A Frenetic Fortnight

Rip It Up, Issue 203, 1 July 1994, Page 46

A Frenetic Fortnight

The 26th International Film Festival

There was a point a few months back when Bill Gosden was worried about the line-up for this year’s International Rim Festival but now the programme’s out, with Gerad Taylor’s elephant singing in the rain outside the Civic, and Gosden tells me the line-up’s ‘good, really solid'. Few people in this country can see as many films as this man, and once again he’s worked through a clutch of international festivals taking in up to five movies a day. Berlin still comes out top: ‘lt has a lot of city money in it with a computer booking service, everything runs on time - it’s a dream of a festival for the consumer’.

Gosden runs a tight show. The press launch saw him chiding the journos for being greedy with their requests for complimentary seats, and for tramping in during the supporting features. After all, these are the 90s, and he’s proud that the event is independent: ‘We’re self-sustaining, apart from a generous sponsorship from Fay Richwhite’. Where does the money go? ‘Prints are expensive - last year's Buster Keaton features cost SSOOUS a screening, as well as entailing the extra expenses of slowing down the projector and hiring a pianist.’ He doesn’t pussyfoot around discussing the ups and downs of this year’s programme. The French director Jean-Luc Godard is described in the programme as being ‘out to lunch’ and Gosden warns that Helas pour moi is ‘virtually impenetrable ... an impossible film in many ways’. He ponders the possibility of Mike Leigh’s Naked and Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird being ‘an unbearable double feature’ with their ‘intense and despairing visions of contemporary England’. Individually though they’re essential viewing (‘David Thewlis is extraordinary in Naked and so is Chrissy Rock in Ladybird"). He enthuses about the ‘big buzz’ he gets from the amazing range of animation films, from Wladyslaw Starewicz’s 1931 The Tale of the Fox to a retrospective of short films by master Czech film-maker Jan Svankmajer - the films we didn’t see when Czechoslovakia startled the West with a rush of charming features in the late 60s. For state-of-the-arters, there are two programmes of New Computer Animation, and for nostalgia buffs, two programmes of Tex Avery and his colleagues, including such classics as Thugs with Dirty Mugs, Bacall to Arms and Red Hot Riding Hood. Gosden is coy on the long-awaited Gus van Sant opus, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: ‘it’s a kind of unfilmable book which is the main problem, but it’s very entertaining with some great outrageous moments’ (Gosden’s favourite, he tells me, involves Uma Thurman’s thumbs). Joel Coen’s Hudsucker Proxy glows with its S4O million budget (‘all spent on sets and camera tracks’). On the music side, Gosden’s keen on the Glenn Gould film even though ‘they’ve cleaned all the humming out of the soundtrack’, Between the Teeth's a ‘great chance to catch up with David Byrne musically, with a wonderful huge band’. How does Isaac Julien’s Darker Side of Black compare to Julien's Young Soul Rebels? Gosden’s unable to answer as Rebels is one of the few films that he hasn’t seen, but he talks of the ‘marvellous scenes of the director confronting the rap artists

and accusing them of homophobia. Isaac's such a queeny little man that it’s incredibly bold of him. He said he was emboldened because he had a bigger weapon than they did - a camera’. On gay issues, ‘there’s a whole gay film festival embedded in it’, His pick is Gay Men in Shorts, with Todd Haynes’ Dottie Gets Spanked giving us the chance to update on the man who gave us Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison. John Maybury’s Remembrance of Things Fast ‘brings a homosensibility to the latest video technology. It’s an extraordinary eyeful’. We resort to idle Metro-talk, what’s hot and what’s not, in terms of various countries. France and Spain are up there, although Spanish titles are hard to obtain, and ‘the American Independent Scene is always bringing up fresh new work’. Perhaps New Zealand is the hot place, Gosden conjectures. The coup of the festival - apart from a brilliant selection of John Ford classics which came through as the programme was going to press - is the world premiere of Peter Jackson’s new feature Heavenly Creatures which ‘might secure that fashionable niche for New Zealand for a little bit longer’. And watch out for the sprinkling of Kiwi shorts in the festival - a long-awaited chance to see Gregor Nicholas's shatteringly beautiful Avondale Dogs and Grant Lahood’s wacky Lemmings Aid.

The 26th International Film Festival runs from July 8-23 at Wellington, July 15-30 at Auckland, July 22-August 6 at Dunedin and July 29 - August 13 at Christchurch, with a selection of films playing in Hamilton from August 6.

WILLIAM DART