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This piece contains assorted spoilers.

I

Following the opening titles of Pascal Laugier’s staggeringly bleak 2008 horror film Martyrs, we cut to a wide shot of a large, modern house, somewhere out in the countryside judging by the sounds of wind and birds. The calm is interrupted by a scream, revealed in the next shot to be coming from a teenage girl (Juliette Gosselin) racing down a flight of stairs in her pyjamas, hair tangled as if she’d just leapt out of bed. Without pausing, she glances over her shoulder at her unseen pursuer, whose perspective we share, the camera barrelling after her from behind. As she reaches the bottom of the stairs, she slips and falls on the polished wooden floor, crawling a few steps on her hands and knees, then scrambling to her feet and pressing onward down a corridor. But it’s too late: her pursuer catches up, tackles her and brings her to the ground. For a few seconds she struggles, till her gasps of apparent terror give way to squeals of laughter. The pair are brother and sister, and she’s stolen a letter from his girlfriend he’s desperate to retrieve. Dad intervenes, she yields up the prize, but as she sits against the wall catching her breath she’s grinning all over her flushed face, and can’t resist taunting her brother till he leaps on her once again.

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This piece contains spoilers for The Phoenician Scheme.

It's told from a child's point of view, which is forgivable, but maddening.

—Knave (Willem Dafoe), the afterlife defence attorney of Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro) in The Phoenician Scheme

I suppose I’m moved by this absurd performance.

—Marty (Jeffrey Wright), one of Korda’s investors

Watching a Wes Anderson film can feel like being given a present in a beautifully wrapped box, which upon opening proves to contain a smaller box, even more beautifully wrapped in even more elaborately patterned paper, which contains a third box, and so on, until you reach the last and smallest box, which contains nothing at all. But the whole package has been assembled with such care, it seems ungrateful to be disappointed.

Or it would, if the tang of disappointment wasn’t an essential part of the Wes experience, one of the intended flavours, like the poisoned salts that season the last chapter of The French Dispatch (as a whole, Anderson’s fullest statement of aesthetic principles to date). The trick is to double down on both innocence and experience, the child’s dream of what adulthood could be and the adult’s nostalgia for the time when the dream compelled belief. Anderson’s heroes are geniuses, millionaires, talking animals, master criminals, spies, dandies, world travellers, extravagant narcissists almost to a man (the women are mainly bystanders, loyal or sceptical or both). But beyond a certain age they’re nearly all a little jaded, stuck in the gaudy prisons they designed and built for themselves so long ago.

Some version of this sadness clings even to Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro), the shifty industrialist and arms dealer at the centre of Anderson’s cartoonish caper The Phoenician Scheme, though neither melancholy nor introspection is exactly his bag. “If something gets in your way, flatten it” is his idea of a healthy life motto, a sentiment shared by his creator at least visually speaking: as usual in Anderson’s films, everything and everyone appears to be steamrolled into place, while camera movement is restricted to traversing the lines of an invisible grid.

This style advertises its own rigidity, yet is more flexible than is sometimes supposed: the systematic patterning is partly a means of keeping us alert to departures from the norm, like the sudden ominous close-up of Korda rasping “I don’t need my human rights,” turning his head towards the camera as if addressing us directly. The system in itself evokes both military surveillance and the drawings of children, perhaps implying an equivalence between the two: Korda, the most ruthless of Anderson’s flim-flam men, remains as much of a Peter Pan as any of his predecessors. More explicitly than in any previous Anderson film, the insistent frontality is also linked to religious art, Orthodox iconography in particular: Korda has black-and-white hallucinations of a medieval Heaven, where he kneels before the throne of a white-bearded Supreme Being, inevitably portrayed by Bill Murray.

Back in the realm of mortals, it’s Korda himself who plays God, especially when cruising the skies in his well-appointed private plane, a remarkably advanced model for 1950. Really the whole “cosmopolitan” ambience belongs to a later date, somewhere in the 1960s or even the early ‘70s, when Korda might imaginably cross paths with the version of Orson Welles who appears as himself in F For Fake, performing magic tricks for children at railway stations and spinning tales about art forgery on Ibiza. But if Anderson is unfussed about anachronisms, that doesn’t mean he isn’t well-informed about the history he plays fast and loose with: aside from being a recognisable archetype, Korda amalgamates a handful of specific real-life models, including Aristotle Onassis, the arms dealer Basil Zaharoff and the oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, sometimes known as “Mr Five Percent” (on no level is the film about Donald Trump, whatever some US commentators might think).

Korda also shares more than a little with Welles’ earlier avatar Charles Foster Kane, including his lonely rich-boy childhood and his immense mansion where he stockpiles priceless works of art (“Never buy good paintings,” he advises a protegé, “buy masterpieces”). This affinity is underlined at the outset when Korda supposedly perishes in a plane crash, cueing a précis of his career much like the pastiche newsreel in Kane—except that Korda unlike Kane is still alive, striding bloodied through the cornfield where the wreckage is strewn to interrupt his obituarist mid-sentence. Kane is a mere man, however magnified by the distorting lens of wealth; Korda is closer to an authentic figure of legend, whose fabulous fortune is merely one of his necessary attributes, though equally a buffoon whose survival and ongoing success can only be attributed to the grace of God.

Were we to consider any of this rationally, we might suppose that the whole movie is taking place in Korda’s head, not just the religious visions—which themselves may be prompted by brain injuries sustained during the crash, in turn brought about by the latest in a long series of failed assassination attempts (his secretary, not so lucky, is blown cleanly in half). At any rate, this latest brush with death is enough to prompt him to anoint a successor; unlike Kane he has many possible heirs, but he opts to bypass his numerous sons in favour of his sole daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who at twenty has recently entered a convent, but who is cajoled into joining him as he goes about securing capital for a large-scale engineering project in the imaginary Middle Eastern nation of Modern Independent Greater Phoenicia, largely desert as far as we see.

The obscurity of the scheme is a joke in itself: the implication is that a barren land will be made fertile, but exactly how this will work is never spelled out, nor is it clear how far the envisaged benefits will flow to the workers whose slave labour is needed to realise the design. Still, Korda views it not just as a monument to his business acumen but as his last best chance at personal redemption, spending most of the movie begging the indulgence of his business partners, played by the usual Wes line-up of celebrity guests. Finally, he chooses to sacrifice his own financial interests rather than walk away, by which point we appear to be dealing with something more metaphysical than a mere engineering project, especially as the climax pits him against his wicked brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose wrath is repeatedly described as “biblical”.

By any measure, redemption is something Korda stands in need of: unlike most Anderson scoundrels he isn’t likeable, though we’re encouraged to see him as the kind of magnificent bastard you have to hand it to. He may not have murdered Liesl’s mother, as Liesl at first suspects; for that matter he claims he’s never murdered anyone, even indirectly. Still, he admits to employing rough types for rough purposes, and brags about having engineered a famine; we’re never shown any of his victims up close, but we can picture them if we wish, as we can picture the offscreen children treated with doctored penicillin in The Third Man, which co-starred Welles as the charmingly wicked Harry Lime (and was produced by the Hungarian-born Alexander Korda, a major player in the international film industry from the 1910s to the 1950s; after a while you start to get a feel for how Anderson’s mind works).

