is the shell of the tortoise. Place one upside-down and it is not stuck. It can maneuver itself upright. And indeed it does in the scene of quiet revelation in Rhino Season. The tortoise that can flip over and begin anew as a metaphor for life is something I will store in my MIFF 2013 full pockets. This year, I have harvested much gold. And I need to find room to save, too, the black inky waters of the Bosphorus. Water as a device for recalling memory, rare was the scene without it. Rain. Snow. Puddles. Tubs. Submerged. Every frame like a painting. From those droplets of water on the car windscreen to waves crashing upon rocks. I saw this film after The Selfish Giant and two favourites have I found. Both in their own way showed me how things feel, from prison life to scrapping. This is how a broken soul can look.

Along the way we’ve also seen how the afterlife might look (The Day of the Crows animation by Jean-Christophe Dessaint which presents figures in block colour against a tonal wilderness), been held hostage on the high seas (A Hijacking), and learned how to roll a snowball in Russia in a tale of bad decisions rising (The Major). And we’ve still several more, too, until 54, our magical target, we reach. Let's go!

+ A coffee pause between MIFF 2013 sessions with a sparrow.
+ MIFF 2013 queue waiting. (Image credit: detail from Champes of the Champs-Elysses)
+ With wistful yearning she cried, "Missing you already, MIFF 2013". (The Origins of Nostalgia captured in yesterday's line)

And lo! the homeward MIFF 2013 dash.

The Villiage at the End of the World (Directors: Sarah Gavron/David Katznelson) (Screening with Pablo's Villa (Director: Matthew Salleh))
Gebo and the Shadow (Director: Manoel de Oliveira)
My Sweet Pepper Land (Director: Hiner Saleem)
Vic+Flo Saw a Bear (Director:Denis Côté)
Blackfish (Director:Gabriela Cowperthwaite)

Whether it is the fatigue that naturally sets in seeing film after film after film or the genius of a scene as it plays out, I’ve noticed in a few films I’ve seen of late, and please bear in mind we are at 40-something now, that a certain effect like synesthesia occurs. Perhaps it is just down to chance, a scene on screen in time with the rotations of the air conditioner, but I’m sure I felt in Manoel de Oliveira’s painterly Gebo and the Shadow (adapted from a Portuguese play) that cool blast of night air as our wayward-son-returned opened the window of our claustrophobic stage set. Making my body as small as it could go, I felt cold in the car as we hurtled towards only conceivable outcome in Bastards (Claire Denis’ film to gut you like a fish). And I am sure I could smell the rain as it dropped down heavy, plop, plop, plop, on Vic and Flo in their trapped agony as they lay on the forest floor. I guess it is no surprise that we watch film with more than our eyes. We hear, we feel, we respond, we bristle, we emphasise, we dream. We some of us doze (even when bear traps abound). We some of us wait for quietest moment to crunch down on a handful of crisps or unwrap slowly a lolly from its wrapper. (Note to self: a zine about theatre etiquette soon to make)

At this end of the festival, clear favourites are emerging, and I enjoy chatting with others in the queue about what they have seen. Familiar faces from other sessions emerge. We either have similar taste, or they are going to everything a schedule will permit. There once more, the woman with a sore back who stands in small alcove unobtrusively at the Forum. There, too, the woman who misheard Louise’s remark of ‘see you in the next queue’ to be ‘see you in the next life’. ‘I’m terribly ill, my dear’ she explained. There is the man who lives around the corner from us whom last year in our more organised state we saw on the same city bound tram. In the half-light between sessions, we discuss the abundance of the letter Q in the names for seasonal shift in the previous film David Katznelson and Sarah Gravons’ Village at the End of the World. And with the poet usher, we talk of the sound of ice before leaping to magic lanterns with their impressive coloured beauty.

