Blog Archives
MWF 2010 authors on… Federico Fellini
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Few directors give you such a hypnotic, rich sense of the inner life in all its density—its theatricality, lyricism, madness and libido.
He brought out the best in mythical actors. Mastroianni, of course. Giulietta Masina… I always think of her clownish soulful face in that gem, Nights of Cabiria. A movie that does what great art seems paradoxically capable of—being both hugely heartbreaking, bleak, and yet celebratory.
You wouldn’t know it from my name, but my mother is Italian and I consider myself as Italian as I am Australian. The fact that my grasp of the Italian language is very poor is irrelevant. And besides, you don’t need to understand Italian to watch Fellini. The images are everything.
Fellini was a bit af a stir amongst the foreign film directors blossoming in Melbourne during the 60s. The Italians were heavily represented, Visconti, Antonioni, Pasolini, and the younger Bertolucci to name just a few. Eight and a Half‘s dreamy subjectivity was a novel language to me, quite disorientating in a useful way. Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon soon followed to raptuous reception. His star had faded a decade on, and it was the grittier realist film, La Strada and the late work, Armacord that have endured for me.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… time
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Summer tends to do strange things to time, but in Finland the effect is breathtaking. Nights—in that old sense of those dark interludes during which you slept–are a brief, odd joke. At first, I especially found the birdsong around midnight disconcerting, like the sneaky onset of a subtle insanity. But the mind or the body adjusts. And then time seems to have become so generous, childhood-holiday elastic…
‘He flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor.’ (David Bowie.)
1/60 of a second, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2003
The photograph above is part of a sequence at www.letusburnthegondolas.com. I took it in Piazza San Marco, in Venice. It reminds me of a portrait by Josef Sudek (reproduced below), in which, as Ian Jeffrey explains, ‘the man is accompanied by his shadow … and by his reflection …. [I]t is a portrayal of a subject reduced and simplified almost out of existence’. There’s a paradox at the heart of this quotation, because in Sudek’s photograph the man is reduced by multiplication. Not only that, but his doppelgangers – a broken black shadow and a will o’ the wisp white reflection – are unrecognisable reproductions. By contrast, the doppelgangers of folklore were indistinguishable from their originals: except for the fact that they cast no shadow and left no reflection.
Josef Sudek, Portrait of a Man, 1938
The subject of my photograph is also a waiter (or rather, one of the two subjects is a waiter), but it is difficult to make sense of what is happening without recounting the precise circumstances under which the photograph was taken. So: I am sitting in front of a bar in an overpriced café. A waiter is standing behind the bar. Half of his bisected torso is visible at the extreme right edge of the frame. At frame centre there’s an espresso machine and a rack of upturned coffee cups. There’s a mirror above the cups, in which the reflection of the waiter’s back is visible. All of these elements are out-of-focus.
Behind me, over my right shoulder, is a plate-glass window which opens out onto the street. A reflection of a small part of this window, framed by drapes, is also visible in the mirror above the espresso machine. Because it’s dark outside, a faint image of the waiter’s face bounces back off the plate glass window into the café interior. That image is also visible in the mirror: the reflection of a reflection.
People walking past the café always look in. They can’t help it. It’s a reflex. So, I think, if I preset the focal point of my lens manually ‘inside’ the reflection in the mirror, I can capture someone looking through the glass from outside at the precise moment that their reflection passes the faint outline of the waiter, projected onto the glass from inside.
Because I am left-handed, I hold the viewfinder up to my left eye, and I have to pull it down and away in order to get enough space to flip the lever that advances the film. As I do so, I expel the air I have been holding in to keep the camera steady. So each exposure on a 35mm film represents a single breath and a discrete perception, both of which have a finite duration: in this case, 1/60s.
This particular image, which exists as a hypothesis in my head before I am able to test it experimentally, is doubly singular, because I know that I’ll only get one chance at it. The experiment can’t be repeated, because I’ll have to bring the camera up fast and shove it right in the waiter’s face, with no warning. I’m willing to do this once – I’ll take my chances and apologise afterwards – but I won’t get away with it twice.