For all its apparent linearity, the film’s own design calls for an artfully jarring mix of registers and approaches, from action-movie carnage to an almost 19th-century sentimentality (Little Lord Fauntleroy is cited, lest anyone suppose Anderson lacks self-awareness about how he’s viewed). The game of spot-the-allusion can be played endlessly, with the allusions themselves a means of uniting disparate worlds. Liesl fuses two characters from The Sound Of Music; a revolutionary along Che Guevara lines is named Sergio (Richard Ayoade), probably because Sergio Leone directed A Fistful of Dynamite; Mathieu Amalric plays a gangster and nightclub owner called Marseille Bob, a sobriquet that summons a whole history of French cinema from Marcel Pagnol to Jean-Pierre Melville, though his fez and white suit seem to be borrowed from Sidney Greenstreet’s Signor Ferrari, the corrupt proprietor of the Blue Parrot Cafe in Casablanca…

Often the whimsy shades into outright spoofing: Korda can sound like a Bond villain, or Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, but the scripted lines are even closer to Dr Evil from Austin Powers, with the same outlandish sang froid. Here’s Korda, addressing his daughter: “I was present at your birth. The midwife was a leathery old hag. I cut the umbilical cord with a pair of garden shears of my own design.” And here’s Dr Evil, recounting his own origins in an encounter group session he attends with his similarly estranged son Scott: “My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.” Who can’t relate?

Perhaps we’re meant to relate instead to Liesl, but for all Threapleton’s efforts to ground her there isn’t much to the character beyond her mordant tone and sustained glare at her progenitor, another of the film’s straight lines. The real standout in the cast is Michael Cera as Professor Bjorn, a timid Norwegian entomologist hired as a personal tutor by Korda, who has a dilettante’s fondness for intellectuals (somewhat after the fashion of Jeffrey Epstein, a more likely 21st-century reference point than Trump). Cera’s performance is a textbook illustration of what’s meant by “scene-stealing,” employing a lilting accent that gives the impression each syllable is being handled separately with tweezers: hearing him pronounce a word like “trol-ley” is a pleasure in itself. For a while, it’s possible to view the film as a three-way debate between Korda’s ruthless pragmatism, Liesl’s equally dogmatic faith, and Bjorn’s gentle scientific humanism—the latter entailing compassion for all creatures, from a would-be assassin slain in a skirmish to the live praying mantis he shows off at dinner.

Bjorn is so self-effacing he resembles a beetle himself, and too smitten with Liesl to leave his post, but he and Korda are close enough to being polar opposites we might anticipate their differences will eventually come to a head. What I didn’t anticipate was the third-act twist that saw him unmasked as the more competent but far less endearing Agent Carlson, a swashbuckling US academic turned spy, who was hired to keep tabs on Korda but chivalrously rescues him from quicksand before becoming the protector of father and daughter alike. Besides replacing the film’s funniest character with an even sillier but much blander self-insert, the revelation effectively erases whatever moral argument has been sketched up to this point—clearing the way for the introduction of Nubar, who’s enough of a pantomime villain to make Korda look decent after all.

Losing Bjorn is the biggest letdown, but another follows at the climax, when it’s briefly possible to suppose Anderson has found the courage to wipe out his entire cast (something I also hoped to see in The French Dispatch, which like The Phoenician Scheme does boast a significant body count). Alas, after a final visit to the film’s spectral Heaven, an epilogue finds Korda alive and well despite his newly modest means, contentedly running a Parisian bistro and spending the evenings playing cards with his daughter, who has meanwhile accepted Carlson’s proposal of marriage.

Even in an actual children’s film, this would be a little too neat and cosy. Still, taking it at face value is not obligatory: the scowling, bushy-browed Nubar is framed as Korda’s mirror image, hinting that on some level they’re one and the same (Korda much earlier refers to Nubar as “my father’s son”). Either the epilogue or the film in its entirety could be construed as Korda’s dying vision, a consolatory fantasy where he gets to show he’s really a nice guy. Or what we see at the end could be a genuine afterlife, where repentant sinners are granted a second chance. None of these options may seem terribly plausible, but this is after all a film where implausibility is much of the point, and where the quicksand of irony threatens to engulf anyone in search of fixed meaning. As for the scheme itself, we’re assured that in Korda’s absence it “continues to deepen and widen”—though as Liesl’s final voiceover admits, there’s no telling if this is a good thing where civilisation is concerned.

“TO THE LEGIT OUTSIDERS/WHEREVER YOU REALLY ARE,” reads the dedication in both English and Traditional Chinese at the start of Terry Chiu’s almost three-hour Open Doom Crescendo, easily the most singular, exhilarating and taxing of the varied provocations I sampled at last week’s inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival. “Underground” is a word open to interpretation, perhaps more so than ever before. But few would dispute that it applies to this microbudget blend of sci-fi action movie and philosophical satire, set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the survivors of a drawn-out war continue to do battle while either seeking or evading the enigmatic Embodiment of Angst.

More contentiously, the film has also been described as “outsider art”: as the quote above indicates, Chiu retains an ambivalence about the label, which he’s taken on board more out of necessity than choice. “I don’t know anyone else who uses the term ‘outsider art’ for film,” he has said, meaning his fellow filmmakers, “because that means they’re like already banishing themselves into a spot where a lot of people won’t see what you do.”

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This piece contains spoilers for the first and second seasons of The Rehearsal.

I wanted to show that here is a man who has all the signs of paranoia and megalomania, exhibitionism and social maladjustment and who can still be fairly well controlled and healthy, and indeed, of apparently greater productivity by acting them out than if he would have tried to constrain and resolve his symptoms… The only way to get rid of the "God syndrome" is to act it out.

—J.L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive? Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama, 1953

The first thing to keep in mind is that Nathan Fielder is an actor. As Hamlet said, that means his task is to hold the mirror up to nature, which is not to be confused with showing things as they are (a mirror, after all, gets everything back to front). What he’s called upon to do, both in his acting and his art generally, is both trickier and more achievable: to show us something we can recognise as we’ve never seen it in the past. Another word for this is “estrangement,” often associated with “baring the device”—a technique employed continuously in his semi-documentary comedy series The Rehearsal, which has just reached the end of its second season on HBO (Max here in Australia).

The second thing is that Fielder is an auteur, in a sense still not so common in US television (Fielder is Canadian but based in the US, and in all his later work is his own primary or sole director). Perhaps he even gains something from bypassing the big screen: in The Rehearsal, what’s made strange first and foremost is the act of filmmaking. Provided you have the budget, there’s nothing so unusual about building a set modelled on an actual bar in Brooklyn, as Fielder’s team do in The Rehearsal’s first season: it’s little different from what Hitchcock did when he had his production design team model the courtyard in Rear Window after an apartment block in Greenwich Village. Likewise, when Fielder recruits non-professional performers to enact vignettes inspired by their own lives, this resembles what many filmmakers have done in the name of “realism”—and when he has both professionals and non-professionals repeat the same scenes over and over with variations, he’s engaged in what is known as “directing”.

Even outside the realm of cinema, there’s nothing strictly new about the initial premise of The Rehearsal, which sees Fielder offering members of the public the chance to “rehearse” for potentially difficult moments in their lives, simulated with as much literal accuracy as is possible in advance. At face value, it’s one more variant on the notion of drama as therapy which has been around at least since the mid-1910s, when the Romanian-born psychiatrist J.L. Moreno started testing out his theories of “psychodrama” on groups of sex workers in Vienna (some of these same ideas would later be channelled into his experimental Theatre of Spontaneity, where the ensemble included the young Peter Lorre). Long-term aficionados of reality TV, or the plays of Pirandello, may likewise feel there’s relatively little here they haven’t seen before —but again, the estrangement effect springs from the way everything is presented as if no-one had thought of it till now.

