In which a bunch of documentary filmmakers become just another nondescript group of convention-goers

I’ve had my head down and my bum up for the last few weeks, racing as script editor to fit the rhythm of a couple of hurried, spasmodic projects.

Last week, I went to Perth for the Australian International Documentary Conference, in which five hundred people who either make documentaries, fund documentaries, participate in the financing of documentaries, or purchase documentaries gather together in one heap, which manages to be both amiable and frazzled at the same time.

Screen Hub covers the conference extensively, so I get to be the feller with the laptop ticking away in panel sessions, and then hurrying off to write, far from the festivities. While everyone else worries about whether they will find the man from Tashkent Television, who is the only person left in the entire television system who might conceivably support a film about cannibal guppies, I am fretting endlessly about my lack of sleep.

It doesn’t help that I am short sighted, deaf and generally trashed in the visual memory department by sheer fatigue. If you are introduced to Clearly Important People, and miss the name, and don’t get the face, it can be very embarrassing to turn their name tags over to see who they are. Two words for them who know – Sandra Levy.

The high point of the proceedings was the descent from some invisible baroque heaven of Peter Greenaway, who delivered the plenary on Friday morning. He was there through some weird deal involving the WA State Government, financial interests who wanted him to shoot some of his Great Work there, and Joost den Hartog, director of the conference and a man with a sense of humour so dry it could evaporate the very water from the polders in his homeland. He is one of my favourite people in the sector.

Anyway, I have reprinted my article about Peter Greenaway over the fold. Just remember it is for an industry audience.

Peter Greenaway presented the AIDC Plenary. Take him seriously at your peril; dismiss him and you miss out on a lot of fun. After all, he is a self-proclaimed servant of ‘paradox and contradiction.’

“I’m looking for a country to re-invent. You are the newest country in the world – wouldn’t you agree with that? So I’m going to reinvent you.”

Five hundred documentary filmmakers who don’t particularly want to be re-invented heard Peter Greenaway deliver the plenary address at the AIDC on Friday morning.

He is remarkably poised, as befits a man who is now making his sixteenth feature film, and has 24 projects on the books, including twenty museums wanting him to curate exhibitions. He travels in a blizzard of quotations and factoids, but is spectacularly ill-informed about Australian culture, since he told a trio of nosey journalists that “There are far older people than the aboriginals in the world, the American Indians for example.”

“There’s the extraordinary fact that the entire population of South America comes from two Siberian villages. That means that Siberian is infinitely older than anything in South America and presumably Australasia too.”

Besides the conference, Greenaway was there to investigate the possibility of shooting a feature film in Western Australia, a task that usually depends on a remarkable relationship with his producer, Kees Kasander, which goes back 23 years. He said, “He is a very phlegmatic Dutchman. We don’t live in each other’s laps. Our wives know one another and our kids know each other, but it’s not a great chummy relationship. It’s not close in any way, it’s very practical.”

Greenaway supplies ideas, Kasander discovers what can be financed by a variety of cash, facilities and tax deals around the world, and then they choose – “both of us together, we have to be very, very practical.” At the moment, the Western Australians have a lot of competition – they have five feature opportunities backed up for consideration.

As Joost den Hartog, the conference director, pointed out before Greenaway arrived, this maverick painter turned high-art baroque-obsessed film director does mount an important challenge to documentary filmmakers. He has made a number of fascinating multimedia works, is restlessly looking for new forms, and has torn the conventional screen to pieces in museum installations.

In the conference speech, which he reckons he has tuned to particular audiences at least a hundred times, he certainly tried to shake the comfortable worlds of creators suspended in the jelly of conventional television.

The cinema is dead, he proclaimed, like many others. It started to die when sound was invented, and was finished at a moment in 1983 when the zapper arrived in the living rooms of the world’s television viewers.

However, the cinema survives as a local variant of the screen, which is not dead at all. “I think what happens next is so much more exciting. It’s going to involve a whole physicality. It’s going to be exponential. It’s going to be like Second Life but much more amazing.”

Greenaway is booked to make a feature on Second Life; he now shoots everything on HD, and can’t imagine going back to celluloid. “We can’t afford to put new wine in old bottles, but most people are thinking celluloid when they use tape. We’ve got to find a way to allow the tape itself to create it’s own language.”

Other people at the conference have pointed out that we have gone far beyond “tape” already, with an extraordinary array of digital collection, imaging and storage systems. All of which have Greenaways’ power to create a language.

He is also self-consciously bad-tempered about the conventional viewing structure of cinema. Why should it be 120 or so minutes long? Why do we always put a frame on the world – a habit that started at the dawn of painting? Why do we watch in a darkened room, facing in the same direction? We move around more when we sleep.