The footsteps outside reach a particular pitch when someone is approximately two seconds away from the right location, before they actually appear in the mirror, so I’ll have to start moving the camera up to my eye when I hear that cue, before the image has presented itself to my eye.
Click.
1/60 of a second is – just, barely – long enough to distinguish the sound of the shutter opening from that of it closing, an interval during which I cannot in fact see anything, during which I am conscious of nothing: except duration itself.
What is the resulting photograph ‘about’? It includes three versions of the waiter. In one sense the bisected mannequin in the foreground at frame right is most real. It’s closest to the camera and is undeniably there, physically present. But that version of the waiter is an amorphous blob: half a white tuxedo, half a black tie, a quarter of a grey jawbone, an icon of the idea of the costume of a waiter, ‘reduced and simplified almost out of existence’. The man’s back, visible as a reflection in the mirror above the espresso machine, is further away, but clearer, more recognisable as an actual human being. Still, it’s turned away from us, expressionless by definition.
It’s only in the second-degree reflection bounced back from the plate glass that the man acquires a personality, but this minute, barely visible face floats uneasily next to that of an outsider peering in, whose naked, grainy curiosity is unbound by the blank protocols of service. Together, these two faces make up less than five per cent of the negative. They’re the only parts of the photograph in focus, but they never coincided or connected in reality.
But perhaps the most important thing about this photograph is what it doesn’t show. No-one ever asks the right question, the most puzzling question, the most important question: ‘How did you keep yourself out of the mirror?’
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… which dead author they’d have for dinner and why
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Kurt Vonnegut, not sure how he would taste, but if he’s anything like his writing, he would be lean, gluten free, and leave a lasting impression.
I thought it would be easy to think of someone, but actually, I have met a fair few renowned authors that have not lived up to expectation. The gap between authorial persona and the real person can be enormous. I suspect that as a rule it’s better to read the books and keep a wide berth of brilliant authors dead or alive. However, I have also been honoured to meet writing legends Isabel Allende and Marie Darrieussecq. If I could bring back to life the Botswanan writer Bessie Head and dine with her, I’d tell her that her novella Maru is a sublime poetic achievement. I doubt she’d snap at me for the compliment. I think she’d smile graciously. And then I’d thank her for leaving such a jewel for others to read behind.
Henry James. I just want to know what his voice sounded like.
It would have to be Michel Foucault. There are many questions I would like to ask him: did you really change your position to the extent that there is no point in reading your earlier writings? How does the concept of ‘apparatus’ relate to ‘discursive practices’ and to ‘assemblage’? and many others. However, there would not be much point as he would probably continue to answer them in his provocatively enigmatic way. So perhaps we could just have a quiet tête-a- tête.
Angela says…
Albert Camus, to talk about then and now in a ‘burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness’.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… alcohol
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Charles Baudelaire
I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler while writing my novel, among other things, and one of the things that kind of seeped into my own writing was a ridiculous amount of drinking. Reading his stories and novels sometimes it seems as though characters pour themselves another drink after every two or three lines of dialogue. If you look at the picture of Ray in this gallery of drunks and addicts you will understand. I decided to take out some of the drinking in my book after feedback from two of my first readers. I didn’t want it to be that noticeable. There’s still too much tea drinking in there, but that’s ok I guess.
I’m not allowed to drink anymore because it contributes to my migraines. If you encounter me at the festival please excuse my social awkwardness.
Alcohol? Never touch it.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that all writers must be drunks (although it could also be said that many drinkers happen to be writers), but, like most universally acknowledged truths, this assertion is in want of a correction: not only do writers drink, but they also sometimes write about drinking. Shakespeare does this through the character of the Porter in Macbeth, who argues that drinking ‘is a great provoker of three things’, including ‘nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery… it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance’, which (if you’re of those people inclined to believe that all writing is autobiography) may provide a little bit more information about Shakespeare than you wanted to know. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ John Keats also yearns for a drop, calling ‘for a draught of vintage! that hath been/Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth’, but apparently he couldn’t hold his liquor very well, as his description of inebriation illustrates: ‘a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,’ which basically proves that even drunk Keats was a bit of a downer. Thomas Love Peacock (whose name almost reads like a transitive sentence describing an amoral act) loved to wax philosophical about liquor, arguing that ‘There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it,’ which just goes to prove that if you’re looking for a reason you will invariably find it.