That might suggest we’re dealing with a naive artist, which we are, although the naivety belongs not to the actual Nathan Fielder, the creator of the show, but to the character of the same name he plays on camera, who we’ll refer to for convenience as “Nathan”. These two are under no circumstances to be confused, even if Fielder sometimes tempts us to do so, and even if they look identical and say and do nearly all the same things (this is the third thing it’s necessary to keep in mind). The fundamental difference is that Nathan lacks a sense of humour, although in some respects he’s a nicer guy: he may be a control freak, even a megalomaniac, but he means well. He wants to help people, and is prepared to go to any lengths to do so, as we learned in his earlier TV vehicle Nathan For You, which revolved around him befriending hapless Los Angeles small business owners and coaxing them into going along with his out-of-the-box marketing ideas.

Nathan like Fielder is blessed with an imagination, but unlike Fielder he doesn’t quite realise it: consciously he’s a letter-of-the-law man, whose flights of fancy are typically born of efforts to exploit a legal loophole or fulfil an obligation at minimal cost. For instance, there was the time that Nathan persuaded the owner of an electronics store to sell TVs for a dollar, the catch being that customers first had to lay their hands on the TVs, which were stashed in a tiny room at the back of the store guarded by an alligator. More genuinely inventive was his plan to offer horse-riding lessons to obese people, attaching helium balloons to their arms to reduce the weight…

But to single out especially memorable brainwaves does no justice to the ruthless logic of Nathan For You, whereby the glaring flaw in any given scheme is addressed with another, still more evidently flawed scheme, and so ad infinitum, or rather until whoever Nathan is dealing with runs out of patience, by which point the allegedly real world in which they’re both operating has begun to resemble a kingdom of alarming nonsense after the fashion of Michel Gondry or Donald Barthelme (look up Barthelme’s brightly malignant “Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” and imagine Nathan as the one in charge). Judging by what behind-the-scenes reports have leaked out, some of Fielder’s dupes weren’t too thrilled when they caught on, while others saw the joke right away but went along for the sake of the free publicity, or for fun. Others perhaps never did quite fathom the distinction between Nathan, the eager-beaver do-gooder, and Fielder, the trickster behind the mask. Some critics have struggled with this too, which may be part of Fielder’s intention, although what he himself wants from any of this is anyone’s guess. To amuse us, it would seem. But perhaps to amuse himself first of all.

In recent years Fielder’s full head of hair has turned dust-grey, allowing him to present an appearance which from some angles could almost be called “distinguished”. But little has changed about his soft childish face with its expression of respectful concern, as if he had just checked some figures on a clipboard and couldn’t get them to add up. He still looks like he could be somebody’s intern, which is what he banks on, since it ensures that no-one will suspect a hidden agenda, or give him much thought of any variety till it’s too late. Teachers will recognise his laborious, politely insistent manner of speaking: the voice of the pupil who believes he deserves an A because he followed all the rules, even if he couldn’t always see why they were needed.

This brilliant characterisation was given unprecedented scope in the first season of The Rehearsal, more ambitious but also more genuinely freeform than anything that had preceded it in Fielder’s career. Initially we were led to believe the show would follow the Nathan For You formula, with Nathan as a roving guardian angel helping out someone new each week—but most of the season wound up focusing on a woman named Angela, a born-again Christian with a range of additional paranoid beliefs, unsure if she wanted to become a mother and for some reason willing to let Nathan help her make up her mind (to describe her as susceptible to manipulation would not be wrong, though she pushed back far more than most of Nathan’s scene partners do). By way of assistance, Nathan set her up in a house in rural Oregon with several young boys taking turns to portray her imaginary son Adam, a workaround to circumvent child labour laws. When her boyfriend understandably ran out of patience, Nathan himself took on the role of baby daddy, by which point it was clear that the journey we were taking wasn’t the one we thought we’d embarked upon, any more than it likely was for Angela herself, setting aside the question of how much of any of this was real (or “real”).

Even with Nathan insisting on camera that his religious faith was no more than nominal, it’s not hard to understand why at least one critic understood the show’s spiralling narrative as springing from the tenets of Jewish mysticism: “Fielder as director as God, manifesting the contractions of the boundless.” (“The genesis of the Godhead was closely related to the genesis of psychodrama,” Moreno wrote in 1953.) Strange to say, none of this was really so far from the mainstream, recalling not just the fantasies about simulated worlds that have proliferated on US TV in recent decades, but a family sitcom of the most traditional sort, with Nathan as the wacky patriarch forcing his obsessions on those nearest to hand. On other levels again, the show could be understood as a satire of the artistic impulse as necessarily rooted in obsessional neurosis—and equally as a defence of this impulse, amoral as its promptings might appear.

“Life’s better with surprises,” was the closest the season came to a thesis statement that summarised all this, along with the line that followed soon after, “Let’s go play.” Both were delivered at the literal last minute by Nathan as part of a final “rehearsal” involving him and a tearful young boy, one of the show’s many Adams (making a child cry as part of your art project might be the very definition of a dick move, but with his zest for moral discomfort Fielder was willing to go there not just once but repeatedly, on this occasion with the get-out clause that both he and the boy had explicitly assumed identities not their own). On one level this was Nathan belatedly acknowledging the limits of control, a familiar moral lesson for the audience to take away with them; on another, it was Fielder reminding us how dull the world might be if it weren’t for him and his fellow tricksters.

The first Rehearsal was among the masterpieces of the age, enough all on its own to establish Fielder as one of the great screen clowns, comparable as a poker-faced daredevil only to Buster Keaton (what Keaton was to physics and engineering, Fielder is to psychology and the other soft sciences). The second season isn’t the same kind of masterpiece, and never could have been: originally Fielder and his team were free to reinvent the show as they went along, whereas a baseline set of expectations are now firmly in place. Perhaps as a consequence, all pretence of spontaneity has been abandoned: everything in this new season is designed to prepare us for the jaw-dropping finale, explicitly said to have been in the works for years.

The first hint of what we might be in for is the cold open, a credibly-acted exchange between two grimly stoic pilots in a plane about to crash (their dialogue is taken from an actual black-box recording, or so we’ll gather later on). On impact both are killed, or at least knocked unconscious—and then the camera swivels to show us Nathan, a half-silhouetted figure visible at a distance through the plane’s windshield, a wall of flame behind him, his expression pensive rather than alarmed. A wide shot reveals the layout of the studio where the crash sequence was filmed, with Nathan standing in front of a high-definition LED screen, a technique we’ll see used often in the episodes to come. As a forecast of the future it’s as enigmatic as it is ominous, but the immediate meanings are clear: we’re reminded how easily The Rehearsal itself could crash and burn, and on a separate level asked to envisage its auteur as a demonic figure orchestrating catastrophe (Angela, back in the first season, did accuse him of being a tool of Satan).