He raged against the dominance of text, pointing out that the form itself is called “document-ary”, which is a twee Derrida-esque line. He is pointing to the way in which drama is structured according to scripts and sentences delivered by actors. He can’t use a pile of drawings as the starting point to finance a film; documentary filmmakers likewise chafe against the primacy of the written proposal.

He is reaching eagerly for new technology, proclaiming the primacy of the smallest screen of all, the mobile phone which will make moving images ubiquitous.

In WA, he seems like the very archetype of an English cultural patrician, like Barry Humphreys without any jokes. However, he is deeply driven by a sense of irony, by what he called “contradictions and provocations” in the speech. Later, he said, “I’m playing a game with you, I’m playing games this very minute. Do I take myself seriously? Do you take yourself seriously? What is there to be serious about?”

As the teacups rattled, he spoke of the “ludic impulse,” the deep human need to play as theorized by the Dutch. This is much more than attention seeking – he displays in the world and acts out the very tensions and dramatic impulses by which he creates the entire reality of his films. Disdaining psychology, un-interested in individual response, he is actually a character from his own cinema.

Individual, idiomatic, utterly unperturbed by the opinions of others, he admitted the importance of his British public school upbringing, an environment so ghastly it could teach pupils how to survive a concentration camp.

Even so, he proclaims his resistance to elitism. “Cinema has been full of elitists. Hollywood is elitist – there are only certain people allowed to make movies, there are only certain people allowed to distribute it. If you take a massive democratisation phenonomenon like YouTube, for example, there’s an opportunity to make this a totally egalitarian association.”

He is also unimpressed with the documentary tradition, which he calls “false and phony – this desire to tell the truth, the truth is untellable.” We create subjective, individual truths; to assert they are more is “an act of extreme arrogance. I would rather advertise and proselytize myself as a liar in order to be able to tell you the truth of those lies than the opposite way round.”

“I’m duty bound I think as a self conscious filmmaker to always tell you that when you are watching one of my films that you are just watching a film. You are not looking through a window on the world. I’m giving you a film. An extraordinary vocabulary and language which is deeply, deeply artificial.”

Really, Greenaway cares little about the rhetoric with which he entertained or bored five hundred people on a Friday morning. What matters is the work.

And here his imagination folds back into a space which is really deeply akin to documentary, no matter how much he protests. He showed a digital, rectangular screen-based version of two works – one a kind of timescape used as an installation in rooms of a new palace in Italy, described as “the biggest palace in Europe, bigger than Versailles.” Greenaway counterpoints the staggering vulgarity of this with illusory projected figures which inhabit the space as if it had been authentic, a real piece of architecture with a proper function in history.

The other was about his complex, unceasing meditation on painting. One installation is a vast contraption with many huge, gauzy screens set at different planes and levels, onto which a dazzling array of images belts out the history of Western art. All set to fabulous music and lighting effects, syncopated and highly rhythmic. In his work on Rembrandt, he has recorded a projected sound and light show projected onto the actual image to transform its lighting, environment, weather, time, structure and characters. This has mutated into a dramatized documentary (hah!) called Nightwatching, with his characteristic disinterest in the conventional performance values of realistic cinema.

While cinema may have exploded beyond the frame, with the audience now free to move around the space of the installation, the whole experience looks remarkably like the triumph of cinema as an integrated, dazzling, intelligent, trickster experience. Pictures, light, rhythm and people doing stuff.

Greenaway is just really, really good at holding it all together. He may be an intellectual bowerbird, skipping about and picking up the deep stuff of entire civilizations as trinkets, but he is remarkably polymathic and he thinks pretty well on the level we need to do cinema.

Some delegates to the conference remained remarkably resistant to Greenaway’s smoke and mirrors, but many others fell into his central point like a busted rocket into the sun.

The form is getting gorgeous, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

——————

I can’t resist quoting an exchange from the interview later, in which Sandy George, Rebecca Albeck and I swapped moves in journalist judo.

“The notion of a way of life or an approach to life is maybe what the English heritage is all about. Everybody in the world now lives like an Englishman – the English have created a lifestyle everywhere, all over the world. We have a Europeanised and basically an English lifestyle. I’m not suggesting that’s going to go on for much longer, but its credibly the way the world actually operates. The bourgeois English family is the module for most peoples’ lives…”

“Money was invented by the English. Capitalism was invented by the English… the Americans are a copy of the English, come on.”

Greenaway’s approach to documentary is deeply ironic. Everything he talks about, and nearly everything that inspires him, are artifacts from the real world outside his head. He starts with fragments of objective reality.

And they seem to keep him sane. He is devoted to Rembrandt, explores his work artistically, and claims playfully that the painter invented cinema (it’s the manipulation of light, silly..).

But he also reminds his audience that Rembrandt is the master, against which Greenaway is almost nothing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.