Angela says…
See my post on the creative ‘spirit‘.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… 1970s (pt 2)
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
This is a photo of my brother and I from a PixiFoto stand at the local shopping centre in 1972. Why? It’s one of my favourite photos, and the impulse towards nostalgia (especially as seen in family photos) is touched on in my book Martin Westley Takes a Walk.
People like to think of the 1970s as a time when something odd got into the water and people started to act very strangely indeed; uncharacteristic of either ‘traditional’ behaviour or more modern ways of life it was more like a parallel universe had opened up in the voluminous space of their loon pants and Oxford bags.
By 1974 almost every man, once chiselled, plain and smoothed down by tailored lines and brilliantine was now to be modelled on every ghastly variation of ‘the pop or rock musician’ (for no good reason at all) and had that all round dishevelled, lost, unwashed look. Every other woman was batty too: now hyper-motivated on self-improvement, they enrolled in wholesome crafts such as pottery, weaving or tie-dying or making strange works (neither art nor craft) with nails and string. Still smoking, still largely under-educated, and still drinking bad wine, they blundered on into a psychedelic-psychopathological alternative to good sense and judgement (of any kind). Or so it seems to some these days.
In the kitchen, long established routines of acceptable food preparation were ditched in favour of some of the wackiest creations ever known to our species. Just thumbing through my copy of Sonia Alison’s Love of Cooking (1975) I see compelling, mouth-watering recipes such as Danish Peasant Girl with Veil (an idiotic sort of apple crumble), Locksmith’s Apprentice (a laxative-action dessert job involving prunes), Syrup Tart (an unexotic and unappetising confection of sugar, fat and white flour), the thoroughly revolting Pilchard Pancakes au Gratin (featuring tinned pilchards in tomato sauce – a form of pure evil mixed with pureed weevil) and the killer, Spaghetti Egg Quickie (featuring tinned overcooked spaghetti in tomato sauce and poached eggs). I fancy we shall see none of this retro-fied at Poh’s corner.
So, the 1970s comes down to us as eccentric, weird, far-out, loony, slightly hysterical, scruffy, squiffy and squalid. But, there is a huge BUT coming.
BUT, this essentially experimental frame of mind with quite extreme shifts in the look and feel of society and culture will be recognised as an important tipping point in history, when a future orientated modernity that was so intolerant of tradition, other cultures, the past and even to a degree nature, was questioned and substantially replaced by an ethnic of tolerance, curiosity, experimentation and hybridity. The following comes from my new book City Life (London: Sage 2010):
‘Cities, especially large metropolitan cities, are the boldest expressions of any historical era and exemplify its values and character more than any other material manifestation. Rural landscapes across the world remain remarkably constant despite profound social changes, but cities are not only products of their age (even if they have only reshaped the foundations of previous eras), they seem to be the first to draw fire and criticism when things are perceived to be wrong. Equally, when a new age is dawning it is on the surface of cities that it begins to inscribe itself first. As the centre of political, cultural and administrative power the principal cities attract and retain an ancillary class of engineers, architects, designers and artists who are called upon to realise the material and aestheticised expressions of social and political elites, their values, forms of governance, commerce, often through show-case projects, often in prominent city spaces. However, the stirrings of new demands for change may not arise first among this professional class since their fortunes are so often tied to those in power or to rationalised dominant paradigms. As George Bernard Shaw remarked, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Therefore, it is often outsiders: students, the artistic avant-garde, new social movements (political, consumer, sexual, gender, race/ethnic etc.) and the so-called ‘hippies’ and ‘creative classes’ – together an important social strata of any major city – who painted in the first brushstrokes and began to live life in a new way and will new life-worlds and circumstances into being. Their combined efforts produced a tipping point for change in the 1970s across most Western nation states.