No-one could have anticipated that the entire second season of The Rehearsal would be devoted to the hero’s efforts to improve aviation safety, but if Nathan thought like the rest of us he wouldn’t be Nathan, and the implications get richer with each episode, even as we’re kept guessing about what lesson the parable is meant to teach. Part of what we’re invited to marvel at is how much can be spun out of one small insight: that plane crashes occur because pilot and co-pilot fail to communicate effectively, due both to the entrenched hierarchy in place and the fact that pilots tend to be solitary, stubborn types. This is what Nathan loves, a problem to be solved: could these barriers be broken down using unorthodox methods, which happen to be the only methods he knows? Could it be that a man experienced in large-scale role-play exercises, who also studies air crashes as a hobby, might possess the exact skill-set needed to save lives?

The argument might be more persuasive if it wasn’t being broached in the context of a comedy show, and if the show in question hadn’t started out by darkly hinting about where these particular good intentions might lead. Still, compared to much of Fielder’s past trolling, what he’s putting forward is not an intrinsically foolish idea: his pitch is plausible enough to win the approval of his new sidekick John Goglia, a well-respected aviation specialist in his late seventies. Indeed, it’s too plausible to be particularly funny, not that plane crashes anyhow are exactly comedy gold, which is the ongoing meta-joke. What laughs exist tend to be the spasmodic kind, forced out of us when the awkwardness grows unbearable—although Fielder does what he can to balance conceptual rigour with whimsy, while Nathan concentrates on supplying the precise quotient of entertainment value needed to satisfy his unseen bosses at HBO.

It isn’t that either’s well of ingenuity has run dry, although some of the stunts are rather too much the kind of thing we’re used to seeing Nathan do. There’s On Wings Of Voice, the singing competition he organises with pilots as judges, to test their skill at delivering bad news. There’s the Gondry-style interlude where he undertakes to relive the formative life experiences of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the hero of the Hudson, from infancy onward, which naturally means lying in a giant crib and suckling from a papier-maché breast. More significantly, there’s the segment where he denounces Paramount Plus for censoring an episode of Nathan For You that allegedly made light of the Holocaust. Here for once Fielder appears to be expressing his own views with little room for irony—till Nathan’s attempt to rehearse for a potential confrontation with the studio sees him rebuked in turn by his scene partner for “pretending to want feedback”. Supposedly improvised, this thematically crucial exchange was almost certainly devised by Fielder and his writing team in advance, which only adds another turn of the screw.

Threaded through all this is the joke the show started from, that Fielder behaves exactly like a filmmaker while also being, in reality, a filmmaker. Again, we see him holding auditions and ordering the construction of realistic sets (everyone is wowed when they first enter the show’s replica of the interior of Houston Airport, though it’s nowhere near as elaborate as the JFK Airport set where Steven Spielberg shot most of The Terminal). To some unknowable degree, Fielder’s acting may be a similar double bluff, whereby he assumes the role of “Nathan Fielder” as an excuse to behave like himself. Still, it’s faintly jarring to be reminded that Nathan and Fielder have all the same achievements to their names—including co-creating, directing and starring in the 2023 satirical comedy-drama The Curse alongside the two-time Oscar-winner Emma Stone, although Nathan insists the experience taught him nothing about acting.

Some devices are more easily bared than others: it’s understandable that Fielder’s co-writers and other major creative collaborators on The Rehearsal are acknowledged only in the end credits, since incorporating them into the show’s narrative would necessarily complicate our image of Nathan as a solitary eccentric. Still, the new episodes do make a point of repeatedly acknowledging The Curse, leading me to theorise as I watched that its existence would be revealed as part of a typical Nathan scheme to make his mark in the realm of prestige TV, shifting his image away from comedy and thus encouraging members of Congress to take his ideas about aviation safety seriously. That precise revelation didn’t come about, but when you’re watching a show in which a famous comic portrays an outwardly identical famous comic in the process of making a show identical to the one you’re watching, it’s not surprising if your own imagination starts playing tricks.

Is the second season of The Rehearsal about Joe Biden? That was another stray thought which crossed my mind, around the time of the Sully segment: the white-haired, straight-backed Sully even looks a bit like Biden (and was a Biden supporter). It’s plausible that writing on the show would have been in progress in the middle of 2024, when Biden was resisting the suggestion he step aside as the Democratic nominee; had he listened to his co-pilot, perhaps the country wouldn’t be going down in flames while the show was in post-production (whatever is literally true in The Rehearsal or isn’t, there’s little doubt that much of its narrative is created in the edit room). Obviously, this is one possible allegorical interpretation among others: wherever you look, it’s not hard to find pilots who would gain from listening more closely to their subordinates, and co-pilots who are hesitant to speak up. But the cap does seem to fit.

The catch, already noted above, is that Fielder had the second season and its narrative destination in mind from much earlier: specifically, from January 2023, which is reportedly when he enrolled in flight school. Two years on, he emerged as a certified commercial pilot (the latter part of his training was conducted largely in flight simulators: apparently the norm, but yet another of the show’s neat ironies). Despite having far less experience in the air than any full-time professional, it would seem that by February 2025 he possessed the minimum qualification legally required to fly a rented Boeing 747 out of San Bernardino airport, circle round and land it back on the runway, with a co-pilot by his side and 150-odd actors on board. (Paying customers would have been out of the question, but as Nathan learns earlier in the season, actors are a breed apart; they can do things barred to most of us, such as canoodling with people they aren’t in a relationship with.) All this is assuming that Fielder pulled off the stunt for real rather than faking it in a studio, which after-the-fact reports appear to confirm; as for how he got away with it, presumably HBO can afford some excellent lawyers.

Once you factor in how far ahead of time Fielder had to commit himself, any topical resonance looks less likely to be intentional. Still, it’s not unreasonable to interpret the season as a commentary on leadership in general, with the final stunt forcing the question of how Fielder is handling his own position of power. Is he playing with people’s lives? No doubt about it, though that’s been his modus operandi from day one, and those who boarded his plane at least knew what they were getting into (thankfully, no children were involved). Physically rather than legally, how much of a risk was he running? That’s for the experts to decide; it was safe enough for the insurance companies, which is all any layperson can say with certainty. To get away with exposing everyone including himself to serious danger, Fielder would have to be an unusually persuasive lunatic; then again, persuasive lunatics do exist, and the entertainment industry is not the least likely place for them to be lurking. And it’s not as if he hasn’t spent his whole career teaching himself how to convince people to go along with dubious plans…

One other potentially relevant piece of data is that The Rehearsal is a comedy show, which tells us that the climax is meant to be not just confounding and suspenseful but also funny. The punchline comes in two or three parts, the first of them comparatively straightforward: in theory, the purpose of the stunt is to show how much safer air travel would be if pilots were better listeners (Nathan seems to be thinking of the flight as one more “rehearsal,” conducted in a setting so realistic the only difference from regular reality is that TV cameras are present). Yet the more we hear about what he has in mind, the more it sounds dangerous in its own right. That, clearly, is how Fielder wants us to feel—but supposing the whole plan truly was a reckless error of judgement on Fielder’s part, which based on the available information is not impossible, we have little basis for certainty that anyone on or off camera could be counted on to stand up and tell him so, or that he would have listened to them if they had.

The second punchline is more complicated, harking back to the preceding episode, where Nathan googles himself and learns that since the premiere of the first season of The Rehearsal he’s become especially popular in the autistic community (naturally, the sites he’s browsing are all authentic; it feels a bit like the second part of Don Quixote, where the characters have all read part one). Being Nathan, he’s quick to ponder how he can capitalise on this special form of fame, while indignantly rejecting any hint he himself might be other than neurotypical. In the finale, the subject crops up again: prior to his big day, Nathan has to fill out a form confirming he’s fit to fly. That leads to a visit to a psychiatrist, where he reluctantly agrees to a brain scan that will pick up numerous neurological conditions including autism (we learn in passing that pilots commonly avoid such tests, since the wrong diagnosis might rob them of their livelihood). Straight after, he learns it’s all been for nothing: he won’t get the results until after the flight is scheduled, so he’ll have to go ahead on the assumption he’s fine.

