Revelation Film Festival

I have a nasty feeling I’ve forgotten how to write, maintaining this blog. My literary inadequacy could of course be caused by the fact I'm a parent with sleep deprivation, or PhD student.

I had a vague idea to write up a journal from my recent visit to Perth, where I was attending the Revelation Film Festival. Notes on length of flight won’t entertain anyone (it takes longer to fly across Australia than to fly to NYC from London), or the vivacity of sunsets. I listened to The Pastels’ new collaboration with Tenniscoats, mostly.

Festival director Jack Sargeant informed me he’d invited me to attend in my capacity as “inventor” – inventor of musical genres, etc. I shook my head and lamented aloud that I’d been unable to take part in Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s series of interviews with Nick Cave fans, friends and peers (Do You Love Me Like I Love You), currently showing with recent Bad Seeds reissues – by treating the‘talking heads’ shoot as art with simple consistency, by refusing to identify fan from musician from commentator, by carefully screening their subjects all immersed in a common passion, Ian and Jane manage to lift the form out its usual realms of the dull: insightful, enthralling.

Well, perhaps only to Cave fans – but I don’t feel I’m committed there.

I shook my head, and audibly questioned Seargant’s inclusion in the film programme of the rustic home documentary Three Hams In A Can – a film purporting to show the adventures of three experimental Australian laptop musicians in Tokyo playing to tiny audiences by focusing on the minutiae, the repetitive everyday, the stuff way off in the margins. Perhaps it was supposed to mirror the music but within minutes our fingers had been glued to the fast-forward button. I’m not one for chair-smashing or hotel room-wrecking but neither am I prepared to watch people’s holiday movies, particularly holiday movies from people I don't know.

Jack cited Jean-Paul Sartre and bamboozled my befuddled head with his geniality and quoting of heady sources.

I also saw some of Steve Severin’s laptop accompaniment to horror films (Music For Silents) in the beautifully restored art deco Astor Cinema: they were dark, repetitive and erotically disturbing, like all the best fantasies. Not sure if I’m referring to the music or the flickering images here.

Saturday midday, in conversation with Severin and compositional musician Cat Hope at the university (audience: five post-grad students and a handful of enthusiastic volunteers), I suggested that lyrics are perhaps superfluous to music – something Severin, as main lyric-writer in Siouxsie And The Banshees, took exception to. It is strange though that as a singer myself I can never remember words, any words. I also paraded my love for traditional musicals (Sound Of The Music, Mary Poppins et al) once more. Question before the team: name one good music video, just one.

Myself and Severin were in agreement on this one.

I stated my distaste for film as a medium (it’s second to opera as my least favourite art form) band and no one questioned my presence. No one asked me about N****** either, which was a blessed relief.

Back at the Astoria, I was (sadly) forced to choose between Josh Koury's documentary on Harry Potter-inspired rock bands We Are Wizards, and Flicker, Nik Sheehan's riveting, dry examination of Burroughs' contemporary Brion Gysin and his dream machine (a flickering lightshow similar to early cinematic explorations which is believed to create an artificial, drug-less high in its users). So I watched the latter. The central tenet of the movie - the dream machine itself, and Gysin - was easily enough to transcend its mundane confines (more talking heads: although you gotta love the ever-laconic Marianne Faithfull, and Lee Ranaldo) and mantain fascination, not to mention install an immediate desire to track down a dream machine for one's own use.

The Scandinavian black comedy Original - billed in the programme as a "romantic comedy for riot girls and indie boys", which was enough to grab my attention - slightly disappointed. I would've liked darker, meaner (like much Scandinavian film I've seen) - but this was the Danish equivalent of Tim Burton's Big Fish: designed with a wider audience in mind, but still with enough intricacies and weirdness to hold the audience. One fucking great moment in a strip-club, too - where the nonplussed feminist singer dropkicks a punter.

Didn't want to go back to the hotel with nightmares, so avoided watching beyond the first 30 minutes of Ted Kotcheff's gripping dissection of Australia's ugly white underbelly, Wake In Fright (1970). It was a film shunned by Australians when it originally appeared - presumably for being too close to the knuckle: and we all know how Aussies can't stand being criticised, especially by outsiders. Yet it's nothing less than stunning, in the way it uses  bushland Australia's heat-lacerated landscape to convey claustrophobia, its unrelenting focus on the sinister bonhomie of the drinking male  in a brutal rural town. The film had been "lost" for decades, copies passed down via fifth-generation video tapes, similar to the way word about Ladies And Gentlemen...The Fabulous Stains spread. (I first saw it courtesy of Noah Taylor, who rates it as one of the finest Aussie movies out there - if not the finest. He should know. He was in one of the others.) What's that old line about the settlers again? "The men are independent, but by no stretch of the imagination can they be considered free."

The Monthly has written a great essay on it here. Coming to your local cinema any day now (if you live in Australia). Don't miss it!

Sunday dawned, like Sunday does. An early discussion on Sonic Film And Music Documentary (myself, Jack and Cat and the director of Three Hams In A Can) was adjourned to a breakfast cafe when only two people showed up where our scintillating banter was filmed with view to being shown at next year's Revelation. A mild argument broke out around what form music documentaries should take - having met the director now (and he was charming) and had the intentions explained to me, I'm actually much more of a mind to go watch Three Hams In a Can again, see if I've been blinded by expectation and training. I doubt it, but hell - it's much more fun to watch holiday movies when you know the folk involved.

Back at the Astor - and man I'm loving that cinema, and the awesome fish'n'chips across the road, and Planet Video, of course, which is like Brisbane's Trash Video and Rocking Horse Records rolled into one - there's time for one more film: Chevolution, the life of Che Guevara examined through the lens of that one iconic image you see everywhere (reprinted up top). Nice choice of focus again.

What an ace festival.