No Secrets

Well kids the real journey has almost begun! I am now in Amsterdam and in just a week and a half I will start my Binger workshop experience.

As I had originally set this up to be a blog about filmmaking rather than me whipping out snide one liners about Jackie Collins and the check-out whores at Qantas, I've decided to start things off with some observations from the Screen Australia party in Berlin. I should preface this by stating that this trip is being funded by Screen Australia so it's pretty damn unlikely that I'm going to criticize them so those of you wanting to read a "filmmaker gets the boot stuck into the funding bodies" article should go elsewhere. I'm sure you'll find something on ScreenHub. Just kidding, ScreenHub. You guys are lovely. Have yourselves a shandy.

I always find industry parties a little awkward. I don't really know that many industry types and it's always a gamble going up to strangers. Will you score somebody interesting or will you be lumped with a pretentious git? It's a little like Russian Roulette and I don't like to gamble - it compromises my Christianity (just like dissing people on the internet). And the last time I drank at one of those things Sigrid Thornton ended up walking into a wall in her attempts to get away from me and my friends and I almost floored Bruce Beresford. So I avoid the demon drink. Instead I normally eat my weight in canapes and RedBull my way through the night until my heart's pumping in 16/8 time.

Luckily there was a showcase of forthcoming films for 2009 which they called Radar. This of course prompted a lot of Under The Radar jokes which went down like the Titanic. They proudly announced that over 30 new Australian features would be released this year (Yep! We heard the public's cry for more Australian films and we delivered!!) and we received a DVD with a trailer for each of them. It really hammered home the importance of marketing for me. So many films don't seem to get how vital a good trailer is these days, particularly with people plastering them all over YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and whatever website the kids are idolising these days. There was one film in particular that I've been quite eagerly awaiting as it's based on a very interesting true crime case in Australian history that could work a treat on film. But the trailer sucked all the fun out of that one, didn't it?

Another film that I was eagerly awaiting was Ana Kokkinos' Blessed. I was a huge fan of Head On and found Book Of Revelation to be more than a little underwhelming. Hell - when you pay to see a rock show you want a rock show! And silhouetted fellatio scenes do not a rock show make. And if you're going to have a pretentious ballet mistress, you could at least give her a wacky Russian accent so we've got something to entertain us. So with Blessed I was hoping that Kokkinos might be pulling a Richard Linklater (i.e. one good film, one bad film, one good film, etc.). Now I should point out the film is still in post production so we were only able to see one scene rather than a full trailer. It was the choice of scene that floored me.

A lot of talk has been made in the last year of the Ozploitation film. Films made in the late 70's and early 80's that featured lots of gore and nudity. Apparently this is a uniquely Australian genre. I'd like to think in 10 years or so, MIFF will be acknowledging a more important unique Australian genre - the Ottozploitation film. These are films that feature Miranda Otto dancing around "unselfconsciously".

The most iconic of course is True Love & Chaos but there's also Love Serenade, Doing Time For Patsy Cline, to a lesser extent The Last Days Of Chez Nous, possibly Danny Deckchair (YOU sit through it and find out. I'm certainly not going to!) and now Blessed. I'd also like to think Cate Shortland was paying homage to this genre when Abbie Cornish coo-cachooed her way around that Jindabyne motel room in Somersault.

Kudos to Ana Kokkinos for resurrecting this genre. She's bringing it back. I hope the "love in a shared house" genre of the late 90's is next. There's nothing more I can really say about Blessed because all we got was 3 minutes of Miranda vamping it up to The Angels' No Secrets. Really. That's it. She may have been drunk. She didn't look filled with unbridled youthful joy like she did when she shook it to Tom Jones in True Love & Chaos. Oh a policewoman knocked on her door at the end of it. Annnnnnnd... Scene!

I'm not sure what we were supposed to conclude from that scene or how it was meant to entice us. Maybe it was hoping we would ask the question - "I wonder what Oz Rock classics Miranda will shimmy her way through next? Quick let's get down to Chaddy for the next session and find out! Fingers crossed for the Divinyls' Science Fiction!"

Is this enough to engage an audiences attention? Do we really want to a hinge a multi million dollar movie on the hope that Australian audiences have Ottophilia? I'm not saying every film has to make millions of dollars and pull in huge crowds to be considered a success. For all I know, Kokkinos considers Book Of Revelation her real triumph and Head On the disappointment. But then it comes back to the artist and their relationship with the audience.

What makes art successful? Do we create art just to create something beautiful on its own regardless of whether it will be seen by others or not? Can we afford to do that when millions of dollars are at stake? Is the success gauged by what we the artist get out of it - in other words, by allowing us to exorcise a demon, capture a moment of joy or allow a personal catharsis? Or does the audience response determine its worth? And if the audience aren't attracted to it, does that make it bad or are we looking at quality not quantity? On a small personal scale I'm finding with The Apocalypse Bear that even though the first episode has been seen by a lot more people (making it a quantitative success), the second episode feels like a greater success - both as an artistic achievement (making it a personal success) but also critically from the people who have seen it (making it a qualitative success).

So where does Australian film sit within all of this and how it presents itself to the world? When millions of dollars are pumped into a work of art, is it enough for us just to say we're creating something beautiful regardless of whether its seen widely or not? At first our instincts probably say no but as the wise Mr Wilson pointed out to me recently, huge amounts of cash are pumped into artworks and sculptures around roadways that nobody ever really looks at. They're just here to make our lives better. Could Australian film be the same thing? Something that exists to enrich our lives. It certainly holds more appeal than allowing an artist just to exorcise their demons through film on a million dollar budget.

The only difference I would point out is that with public art, the art is in the public arena so we see it whether we choose to or not. People drives those roadways every day. But people aren't making it into that cinema to see this other form of art so it never even has the chance to enrich their lives. So if this is true then the marketing suddenly becomes the most essential part of the whole process as this is the one thing that can bring the public to Australian film.

Suddenly a lot of weight has been put on Miranda Otto's dance moves if that's what's meant to inspire people to allow Blessed to enrich their lives. And will another film with Otto going hammer and tongs to a rock classic like your mother at a Dance-Along session of Mamma Mia really enrich anyones life?

These are the wild and wacky thoughts dancing through my brain on a rainy day in Amsterdam.

On a side note, the first Australian film I've seen this year is Mary & Max. The trailer perfectly showcases everything there is to love about the film - its observations on human existence and its skillful balance of humour and pathos. The film is a delight, one of the finest Australian films I've seen in many years, for one overriding reason. It has a strong personal unique voice. It gives us a window into somebody else's life and lets us walk in somebody else's shoes for 80 minutes. Maybe that's all a good film has to do. I, for one, definitely feel it enriched my life.