THE KINGS are in their counting house, and the cultural workers in the galleries, libraries and archives are cowering in fear. They’ve kept the books up to date and their noses clean, but they know that any minute this or that curatorial role will be found “surplus to requirements.” Then Jack or Jill, who worked for years to earn their niches in the care of books, paintings or film, will be scrounging for part-time employment in alien tasks, while their skills go to waste and the institutions they’ve served lose not only their service, but also banks of invaluable professional memory.
The cuts to staff and screening programs at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra have been widely discussed and argued over – and there’s a twist in this tale: they are not the results of government budgetary measures, but of decisions by the CEO, Michael Loebenstein. His concern, he has said, is not so much to preempt the budget as to reset the Archive’s public identity clearly around its central functions in collecting and preserving the national film and sound inheritance. Billed as a restructure, the changes involve the loss of twenty-eight jobs, among them those of long-serving and deeply knowledgeable staff; I have no permission at present to name them. The work of the beautiful Arc cinema will be curtailed after this winter’s programs; much less of world cinema will be offered. The Archive’s lending services will also be cut back – how far is not yet clear; but the invaluable programs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, for example, like non-commercial exhibition in other cities, depend crucially on the Archive’s resources and services. Commercial distributors are reluctant to lend; film prints are less and less available as DVDs take their place; and often hiring and shipping costs are prohibitive.
Two weeks ago, at the gallery, I saw Errol Morris’s incisive and searching drama-documentary on police interrogation and conviction, The Thin Blue Line; this week, in the same series, there are three screenings of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Seen again, Rashomon brings back the sense of cinema’s grandest possibilities, with Kurosawa’s Shakespearean reach, the interplay of high life and low, the orchestration of theatre, music, literature and painting. This series, headed States of Mind, is linked to the current Biennale; it began with Fellini’s 8 ½, took in Last Year at Marienbad and Orson Welles’s The Trial among others, continues with The Manchurian Candidate and, on 28 May, Duncan Jones’s science-fiction poem of 2009, Moon, before concluding with Mulholland Drive on 4 June. Particular tastes aside, this is an extraordinary parade, a ranging exploration called up by one of the country’s very few dedicated film curators, Robert Herbert. Meanwhile in Canberra, the Arc screened masterworks by Satyajit Ray – one director who was saluted by Kurosawa himself; thus, after some decades, I looked again at Ray’s Charulata, and found a film far more complex and beautiful than I remembered.
It’s that kind and level of work which may no longer be on offer for Canberra; and apart from the efforts of a few very small film societies, Robert Herbert’s work is all we have in Sydney – a rich Western city of four-and-a-half million, which has no cinematheque. Without the Archive’s lending collection, his work could not be done.
MORE CAN be said, and will be, on the struggles of film culture in a hostile climate. Meanwhile the world does keep on going to the movies, and numbers of us have found Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel definitely worth a second viewing. Never believe the trailer; this looked like a high-camp romp, and little more than that. It’s rather a film about the necessity of storytelling, and one in which style, the whimsy and flair of the invisible narrator permit him to synthesise history, fantasy and farce. He turns the pages, we look at the pictures, always knowing this isn’t quite the way it was.
Ralph Fiennes plays Gustave H., the concierge of the palatial Grand Budapest, a monster wedding-cake structure on an impossible mountain peak, not in Hungary but in the fictitious, imperilled Republic of Zubrowka. (If you hadn’t seen Martin McDonagh’s excellent film gris, In Bruges (2008), you might have been surprised by Fiennes’s comic mastery; in that piece, he was a marvellous baddie.) Here, with the wide-eyed Tony Revolori as Zero Mustafa, the hotel’s lobby boy, a Sancho Panza role, Gustave leads central European high society of the 1930s in its dance towards the cliff. Hitler isn’t named, but Fascism is there, the dark outside the windows, personified in several episodes by thuggish invading police. The cast is all A-list, with F. Murray Abraham as the old Mustafa, compulsively remembering, and Willem Dafoe’s Jopling reminding us that we’re in Frankenstein’s country. On no account miss the final credits; there Alexandre Desplat’s music, with a full balalaika ensemble, goes brilliantly crazy, and lets us know just how to read the entire composition.
A NEW homegrown feature demands attention, if only because there aren’t many around; the drama that matters to us has mostly migrated to TV. Craig Monahan’s Healing sounded pretty ominous: alienated bad man finds redemption in work with wild creatures, in this case huge (and hugely impressive) eagles at a bird sanctuary outside Melbourne. Hugo Weaving, for once playing a character who’s all good, is the concerned prison officer, Don Hany the struggling long-term inmate for whom Murphy’s law is in force – whatever can go wrong for him will. But the rules of melodrama do their work; the broken family will show signs of mending. The dialogue is often clunky, the script undisciplined; but Weaving and Hany, with Justine Clarke and Tony Martin in solid side roles, Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography, and the wildlife take this film further than it seemed likely to go.
It’s worth a look, also worth a think. It seems that Australian feature-making still needs more inventive producers, the kind capable of tight and purposeful steering, and along with them script editors who know when less can be more. It also needs a sense of cinematic flourishing around it, a fostering critical climate, and one in which audiences can be trusted to be both welcoming and demanding. For as long as I can remember, back to the early days of the 1970s revival, we’ve had an industry in which too many film-makers don’t actually go to the movies, and don’t therefore attain the sort of cineliteracy which enables the witty formalism of a Grand Budapest Hotel – or, much more importantly, the incisive social probing of a Thin Blue Line, let alone the grand fullness of Charulata and Rashomon. •
