Cinematic offerings top of the festival billboard
A Cinema Special:
The Gardens Festival is a special event. It is deservedly the focus of attention for arts lovers. This week immediate reviews has overwhelmed this column. Ordinary life, however, continues, and offers absorbing experiences, including developments in cinema which seem light years away from the first screenings in New Zealand.
On October 14, 1896, theHerald carried New Zealand’s first ever film review . . .
‘‘Yesterday evening there was a very large audience at the Opera House. The great feature of the evening was the first exhibition in New Zealand of Edison’s latest marvel, the kinematograph . . . This wonderful instrument threw upon the screen a bathing scene on the sands at Folkestone, boys leaving school, a dancing girl with limelight effects . . . the reproduction showed the marvellous ingenuity of the inventor. Everything moved as though in life; in fact, it was life reproduced.’’
A mere 123 years later, there is technology which gives us everything from holograms to Netflicks, big screens in great halls and screens on the face of a watch. Life is not only reproduced, but since Georges Melies sent man to the moon in 1902, it is now impossible to tell when what we are looking at is real, or a complete fiction. Mr Edison was a citizen of the United States. His inventions sold. The Lumiere brothers in the 1890s France were also on the game, but Edison captured the world market and the world’s attention in ways which were to spread US culture anywhere films could be screened. The Hollywood influence is so irresistible that despite the fact that the biggest film output now comes from Asia, especially India, Hollywood, the direct descendant and ultimate beneficiary of the Edison phenomenon, has become the ultimate disseminator of cultural values. Our sports commentator who pronounces ‘wrath’ as rath, rather than wroth, our writers who spell manoeuvre, ‘maneuver, our crowds who call films movies, and refer to the loo as a bathroom, have been taught such usage through the screen. Today there was an interesting example in the Waikato Times where Katherine Mansfield was referred to as ‘‘kickass’’ . . . now there’s an ironic moment!
Our culture exists in the words and images which we use to record, learn, discuss, and communicate it. We have recognis/zed (sic) speech communities in which language defines our membership and our values. When these are ambushed by the words and images of another culture, though another speech community, our world view and our self-understanding changes, and our values are revised.
We are not well treated to cope with the influence of Hollywood. Most of us are happy to adopt US culture, via Hollywood, without asking why, even becoming aggressively resistant when asked the ‘why’ question. Few of us recognise the influence as potentially damaging, and so can argue for the neutrality of violent video games from the world view of the providers of those games. When we receive the benison of the Hamilton Film Society, the rewards of the Alliance Francaise Film Festivals, however, and other cinematic offerings outside the deluge of Hollywood ‘‘culture’’, the world, quite simply, becomes a better place.
Preview:
What: Film Programme for 2019
Who: Hamilton Film Society
When: Mondays at 8pm March to December
Where: Lido Cinema for programmes, or
Contact: Richard Swainson 021 053 9358
Soloists: Every film director who brings you a film in this programme!
Previewer: Sam Edwards
The Hamilton Film Society has been screening film longer than most Hamilton businesses have been running. Seventy two years ago, alongside the commercial theatres in Hamilton, old goers like the Embassy, built in 1915. The society would show ‘‘good, worthwhile and challenging films to as wide a range of people as possible’’, and are still doing so. It is a real demonstration of the pulling power of good quality cinema, because the programme is made up of titles as recent as a year or so before, some from previous film festivals run by the NZ Federation of Film Societies, and some from the silent era. They are taken from nearly every film producing country in the world, and are gaspingly good, although I do remember that Bresson’s memorable Diary of a Country
Priest seemed to run even a slow moving bicycle in slow motion . . . This year’s pacey programme pegs films like Billy Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevarde on the line next to Alan Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Nocturama –a French thriller from 1924, andAsh
is Purest White, a 2018 title from China – a total of 32 films ending with Richard Lester’s Beetles classic, A Hard Day’s Night and a Film Society party. There is a great year ahead, and good conversation to be had.
Preview
What: Alliance Francaise Film Festival 2019
Who: Alliance Francaise When: March 14-27 2019
Where: Lido Cinema – also for programmes and information Previewer: Sam Edwards This is one remarkable aberration! Here we are, surrounded by film titles like
Alita: Battle Angel, Aquaman , and Happy Death Day, all in American English, and suddenly we are offered a whole bunch of first-class films from Europe, or more specifically, France. These films are so good one doesn’t really need the subtitles, even if the screen language is French, and they are a wonderful antidote to the formulaic plots and cardboard characters used to carry the narratives in what we call mainstream movies. They are likely to be some special events during the season. Opening and closing nights are always memorable, but there could be a wine tasting connection and/or a women’s night screening during the 10 days of the festival. The programmes should be out soon, but this is a cinematic refreshment like no other.
Events next week
What is there? Why, The Festival, of course. From Opera and Twilight, through He Piko He Taniwha, and Pitching a Tent before the fireworks from the WTSO with the now traditional Sunset Symphony.