Nathan may be thrown off course by this development, but once again it’s more than likely Fielder and his writers had the whole thing mapped out in advance, to the point where this particular narrative thread feels more fictional than not, even if what we’re seeing is footage of a genuine medical consultation. The giveaway is the blatant artifice of the larger design, again revealing Nathan as an unreliable narrator whose stated intentions are belied by his acts. While the flight is still in progress, he participates in yet another role-play exercise, taking on the persona of one Captain Allears, who loves getting feedback from his co-pilot. But after all, this was only a character he was playing: given a hero’s welcome back on the ground, he chooses to dismiss any potential diagnosis as irrelevant to whoever he is or wants to be.

The point here is not whether we as viewers imagine the Nathan character to be autistic (as for the real Fielder’s neurological makeup, the show offers no insight into this whatever). Nor are we obliged to see Nathan’s choice to set aside the results of the scan as misguided in itself. But the presentation of this as a personal victory carries a very definite irony in the context of the preceding six episodes, which have centred on the character’s quest to encourage people to listen to what others are telling them, most especially when the news might not be welcome. The kicker comes in the concluding account of his subsequent aviation adventures, where the satirical intent finally becomes unambiguous, or almost. “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size,” he muses, sounding like no-one so much as the current US troll-in-chief. Factoring in that Nathan’s flight apparently took place in February 2025, the echo of the voice coming from inside the White House seems too specific not to be intended—though if Fielder is the man I imagine he is, we’ll never know.

It was not as much what I told them, the tale itself, it was the act, the atmosphere of mystery, the paradox, the becoming real of the unreal. I was in the center, often I moved up from the foot of the tree and sat higher on a branch: the children formed a circle, a second behind the first, a third behind the second, many concentric circles, the sky was the limit.

—J.L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive?

This piece contains spoilers for Sinners.

“The reason why I love the medium is multiplex movies,” Ryan Coogler recently told The New Yorker, citing The Fugitive and The Dark Knight along with Do the Right Thing, in case anyone suspected the director of Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever of being an art filmmaker in disguise. Sinners, which he directed from his own original screenplay, isn’t much like most of what’s been in multiplexes lately—or ever, in some respects. Still, this horror-fantasy-gangster-musical-thinkpiece is a multiplex movie, showing he’s learned a good deal from the gruelling experience of working twice with Marvel, most crucially that the surefire way to reach a broad public is to supply a maximum of varied material, leaving it to us to assemble whichever version of the story we prefer.

On this choose-your-own-adventure principle, Sinners gives us two versions of Coogler’s regular star, Michael B. Jordan, showing off his newfound swaggering authority twice over as the twin brothers Elijah and Elias Moore, otherwise known as Smoke and Stack, who learned to fight in the trenches of the First World War, made a pile in Chicago working for Al Capone, and have now returned home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta to open up a juke joint (the year is 1932). Famed and feared at least on the Black side of this segregated community, they operate as a seemingly indissoluble unit, close enough to light each others’ cigarettes. Still, there’s no difficulty in telling them apart, and not only by their colour-coded headgear (Stack wears a red derby, Smoke a sky-blue flat cap). Stack is the cocky, sweet-talking frontman, who also seems to be the real music enthusiast of the pair; Smoke is more cautious, more privately vulnerable, and more likely to be the one pulling the trigger.

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The following is adapted and expanded from notes for an introduction to a screening of Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), presented on May 11, 2025 by Cinema Reborn. It contains spoilers.

How do you show bad taste on screen? More specifically, how do you show it in a way every viewer can recognise, even those most lacking in taste themselves? Going by the original silent version of Stella Dallas, directed by Henry King in 1925, the answer hasn’t changed in a century: through excess. Stella (Belle Bennett), the lower-class heroine who marries into wealth, is too much in every way for her new environment: too boisterous, too up for a good time, too visibly a creature of flesh and blood (Bennett, a onetime circus performer, reportedly gained weight for the role).

Stella’s fatal lack of class shows above all in her dress sense, a trait carried over directly from Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1923 novel, where a whole section of the plot turns on an especially ill-advised black-and-white striped frock that draws all eyes to her at a fancy resort. “She resembled a zebra somewhat,” Prouty’s narrator tells us, as malicious as the tittering observers within the fiction. As imaginatively brought to life by King’s costume designer Sophie Wachner, who went on to the Martian outfits for the 1930 science-fiction musical Just Imagine, the look is no more outlandish than a good deal of haute couture since. Still, we couldn’t be further from the clean lines of Helen Morrison (Alice Joyce), Stella’s conveniently widowed romantic rival, who retains her flapper physique even as the mother of three increasingly strapping sons.

As in the novel, dress serves as a metonym not just for social class but for sexual propriety, or rather for the impropriety Stella is suspected of, not without reason, after her husband Stephen (Ronald Colman) departs for New York a few years into their marriage, while she stays behind in Massachusetts with their young daughter Laurel (played from the age of around ten by Hollywood newcomer Lois Moran, who holds her own with Bennett in what is a mother-daughter love story above all). With the couple permanently separated though not divorced, Stephen allows himself the consolation of a rekindled platonic friendship with his childhood sweetheart Helen, while Stella starts stepping out with Ed Munn, a local good-time Charlie played by the character actor Jean Hersholt, furnished with his own wardrobe of clashing patterns and leering no less coarsely than he did a year earlier in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. How far Stella is deliberately rebelling against convention is never wholly clear, but the shakier her claims to respectability become, the more she doubles down on ruffled skirts, lace trimmings and pancake makeup, piling her bird’s-nest curls ever higher when not hiding them under what Prouty calls “futurist hats”.

Still, Stella does eventually give Ed the boot, after he wrecks her last chance to reconcile with Stephen—and when she seeks him out years later, it’s purely to use him as a tool in her plot to guarantee the best possible future for Laurel, whose growing taste for life’s finer things may be a genetic inheritance from her father’s side. The point is that while class origins may be ineradicable they’re not the whole story: Stella and Ed are alike in some respects, but less alike than most observers come to believe, including even Laurel herself. Ed may be even worse than he appears, going by the horror the teenage Laurel shows at the very mention of his name; Stella’s vulgarity is what marks her as one of the elect, the outward and visible sign of a Christlike capacity for self-abnegation.

That in itself is rather a vulgar idea, and one of the strengths of King’s film—shared with King Vidor’s better-known 1937 remake, starring Barbara Stanwyck—is an awareness that its own place on the class hierarchy is open to question. Indeed, the melodramatic twists of the plot aren’t so far from the kind of trash favoured by Stella herself, who prefers racy bestsellers to highbrow mystification and is not condemned for doing so (as the scholar Jennifer Parchesky notes, traditional literary values held more sway in Prouty’s staunchly middlebrow novel, which the New York Times compared to Willa Cather). Both films invite judgement on Stella while retaining a reluctant complicity with her, which is part of what makes her such a usefully flexible protagonist: we can look up to her unselfishness and down on her naivety, empathise with her shame or rejoice at her defiance of society’s standards, set ourselves apart or think of her as one of our own. Indeed, we can do all of these things at once or by turns, depending on which of Stella’s insecurities happen to mirror ours.