In this recent crop of films, the natural elements, nature and our place in it has been the link I’ve found from Niaqornat in north-western Greenland to the inevitable sadness of human nature that steals from others for own gain (Gebo and the Shadow) and plunders for entertainment (Blackfish). Respecting the land and taking only that which you need to survive was the beautiful message I’m pocket-tucking from Village at the End of the World. The survival of small village comprising of 59 residents dependent upon a fish factory bookended by our greed and destruction in Gabriela Cowperthwaite's Blackfish, I, like many, like all, enjoy making threads between films in the pause. In Blackfish, we look at how we’ve cruelly hunted and separated pods of orcas to meet our own lust for barbaric entertainments. SeaWorld presents nature as entertainment from which to profit, reducing majestic and intelligent animals to circus-type performers. Yes, seems we’ve been doing this for centuries (think: Pietro Longhi's The Rhinoceros, 1751) and seems unlikely, to me, ever to stop. I watched footage of these animals in captivity with a lump in my throat. Before me, several girls have come dressed in orca costume.

The natural world is celebrated in Hiner Saleem’s My Sweet Pepper Land, western style. Such a landscape! Such beautiful people. Such eyes like liquid amber. To say little of Baran’s hat, this film oozed beauty and style amidst its darker elements and shootouts. A Kurdish near-romcom with its impossibly handsome leads was a charm that gave way to Denis Côté’s Vic+Flo Saw a Bear across the road. A session I’d booked based on last year’s Bestiaire brilliance and Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights used in the trailer. Bestiaire and Romeo and Juliet, two favourites of mine. This time around, we’re looking at the human animal, not those in zoo’s confine, and the things it is capable of doing. The cruelty it is capable of inflicting, but also the love. The relationship between Vic and Flo was one I believed in utterly, for me, none more so as when they become the wind.

Figuring out relationships once outside of the confines of prison. Figuring out nature in captivity. The great muddling along stumble of all things! Mankind can do great and terrible things Stephan Schesch’s Moon Man (an adaptation of Tomi Ungerer’s 1967 children’s book of same name) tells us. We can separate a mother from her calf in the knowledge that orca families live together until the very end, and we can live with her anguish. Yes, one moment hope is dashed and a dark, grim world appears, only to be rebuilt in the next session where a small girl in Saudi Arabia finds a pocket of freedom in an oppressive system (Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadja). To MIFF 2013, the great emotional mangler. Here’s to the last days of the fest!

+ Village at the End of the World where ice shifting can sound like old people moaning and young people playing
+ MIFF 2013 shift change
+ Curious? The Orca circus-cum-prison that is SeaWorld
+ "Elvis, Bach and Mozart..." (My Sweet Pepper Land trailer)
+ Finalising 70 labels for next week's install at Geelong Gallery (Life after MIFF 2013)
+ Those seventeen days

Tragedy and delight in equal measure.

What Maisie Knew (Directors: Scott McGehee, David Siegel)
Jimmy P. (Director: Arnaud Desplechin)
Bastards (Director: Claire Denis)
Moon Man (Director: Stephan Schesch, and adapted from Tomi Ungerer's 1967 children's book)
These Birds Walk (Directors: Omar Mullick, Bassam Tariq) (Screening with Freia and the Wannabe Indians (Director: Carl Javér))
Tip Top (Director: Serge Bozon)
Becoming Traviata (Director: Philippe Béziat)
Workers (Director: José Luis Valle)
Child’s Pose (Director: Calin Peter Netzer)

In the end, it did not take so very long to make me an opera convert. I can count the number of operas I have seen performed live on two hands and still have change. Handel’s Partenope and Verdi’s Aida in May of this year; Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Serville the previous year; William Kentridge’s rhinos writhing and contorting in Mozart’s The Magic Flute; Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a chamber opera in two acts by Richard Mills that perhaps did more at the time to turn me away rather than pull me towards; Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, in the days when Louise worked at the Arts Centre and could lay a hand upon a great ticket or two in A reserve; and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess when I was in primary school, sitting on a makeshift cushion of my parents folded winter coats. If I stick with my hands as counting device, I cannot count the number of operas I will see from here on in. I’ve not enough fingers for such calculations. Passing the tens, things could easily become muddled.