Portentously, in April 1970 the horse Gay Trip won the British Grand National. The 1970s were the beginnings of an epoch of revolutionary social and cultural transformation and from David Bowie’s gender-bending rock through the sexually liberating magazine Oz to Spare Rib and the Gay Times, everything, including received norms of sexuality and gender had been subjected to the most rigorous criticism and experimentation. The ‘70s created a culture, still alive today, that thrives on transformation and change as a permanent state and its role in the creation of new forms of city life cannot be underestimated. Later, in July 1970, enthusiasts brought Brunel’s revolutionary ship the SS Great Britain back for restoration in Bristol docks. It had to be for profoundly important reasons because it was brought back from the Falkland Islands at great expense. Such a move signalled that the new modern future was not going to be achieved by rejecting the past but by being inspired by it. Prior to the 1970s the modern impulse was future orientated and it worked as hard on destroying the past as it did on finding a future. As tourism scholars who specialised on the new heritage phenomenon found, one cannot destroy the past without creating a sense of loss and when that loss seemed to be the extensive industrial culture of Britain, it proved too difficult to bear. Personal and cultural biography, and memory itself was inscribed on the sorts of everyday objects and spaces that were retained and showcased by heritage collections. Critically, the impulse to preserve the SS Great Britain belonged to the gathering heritage sensibility that has been much mocked but it was an instance of a very important transformation. The search was no longer on for a singular aesthetic, a new look for a new perfectible age. Instead aesthetic beauty was being found in new places, in pre-industrial cultures, other cultures elsewhere, in the past(s), in textures and surfaces of old buildings, on the fringes and in newly discovered popular cultures from the past and present – in the nooks and crannies of all forms of city life, human and non-human. The crap men’s hair and the many crap towns that emerged then were not ends, were not intended outcomes but beginnings, the beginning of new becomings. Men’s hair would get better…
The 1970s reaction to the dominant culture of modern functionalism was to blow raspberries using whimsy and absurdity; adherence to the past provided a form of reversal and quirkiness that became the anti-motif. The Beatles did not eschew sentimentality but actively sought it in such things as brass band music. Everyone knew that brass bands were the epicentre of trad working class collective sentiments and they were not to be simply blown away or forgotten. Nobody was to be forgotten. Besides, it sounded interesting against the jangle of guitars. Or/and Indian instruments…
New communities of interest were coming forward to be defined and identified by objects, pasts and spaces on the verge of extinction but now to be recoded heritage or culture. This is how city life in places like Canterbury came to be changed and set on a new line of flight. There was a lot of recoding going on in city life now. Instead of finding the correct form, good taste transformed into eclectic taste, mixtures, hybrids and fusions. Instead of seeking the best way to live and identifying forms of life to reject and reform, a new kind of empathic curiosity took its place. If there was a degree of intolerance or rejection it was for modern utopias, futures that left the past and some groups behind. There was a new-found intolerance for the technocrat and scientists found to be working for corporations rather than for the common good and for progress.’
Today the 1970s can seem a mess, and the food a disaster but that is only because all the pieces of the world were thrown up in the air in order to be reconsidered afresh, with a more tolerant and open-minded attitude. How such a fragile, wobbly, improbable movement came to change the world is very life affirming for me. Maybe I should try Pilchard Pancakes au Gratin after all….
[i] George Bernard Shaw Revolutionist’s Handbook
On Saturday 4 September there will be a session called Living in the ’70s, featuring Francis Wheen and Frank Moorhouse. Get tickets here.
MWF 2010 authors on… the 1970s (pt 1)
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Is summed up in a black, long-sleeved, boat-necklined wool dress my mother bought in 1974. She still has it. It is the glory of vintage apparel defined.
When I should have been in my twenties, black and in New York instead of being four, in Warrandyte and dubbed Grandmaster Flashdrive.
The 1970s started for me with the Springbok tour of Australia. I didn’t know anything about politics – or South African politics – at the time, but I remember the chant ‘Paint them black and send them back’, and remember thinking it was racist and wondering what it was for. I also remember seeing television images of police riding their horses into demonstrators, and 19-year-olds (they seemed all grown up to me then) with bloodied faces.