Another part of this flexibility is how readily Stella’s efforts to fit into high society can be mapped onto a range of anxieties about “passing”. Biographers have speculated that Samuel Goldwyn, the mogul who produced both the 1925 and 1937 films, had a special personal affinity with the material—connecting it to his Yiddish-speaking mother back in Europe, or to his own uneasy aspirations to “class”. In more recent decades, Stella’s excessive yet insufficient adherence to the codes of gender has drawn considerable attention from feminist film scholars (among others). While she may be the ultimate mother, she demonstrates this by refusing to be a mother at all—and while she’s all woman, she’s no lady, which means that in the eyes of her betters she’s never quite woman enough.

All this holds good in both the 1925 and 1937 films, which differ in tone and emphasis but follow the same basic plot with the same “sock scenes,” as Variety put it (the 1990 modernised remake Stella, starring Bette Midler, falls outside the scope of this discussion). Still, the 1937 film has attracted far more critical attention than its predecessor, which has long been hard to see in a version that does it justice, though a Blu-ray of the recent restoration surely can’t be too far off. Viewed side by side, the two films can be taken as a test case for auteurism, which is not to diminish King and Vidor’s respective collaborators behind the camera, such as the celebrated screenwriter Frances Marion, who scripted the 1925 film among hundreds of other silents (and then transitioned seamlessly into the sound era, crafting hit vehicles for Greta Garbo and Wallace Beery back to back).

Nor is it to deny that Bennett and Stanwyck were always destined to be very different Stellas. Stanwyck told the Saturday Evening Post she had been inspired by the “magnificent performance” of Bennett, who died of cancer in 1932—but if so, it would seem she was inspired mainly to avoid repeating the same effects. Given her first star part in the movies at the age of 34, Bennett set out to show what she was capable of, progressing through a series of transformations from alluring youth to blowsy middle age to the finale where she appears to be at death’s door (“I can make up for any part from fourteen to eighty,” she boasted). Central to her interpretation is a sad-clown quality reminiscent of Chaplin, whose Little Tramp travestied the traditional notion of the “gentleman” as Stella travesties the “lady”; something like direct homage is paid in a wide shot in which she toddles away from the camera, using a parasol much as the Tramp used his cane.

Though not without a degree of cunning, Bennett’s Stella is increasingly woozy, even a little stupid—qualities beyond the range of Stanwyck, who substitutes a tour-de-force of another kind, focusing less on outward transformation and giving us a heroine more stubborn and emotionally reckless than truly lacking in self-knowledge. These contrasting approaches are well-matched to their respective directors: Vidor’s moving camera shares the dynamism of his heroine, whereas King, a classicist even by the standards of 1925, renders the story as a series of illustrative tableaux, holding the characters at a literal as well as figurative distance (when Stella wins Stephen as a husband, she literally snares him in the vines that dangle over one side of her front porch, an inspiration taken from one of her favourite magazines).

Restraint of this order may have been more King’s default setting than a specifically intended counterpoint to Stella’s crassness—but for all the “invisibility” of his style, careful examination reveals that he was anything but a primitive, either by comparison to Vidor or in general. With the mania for system which so many “classical” directors possessed but never spoke of, he builds his film around the notion of vision: what matters is not just what we see, but whose eyes we’re looking through, whether or not their judgement is one we’re led to share. Thus the opening scene, showing the idyllic youthful courtship of Stephen and Helen, is revealed as the dying vision of Stephen’s embezzler father—who looks on from a window of his study before turning away to shoot himself, his emotion betrayed only by his trembling hands as he clutches the newspaper that proclaims his disgrace.

Numerous variations on the theme follow: Stephen’s first out-of-focus glimpse of Stella as he strolls past her family home, Stella’s mischievous younger brothers spying on the new couple and the camera spying on them in turn, the prying eyes of Laurel’s headmistress keeping watch on what Stella and Ed get up to when Stephen is out of town. Laurel spends a substantial portion of the film’s second half fretting about what might happen should her mother be seen by her new upper-crust friends, in particular the boy she likes, Richard Grosvenor (Douglas Fairbanks Jr). But what does Laurel see, when she looks at her beloved mother, and when does that start to shift? What does Stella see when she looks at herself, to the degree she ever manages to do so squarely?

The uncertainty of vision, and the unreliability of judgement, are central to this whole story (if Steven had “seen” Stella as she appears to him later on, he might not have married her at all). Stella herself is far more the person being looked at than the one who does the looking, until the famous denouement, where she guarantees the happy ending by shutting herself out of it. Having given up all claim to glory of her own, she’s now at one with the rest of us out there in the dark, peering over the railings into a well-lit room where Laurel is celebrating her marriage to Richard (Helen, the official mother of the bride, is the only one to guess the secret, compassionately or sadistically ordering that the curtains be left open so Stella can see). It’s the nadir of her descent, but also her triumph, and selfless mother-love isn’t quite all there is to the equation: Stella may be hiding in the shadows, but we know she’s orchestrated this spectacle every step of the way, gratifying both her own tastes and those of the public.

This is one of a handful of moments where Vidor more or less directly replicates King’s mise-en-scène, built on the ideally straightforward mechanism of shot-reverse-shot. But the nuances of performance differ, especially in the aftermath. A surprising range of emotions move across Stanwyck’s face as she walks off into the night, the camera tracking back to keep her in view; indeed, the character herself seems surprised by the pleasure rising within her, putting a finger to her chin as if light had dawned for the first time. This gives way to a musing look as if to say “Well, that’s that, then”—and from there her stride takes on pace and certainty, while her eyes glow with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Again, Bennett’s simple-hearted Stella is very different: her luridly haggard appearance makes Stanwyck look glamorous by comparison, and her last moments after she turns from the window are much briefer, since King’s camera doesn’t travel with her. Still, she’s no less pleased with herself, after her own fashion: she totters away with a look of dazed ecstasy, permitting herself one final glance back at what she’s wrought, and lifting up her hands as if imitating a gesture she saw at the movies long ago. Where Stanwyck’s Stella is clear-sighted at the last, Bennett’s is lost in her own dream: if this isn’t another dying vision like the one that opened the film, it might as well be. We can see, though, that she still has feathers in her hat.

The show’s not good, guys… It’s great, but it’s not good.

—John Mulaney, addressing the writers of Everybody’s Live

Irony to John Mulaney is like oxygen, but he’s capable of slipping into breathless fanboy mode, as he did recently with John Cale on his Netflix talk show Everybody’s Live, currently streamed weekly worldwide with “no delay” from a studio in West Hollywood. “Do you think there’s a thriving avant-garde now?” he asked, having demonstrated his credentials by name-dropping Cale’s 1960s collaborator La Monte Young. “Do you think there are acts now, comedians, musicians, who like to make the audience as uncomfortable as you might have?” Cale didn’t really have an answer, mumbling something about hip-hop without naming names. Truth be told, he seemed a bit out of his element, an old sailor washed up on a shore far from any region known to him in the past, even if his former captain Andy Warhol had his own fixation on semi-famous people doing little or nothing in real time.