Philippe Béziat’s Becoming Traviata, if you’ll permit me to continue with the body as measuring device, is the stuff to make the legs and arms tingle. The stuff to make the heart beat faster upon receiving message from the ears. The inevitable goosebumps form and all else fades away. Whether you are familiar or not with Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, the beauty is recognisable, such is Verdi’s communicative genius. Intimate knowledge and closer inspection will yield more, it always does, but watching this rehearsal unfold in the cinema it is true, you do not need to be a fan. The delight comes from watching theatre and opera director Jean-François Sivadier and soprano Natalie Dessay working together. The collaborative process of opera, dance, theatre, it is one I am, as a visual artist, keenly jealous of. This sense of all hands on deck, all moving in the one direction to make one glorious work. This, this I love. This solidarity, I am in awe of it. I want, too, to be a part of it. Seeing Sivadier and Dessay work together, perfecting and polishing and repeating and tweaking to make Violetta’s tragedy and delight soar, I feel privileged. I feel elated. And still in my ears, I hear that music. Those notes, those waves. Seeing the faces of the performers in rehearsal — such magic. Seeing up close the physical demands is such a treat. All the muscles of the body employed. I enjoyed being able to see the intimacy between the performers. Stripped of costume, the camera close, the link is immediately clear. This is something we can all respond to and understand.

From here, we race up the road to the Kino to see Workers. Two favourite films back to back, it transpires. Such luck! In addition to Snow White (Blancanieves) and Little Red Riding Hood (Jîn), and the observational delights to pluck from Museum Hours own Ways of Seeing, José Luis Valle’s Workers makes easily my Best of the Fest list in my head. With its quiet wry humour twined with sadness (that precarious balance, light and dark!) and all its beautiful precision, it calls to mind Roy Andersson’s You, the Living, another favourite film of mine. ‘Tragedy and delight, delight of my heart!’ Why, we’re back at Verdi, aren’t we? In its own unassuming way, it is an opera too. It is an orchestral study. It is theatre. To see the blue disappear from the sky as late afternoon gives way to dusk as one long and continuous street scene plays out, I doubt I’ve seen anything more beautiful. We wait for Rafael to emerge from the brothel. We are standing across the road, watching the scene.  Night falls, characters pass by, and written on the wall the words ‘Julia*, I love you’. Moments later, this graffiti is added to. ‘Not anymore’. ‘Ya no’. Just as Workers balances the humour with the realities of the workers lives, so too it is both subtle and sharp at the one time. This is humour as I like it. The man who fell asleep and snored in this screening only added to my enjoyment.

All this before landing in Netzer’s Child’s Pose, a beautiful look at love, obligation, loss, and family life in Romania. Some things are the same, and many are different. Though certainly with her faults, like us all, I felt for the mother (played with such conviction by Luminita Gheorghiu that I believed her utterly to be the Herta Müller reading Cornelia) with such a son so useless and cruel just as I did for the parents in Tower with their son Derek also so useless and cruel, and I can only hope that my next crop of films as we gallop to the end brings a few more brilliant films for me to discover. I’m sure it shall.

I have read since that others found Becoming Traviata’s rehearsal repetition to serve only to create distance. This I did not find. I could have watched the hard work that goes into the polish for hours for it is this long and dedicated process that yields great work. Art takes time. You cannot sing such an aria quickly. I have read that others found Workers to be slow, yet I barely felt its 120-minute running time. I have heard that others could not understand the plight of the boy in For Those in Peril. I did not find it so. His plight made me near-to weep. I have read that others found Museum Hours to be without direction, and that they sympathised with Tower’s Derek. Again, I repeat, I did not find either so. Museum Hours turned itself into a Pieter Brueghel the Elder work (Who is the focus of in this painting?), and Derek who had so much kindness and interest showered upon him squandered it all. And this, this is what I love about the festival. Different opinions, different ways of seeing. Different ways of looking and interpreting and feeling. Sitting at the table in the Romanian village talking about loss, we are seeing the same story differently owing to the land we’ve previously traversed.

We all see differently and this is marvellous.

* I remember the name as Julia, but I may be wrong.

+ Sleeping flat out like this penguin either side of MIFF 2013 sessions (Image by Franco Mattichio, b. 1957, Italy)
+ If you were to carve open my tired MIFF 2013 brain it would look something like this
+ Louise's MIFF 2013 intermission I, II, and III

Pepe and the finely dressed felines of Paris.