We talked about it a bit in my house: my mother protested against the Springbok tour, against the Vietnam War. She took a cushion along to sit down on Bourke Street, and I remember watching that mass of humanity sitting on Bourke Street on television and hearing the wildly differing estimates of people numbers. Why did the police always say there were fewer than what the demonstrators said?
We lived in Seymour and in the 1970s I went with my brother to the swimming pool and we ate sunny boys and razzes and I first discovered girls, notably by pushing them into the pool to show you liked them. One of their big brothers beat me up on the way home once and put a stop to that.
There were elm trees lining Station Street in those days and the cicadas used to sing in them when it was hot. There were other streets in town called Railway Street, and Loco Street, which was Seymour’s Struggletown.
The Vietnam War sizzled its way into my memory because we saw it every night with our chops and mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. Our tv was on top of the fridge and it chirruped on while we ate. I remember announcements of ‘three diggers were killed and two were wounded’, or something like that, and Peter Couchman standing in villages in Vietnam with a chopper in the background messing up his hair, talking about places called Nui Dat and Vung Tau and Bien Hoa.
I also seem to remember an expression you heard on the news at that time: ‘he was dead before he hit the ground’. I don’t know if that’s my memory playing tricks on me, but I swear newsreaders used to say that. Then how did they know?
And the politicians coming on tv saying if we didn’t stop the downward thrust of Communism they’d be here those Reds, under our beds, probably ravishing our wives and mothers by the tankstands, just as the Huns were going to in WWI or the Japs were in WWII.
Of course there is the searing image of a little girl running down the street naked with her back on fire, and the Americans afterwards saying it was a mistake.
This was a televised war, so we saw it all: the Saigon police chief shooting a man through the head and him collapsing in the street, the NVA approaching Saigon in their tanks and the young, rich and wealthy Vietnamese kids sitting in cafes playing dice games.
Uh oh.
Something dawned on me with that televised image. My brother had been called up to the war, but the change of government in 1972 let him off the hook. By the mid-seventies I was understanding this was more than just a war in a far off country among people about whom we knew very little. This was about justice at home as well. Our government was conscripting young men and sending them away to kill and be killed. This was what the demonstrations were about. As well as about the mayhem we were producing overseas.
Yet here were some young Vietnamese kids sitting around playing dice while the Commies advanced on Saigon! (Maybe we’d been sold a crock?)
My mother said she would protect any draft dodger who went underground, and I didn’t get what going underground was, and why you would do it, although it did sound vaguely like fun. I imagined riding my skateboard through tunnels. I also heard about young male politicians who were encouraging young men to go to the war, and the question was continually raised in my house: why didn’t they go themselves?
In between learning about the world I was learning about girls and asking them to the local Show or the movies, vaguely trying to put my arm around them and realising they were really, well, different.
We wore high heeled shoes and flares and messed around with strange ways of doing our hair, growing it lank and slicking it back. We did kung fu and went to Bruce Lee movies. The guys I went to school with listened to Nutbush City Limits and the Electric Light Orchestra and Queen, bands I detested.
Now my little boys play We are the Champions on their iPods, and I suppose it goes around.
Just like the wars. As I write this, last week Julia Gillard was given the top job in Canberra. Also last week 10 civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan’s Khost Province.
‘We have received five bodies of civilians in our provincial public hospital,’ Khost provincial health director Amirbadshah Rahmatzai Mangal told AFP.
‘The dead include two female children of seven and eight years of age.’
Those irritating Kiwis across the ditch said they wouldn’t send a soldier to Afghanistan because it wasn’t in their national interest. How dare they not play this game?
That war in Vietnam was in the 1970s, but in the 2000s they’re still trying to win hearts and minds and occasionally apologising for mistakes, like when they blast a primary school and kill a lot of kids, (although these days they’re more likely to just blame the terrsts).
Within the first 24 hours of Julia Gillard being given the hot seat in Canberra she was on the phone to Obama assuring him of our troop commitment in Afghanistan. Right after a fortnight when five young Australian men were killed there. Plus ça change.