Viewed from the other side, the exchange tells us a few significant things about Mulaney: he’s into the idea of the avant-garde, he’d like to think that comedians could be part of it, and he takes for granted that making people uncomfortable is a worthwhile artistic goal, for all the success he’s had seemingly doing the opposite. A stand-up comic first and foremost, he’s securely embedded in the mainstream, all the more so following his well-publicised stint in rehab; his newfound sobriety is gag fodder for Everybody’s Live, along with his new responsibilities as the father of a young family. Still, he remains the same well-camouflaged oddball he’s always been—with his deceptively wholesome look, his bent for morbid gags about incest or the Son of Sam, and his officious speech patterns suggesting a child’s impression of an adult laying down the law.

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This piece contains spoilers for A Grand Mockery.

Some time around the turn of the millennium, when I had almost but not quite given up on DIY filmmaking, I had a never-realised idea for one final short, to be titled Super 8: A Dying Medium. There would be no story, just a series of disjointed, ghostly images: telephone wires at dusk seen from the window of a moving car, interspersed with wide shots of a silhouetted figure digging a hole in a vacant block, in which some of the last ever rolls of Super 8 film would be buried.

Back then, the writing really did appear to be on the wall (Kodak stopped making sound Super 8 in 1997). But here we are in 2025, and here is A Grand Mockery, a compellingly peculiar Brisbane odyssey shot on Super 8 by the duo of Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon, which was awarded the top prize at Sydney’s SXSW film festival in late 2024 and at the time of writing is about to have its Melbourne premiere (along with Boogie Bobby, another recent microbudget feature from the prolific Briggs, this one shot digitally). And here’s Dixon himself, not a full-time actor but magnetic as the long-haired, weirdly-named artist-hero “Josie,” who inhabits a version of the present but could just as well be a 1990s slacker, or even a 1970s drop-out, and who is first seen shambling towards the camera in an out-of-focus long shot in a hillside cemetery, as if he himself had risen from the grave.

The idea of straddling the gap between eras is embedded in the form of A Grand Mockery, which retains its grainy, contrasty Super 8 look but was finished digitally and will screen that way, willed marginality nowadays being practical only to a point. This isn’t to say Super 8 as a stand-alone medium is as dead as I once assumed it was about to be, or even that it belongs intrinsically to the past. Still, aside from the increasing challenge of locating projectors or projectionists, the connotations of pastness and nostalgia attached to the medium remain hard to escape, as they already were in the 1990s, whether or not home movies were a significant part of your childhood (they weren’t in mine, though I knew in theory it was possible to screen them on a bedsheet draped over a clothesline in the backyard). Similarly inescapable is the association between Super 8 and amateurism—granting that some experimental filmmakers have exploited its possibilities with exquisite precision.

As for where A Grand Mockery sits on this latter spectrum, it would be foolhardy to think that Briggs, Dixon and their cinematographer Charlie Hillhouse are naïfs, or that the look they wound up with isn’t just what they were shooting for. Still, much of the film’s woozy quality stems from their flaunted indifference to polish even within the limits of the format, letting us understand the heavy shadows and blown-out highlights as indicative of the protagonist’s fragile state. An early shot shows Josie and a mate slumped with their beers before an offscreen TV in an otherwise darkened room; a blaring ad creates a strobing effect, shifting the image between three or four separate tonalities without visibly affecting the blankness of those looking on. On the other hand, the sound is clean and precise even where it seeks to disorient, setting the film apart from more truly amateurish local Super 8 epics of a previous era.

Within the fiction almost anything that smacks too much of the 2020s has been eliminated, in a manner too consistent not to be wilful (a stray reference to “Karens” is as contemporary as it gets). But the archetypes aren’t retro so much as timeless, starting with Josie’s all-Aussie blend of insolence and passivity, expressed through a croaky smoker’s voice, an intense gaze, and a broad-to-a-fault grin hinting at permanent distrust of himself and anyone else. Like his creators he’s something of an old soul, with his digital watch and his bent for writing handwritten letters in purple prose—though it’s his girlfriend Nelly, played by Brisbane rocker Kate “Babyshakes” Dillon, who seems to have assembled the household’s extensive vinyl collection. The letters are deposited at the cemetery to be retrieved by an unseen correspondent, supplying the pretext for Josie’s opening voiceover, delivered in a mordant tone that acknowledges his pretensions without apologising for them: “I marinate in the sunshine, and the salubrious secretions of the departed.”

The words “marinate” and “secretions” prefigure the scatological imagery that proliferates in the later stages of A Grand Mockery, the kind of cultish object best-suited to a late-night audience primed for anything. But the phrasing also has the decorum employed throughout as a counterpoint to the lo-fi roughness and the gross-outs (another instance of this is the outstanding title, which would sit well alongside that of Cameron Worden’s still more abrasive The Idiot Faces Tomorrow on a double bill). Titlecards in the manner of silent cinema pop up semi-regularly, till the film forgets about this ploy in what appears to be a fit of stoned absent-mindedness: “AN ENTIRELY NEW AND MALEVOLENT ADDITION TO HIS FURNISHINGS,” runs one of these, accompanied by the very Brisbane hiss of cicadas. In bed with Nelly, Josie sentimentally reads to her from The Wind In The Willows, though she’s too tired to take much interest (their relationship, from everything we see, is more “wholesome” than outright passionate). Nelly’s musical tastes run to 19th-century salon music like Elgar’s mournful “Salut d’Amour,” which she plays on violin; their modest flat also has an upright piano and an open fireplace, where Josie insists on getting a roaring blaze going despite the heat.

Once upon a time, these two might have tried to squeak by on the dole, like the more clean-cut if also more openly rebellious and much hornier couple in Bill Mousoulis’ Lovesick, shot on 16-milimetre in early-2000s Melbourne. A generation on, that’s out of the question, so she teaches kindergarten while he works nights picking popcorn off the seats at the local arthouse (identifiable as part of the Palace chain). Whatever might be playing on a given night holds no great interest for him or for the filmmakers, although he has some off-colour stories about the things the punters get up to in the dark. We don’t see these for ourselves, but the groundwork has been laid for one or two comparably freaky sights later on; in the meantime, the setting is used to give us a sense of Josie’s distrust for the above-ground world, represented by his overly matey boss and by a patron determined to get a drink after the bar has closed. One of the film’s pull-quotes mentions Buñuel, but the balance of grotesquerie and realism is closer to the Polanski of Repulsion or The Tenant, leaving open the possibility that life truly is hell for anybody with the sensitivity to notice.

The balance is maintained for the film’s first half, where the emphasis is on portraiture more than narrative: what’s eating at Josie remains unclear, but we can sense his anxiety through his varied tics, including a habit of talking to himself and a near-constant need to steady his balance with a mug of cask wine or a cigarette. Dixon has acknowledged an autobiographical side to this, describing Josie as “a more extreme representation of my inner world” in an interview itself conducted via handwritten letters. While the film is no kind of documentary, in the early scenes especially the line between fiction and reality is frequently blurred (the supporting cast appears to be made up largely of non-professionals, with the painter Jim O’Leary playing a version of himself). By his own account, Dixon grew up on a farm in the Sunshine Coast region, a background that has informed his filmmaking since he started making shorts in the early 2010s—and while Josie may not share this exact biography, recognising his manner as that of a country kid in an urban context helps bring his outsider status into focus.