{...taking us to 27 films thus far.}

Le Joli Mai (Director: Chris Marker)
Wadja (Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour)
Tower (Director: Kazik Radwanski)
Coming Forth by Day (Director: Hala Lotfy)
Blancanieves (Director: Pablo Berger)
Viola (Director: Matías Piñeiro)
The Best Offer (Director: Giuseppe Tornatore), with Q&A wth Giuseppe Tornatore and Geoffrey Rush

A young door-to-door salesmen offering green energy products for the home recalls Günther Anders’s novel The Molussian Catacomb (1932 – 1936) which features in beautiful fragmented parts in Nicolas Rey’s third feature film differently, Molussia (2012). ‘And’ really is the strongest word. You can join it to your own point neatly. ‘Use this AND save the planet. Use this AND save money. Use this AND you’ll be doing good. You do agree with all of those things, don’t you?' No is the only answer if you want them to leave. No, I don’t want to save the planet. No, I don’t want to save money either, and I don’t want to do good. (I do, of course, but what else could I do? I want to get inside to my soup on the stove that is waiting for me.)
 
Things are getting blurry as we near the halfway point of our journey. The line between film and own reality grows ever hazy. My thoughts remain in film, leaving little room for my own day-to-day musings and I say, obscure me further with your fog. The full emersion, I’ll happily, greedily wear as cloak. At festival’s end, we head to Geelong Gallery to install our work. The work is completed and currently being stored under weights to keep it flat. It sits ready and waiting, my postcard collages and Louise’s birds, and I realise that (as all the work for show we have already done in advance to MIFF) the best place to leave your doubts and jitters is the cinema. Really, things couldn’t be better timed. The full barrage!
 
Since last we spoke, some fantastical films have I seen. Le Joli Mai and Blancanieves stand out in particular. Both in beautiful black and white, one, Chris Marker’s work takes us to the streets of Paris in 1962 and, on the heels of the Algerian war, asks: what do you recall about the month of May? The second, Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves. A fairytale is retold and a glorious love missive to silent film unfolds. Such beauty! However, right now, what I recall is the animals in both. From the spider that as if on cue runs across the shoulders of the inventor as he talks about process and agrees that it is much like a spider weaving it’s web to those magnificent Parisian show-stealing felines dressed in their finery or shown hissing in conversational reply in Le Joli Mai. Of Pepe the rooster, and Lucifer and Satan the bulls in Blancanvieves. And of the trapped raccoon in Kazik Radwanski's Tower that led handfuls of people in solidarity with the raccoon's plight to leave the session. As I put the key in the front door, three little heads emerge from the dark hall. There is Percy, and Omar, and behind them, Olive. A greeting party of pets. Of film festival casualties! Where have you been? We miss you. Feed us. Warm us. Nuzzle us. Doze with us, post soup and toast.


{Blancanieves}


{Le Joli Mai}

+ Film, film. film. What else is there?

+ Our SALE continues! Simply enter the word ADVENTUREBOUND when prompted to receive 25% off your order.

And so we are at twenty in the quiet of it all.

{Eight more, friends. And some real favourites.}

For Those in Peril (Director: Paul Wright)
Museum Hours (Director: Jem Cohen)
Closed Curtain (Director: Jafar Panahi)
Tenderness (Director: Marion Hänsel)
differently, Molussia (Director: Nicolas Rey)
The Attack (Director: Ziad Doueiri)
Cutie and the Boxer (Director: Zachary Heinzerling)
Jîn (Director: Reha Erdem)

Day six and the MIFF ad elicits now but a light twitter from the audience. We’ve seen the ad before and wear our familiarity like a badge of honour. It remains now the newcomers test. Six days in, but it feels longer, much longer than that, and I take great delight in watching the crowd between sessions. From the reluctant shuffle of the queue when asked to go two abreast on the staircase to the find-a-seat scramble, and the MIFF volunteer standing over the Premium seats in premium location uttering the same refrain over and over. Patrons start to look like they are from a film, just like the visitors to the museum that look like they could have stepped out from a painting. The chance to sit and watch and think things over is one I love. As snacks of all descriptions are pulled out from rucksacks and satchels and eaten in the liminal state between film screenings, it’s a pleasant pastime, the wait. A bag of nuts here. A sandwich in tinfoil casing over there. Someone has made cheese scones and their smell carries as the lid is lifted off their travelling container. Fragments of conversation overheard. As I talk to the poet usher who made one sentence from his MIFF guide, plucking out a word from each of the 300-odd film listings, an orange rolls down the steep Forum stairs. An orange? Boldly nutritious. I bite the head off a yellow snake, and mull over what I’ve seen. Behind me, someone disliked an ending I especially loved. Poet usher is bemused by the cinema patrons lit up by iPhones and iPads and other devices. He is especially enamoured by those who in bid to be courteous shield their illumination makers with a jumper or scarf only to make their forms look like little lamps in the half-light, and I decide that I’ll text my parents during the next break between films.