Just like the wars, and the 1970s rockbands, I have a sneaking suspicion that the crocks are still going around as well.
On Saturday 4 September there will be a session called Living in the ’70s, featuring Francis Wheen and Frank Moorhouse. Get tickets here.
MWF 2010 authors on… the last movie they saw
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
My love for British film director Alan Parker was reawakened when I rewatched Shoot the Moon, a devastating story about the breakdown of a marriage that makes Kramer vs Kramer look like You’ve Got Mail. The main protagonist of the film is a writer (Albert Finney) who in his wild success experiences a midlife crisis that leads him to leave his wife (Diane Keaton) and four unruly yet charming daughters. It is a decidedly uncomfortable and confronting viewing experience, and one of the most unfliching portraits of a narcissistic writer ever presented on screen, yet strangely remains one of Parker’s most overlooked films.
Alan Parker was once accused in a review of Mississippi Burning of being a ‘manipulative’ filmmaker, with a directorial style equivalent to a ‘cinematic bludgeoning’. Parker’s response to this was that it was a ridiculous accusation because the very role of director is that of manipulator. Parker comes from an advertising background and knows exactly how to get his audience right where he wants them: how to elicit need, emotion and desire. Most of what I have learnt about writing has come from filmmakers rather than other authors. Those who write with light have just as much to teach us as those who use a pen.
The ending of Shoot the Moon is so sharp and tragic it reminds me of how I like my fiction: short, punchy and leaving me in a state of despair and wonderment, a changed person from the experience. I like my stories to shoot from the hip, and Parker doesn’t pull his punches. He hasn’t made a film since the very bizarre The Life of David Gale in 2003, and I hope he returns to deliver a cinematic one-two punch to confirm his status as one of Britain’s greatest auteurs, or at least erase the memory of The Road to Wellville.
I borrowed Women in Love from the library thinking I would be swooning over Oliver Reed, when in fact my eye was on Alan Bates.
I usually go to the cinema relentlessly, but it’s been a while now as cinemas in Helsinki really slow down in the summer. Choices are also restricted by my not speaking Finnish or Swedish. The former is a deliriously difficult language and I have no excuse for not speaking the latter. Most things slow down in Helsinki during the summertime, with the exodus towards The Summer Cottage (On the Island / By the Lake)… The capital, which is usually lovely and mellow, becomes something of a ghost town, pleasantly drowsy.
Mother and Child: A rather disturbing endorsement of the current paradigm that blood/genes prevail over human relationships.
I don’t know what the last movie I saw was for the reason that, simply put, I don’t really like movies. This isn’t some highbrow pretentious thing (I love television and don’t trust anyone who doesn’t own a TV set), but I hate movie theatres, for the reason that there’s nothing more alienating then going to see a movie which you find unfunny/didactic/obvious/ham-handed/emotionally manipulative etc., only to find that everyone around you seems to be laughing and having a good time (this may sound inherently misanthropic, which, of course, it is). It’s to the point where my wife won’t even go to the movies with me, because I inevitably end up sitting there huffing and fidgeting and basically making the movie-watching experience uncomfortable for everyone around me despite my best attempts to remain still and quiet. If I were to try to justify this intellectually – and I am always happy to attempt to justify everything intellectually – I might argue that television has clearly surpassed the film as a storytelling medium and that it’s difficult to think of any movies from the last decade that match the power of the best television from the same period (like The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, or Arrested Development), and at times when I’m feeling particularly emphatic, I might even suggest that all government funding for film should be reallocated to novelists – but that would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Clearly, I’m just not that fond of movies…
Angela says…
My man and I have been on a bit of a vampire bender. The classic Dracula, then Nosferatu (superior – wonderful) and the other day The Hunger, a very sexy film that I can’t believe I haven’t seen before. It has everything: Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve getting it on; David Bowie in an old-man suit; ’80s decadence; monkeys; an original kind of undead; and so much more. Delicious fun.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments. What was the last movie you saw?
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 