It is in this time that I like to mull over what I have seen. And I realise that what I like best in many films seen thus far is also this time, this space, this quiet. Freedom to assemble your own thoughts. And this I have found and appreciated in this recent MIFF crop that takes us to twenty. It is in Nicolas Rey's differently, Molussia with its 362,880 different versions possible that spins, surges, and shines like an automatic drawing. It is in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours unfolding in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain smuggled out of Iran on a USB buried in a cake, and in Paul Wright’s feature-length debut, For Those in Peril. And it is in the mountains and high in the trees of Reha Erdem's Jîn (with a string score by composer Hildur Gudnadottir). Through a reduction of noise in its many forms, a simplification of the visual palette, clarity is the result and in the open field I can compose my own thoughts. Yes, pared back in such a way so as reveal something greater than one definitive meaning. I can decide what I will focus on, what I will feel. And this is a liberty not found in many films.

‘For some, the film will primarily be an engaging study of two adults whose relationship defies cinematic stereotypes; for others it will be a story-engendered portrait of the city of Vienna; for others, it will mostly serve as a meditation on the crossings between life and art and the museum as intermediary.... All of these interpretations are valid and encouraged.’
(Museum Hours synopsis)

Harvesting in the quiet, the walls of a bar covered with snapshots that recall the collection of miniatures in the gallery; the glorious creak, creak, creak of gallery floorboards underfoot; portraits that evoke paintings, and refuse on the ground that recall compositions; the junk store open at curious hour, one day of the week only (Museum Hours); the irregular undulations of asphalt in a car park owing to the fully grown trees reclaiming their space as everything returns to nature; the spin, spin, spin of a camera that lands askew, taking you with it; the postcards that in the end are sent from no-one and received by no-one, and the boat that goes untarred and the pear tree that goes unpropped (differently, Molussia). Gills made by four cuts to the neck, two either side, turn a boy into a fish; and the devil of the deep blue sea is as hard to bait as you’d expect, but it can be done, and perhaps, just perhaps, this huge, red, physical lump of a beast is what a mother’s grief and a town’s guilt looks like, there on the beach, unavoidable and unmistakable (For Those in Peril). The creative process is someone throwing your work about the room, interrupting you, and letting in fear and doubt (Closed Curtain), but it is to be pursued. What else is there (Cutie and the Boxer)? A suspended full moon high above; a soldier sings to a falcon; and just when you'd like to believe it is one thing, a horse whinnies during an attack. Nature and how we respond to it, the role we play and our place in it, and the mistakes we make, Jîn, is a film I will keep tucked in mind for long to come. Quiet is suddenly, easily, perpetually interrupted by war and violence (in a tale the director Reha Erdem believes could take place or be set anywhere, like a fairytale). Don’t unpack your belongings. Stay alert, ready to flee. Hide in a carved out space in the rocky face of the mountain. Trust is broken but it can be rebuilt. Can’t it? And nature and her creatures, the bear, the tortoise, the deer, the donkey and the lynx are beautiful (Jîn).

'The animals she closes ranks with, perhaps because they face similar threats, are her greatest source of strength and consolation. She shares a cave with a bear to escape a shelling, she finds an ally in a deer, she treats an injured donkey, she makes a pact with a savage bird whose egg she eats, she’s consoled by a wildcat, alerted by a snake and protected by a horse...'
(Jîn synopsis)

+ Reha Erdem, in interview
+ MIFF talk Jîn
+ MIFF talk Museum Hours
+ Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
+ foyer waiting
+ 'The camera finds the direction of the wind...', A Conversation with Nicolas Rey, Senses of Cinema