Part two is when the demons take over. For a period Josie drops out of the story, letting the agitated Nelly replace him in the foreground (all in all, it can’t be said that her character is hugely fleshed out). Subsequently he resurfaces in what I took at first to be a series of flashbacks dramatising the contents of a cache of documents passed on by his former penpal, in the manner of an epistolary novel (Briggs has mentioned Frankenstein and Dracula as influences). Characters and scenes recur from the first half of the film, but are cast in a more lurid psychosexual light, suggesting that Josie is reimagining his mundane life for the benefit of his correspondent. But this interpretation makes only limited sense of the range of elements included to ramp up the weirdness: the Cronenbergian growth Josie develops around his neck, the bursts of stuttering editing as if the film had jammed in an imagined projector, and the goofy American alter ego that takes over the narration, sounding like the Muppet version of Nicolas Cage.

Trying too hard to rationalise any of this would go against the spirit of a tale which isn’t told so much as spewed forth: the simple explanation is that Josie is in the throes of alcoholic delirium, and that nothing makes sense because it isn’t supposed to. Still, the irrationality remains carefully patterned, at best more in the manner of David Lynch than Ari Aster (there’s something especially Lynchian about how Josie’s favourite checkered mug from the early scenes reappears later on). The key may lie in the ramblings early on of one of Josie’s dubious male friends, as they nestle together after sharing a joint: “I could actually be sitting here by myself. You may not actually be here.” That ties in most directly with Josie’s visits to his nearly mute granddad, who really is only half there, forcing Josie to work doubly hard to keep up both ends of the conversation. But from there it’s only a short step to a wider range of existential riddles: did “Sal,” the recipient of Josie’s handwritten screeds, ever really exist? Are Josie and Nelly hallucinating each other?

The answers remain out of reach—which, as in most such cases, is for the best. Likewise unresolvable is the question of what Big Theme A Grand Mockery is centrally concerned with. The cultural cringe? Heterosexuality in crisis? A voyage through the afterlife? Perhaps it’s a little of all three, in which case we haven’t wandered as far as we might have supposed from the mainstream of Australian cinema since Wake in Fright. It’s the Super 8 of it all that keeps the movie in the margins, enacting a yearning to escape the confines of the present, while implying that a romance with the past might be equally a dead end. Lest we get carried away thinking of Josie as a ghost who walks, when he speaks late in the piece about wanting to “quit this paltry misery” he’s adamant he doesn’t mean suicide: he might mean getting out of the country, or away from masculinity as ordinarily conceived (the new lover he’s addressing is pointedly androgynous).

Still, his hero’s journey culminates in an apparently conclusive farewell, plunging headfirst into a remote stream and letting the waters close over him, his alter ego on the soundtrack having signed off with a gonzo final monologue involving masturbating trolls and golden showers from forest nymphs. The camera lingers till the ripples subside, as if reassuring us that no edition of him will resurface. Or is all this the fantasy of a passed-out drunk, destined to awaken next day in a pool of his own piss? Conservative in an honourable sense, A Grand Mockery prompts the suspicion that nothing is ever truly dead as long as it can be recycled, whether we take this as reassuring or the reverse.

A Grand Mockery will screen in Melbourne and Sydney in May 2025 as part of the Fantastic Film Festival Australia (see link for details). The Melbourne premiere of Boogie Bobby (with live score) will be at Miscellania on 7pm on Thursday May 1, presented by Dogmilk.

The problem with updating Snow White…well, there are a few problems, but the obvious one is that no matter how revisionist you think you’re being, you’re still liable to end up with a story about a character named “Snow White”. Not that this has anything to do with race, obviously. That is, not unless you’re Bob Clampett in 1943 working on the grotesque Merrie Melodies parody Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs, which for all its jaw-dropping stereotypes is not doing much more than kicking over a rock and allowing us a clear look at the assumptions underlying the 1937 Disney version, to say nothing of what came earlier.

It’s true that Disney and his team followed their source material in giving their heroine “hair as black as ebony,” rather than making her “fair” in the sense Shakespeare punned on relentlessly in the sonnets. But there’s no reason to think anyone involved in the film’s making saw any problem with identifying whiteness as a core component of beauty, any more than the Grimm brothers did in the early 19th century when the tale was first written down (in case you haven’t checked lately, in their version the heroine is identified as “the fairest in the land” at the age of seven, and the queen is a would-be cannibal who is tortured to death at the happy ending, but we digress).

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Hard to resist Dizzy Gillespie, even when he’s acting as a tool of the US State Department. In a 1956 newsreel excerpted in Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To a Coup d’État, he’s about to embark on a government-backed tour of the Middle East, aimed not just at spreading the gospel of jazz but at improving America’s image in the region more broadly. His friend Adam Clayton Powell Jr, the Harlem congressman and civil rights advocate who cooked up the scheme, riffs to a reporter that this tour might be seen as part of the “cool war”. Gillespie plays along, holding up his trumpet with the modest but assured grin of a man who knows what’s required of him: “The weapon that we will use is the cool one.”

This is a story that’s been told often enough, sometimes with the implication that Gillespie and other musicians enlisted for such tours were caught up in a propaganda struggle waged over their heads. But there’s no reason to think most of them were as naïve as all that, a point Grimonprez’s film usefully brings out. It was, rather, a matter of tradeoffs: “I sort’ve like the idea of representing America,” Gillespie observed in his 1978 autobiography, “but I wasn’t going over there to apologise for the racist policies of America.”

Soon after, the notion was floated of sending Louis Armstrong to Moscow (at the behest of the newsman Edward R. Murrow, he had already visited the British Gold Coast Colony, soon to become Ghana, where he received a rapturous welcome from record-breaking crowds). But with segregated schools a national issue in the US, Armstrong declared publicly this was off the table “unless they straighten that mess down south”. Eventually he did go, but not till 1970*, after he had undertaken similar excursions to numerous other countries, and had also recorded The Real Ambassadors, a 1962 jazz musical devised by his fellow “jazz ambassador” Dave Brubeck and Brubeck’s wife Iola, with lyrics that reflected ironically on these experiences. “Remember who you are and what you represent/Always be a credit to your government…”

A bit surprisingly, The Real Ambassadors doesn’t make it into Soundtrack To a Coup d’État. But then Grimonprez, a Belgian multimedia artist who has been constructing sophisticated audiovisual collages since the 1990s, has a lot on his plate with this political essay film, which on the level of overt subject-matter isn’t primarily concerned with jazz at all. To the degree he takes jazz as a model formally speaking, he might be thinking of the “free jazz” of Ornette Coleman, never officially a “jazz ambassador” but given a cameo here all the same: figuratively speaking, there are often three or four melody lines going at once, with images, voiceover, music and superimposed captions all leading us in different directions. Still, it doesn’t take long for the primary theme to emerge: the downfall of Patrice Lumumba, the left-wing nationalist leader who became the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, only to be deposed in September 1960 and murdered in January 1961, less than a year after the end of Belgian colonial rule.

This too is not an entirely unfamiliar story. In 2002, Belgium publicly acknowledged “moral responsibility” for Lumumba’s death—and to put it as minimally as possible, it’s evident the American and British governments of the day were no less glad to be rid of him. What put more heat on him than was usual for “non-aligned” leaders at this period of the Cold War was his country’s wealth of natural resources, which his long-term successor, the CIA-backed dictator Joseph Désiré-Mobutu, allowed Western powers relatively free access to, meaning that Congolese copper wound up being used for millions of bullets fired by US forces in Vietnam. All this is set out in detail in Grimonprez’s film, which incorporates narration from the Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane among others, and gives special attention to power struggles at the United Nations, with Dag Hammarskjöld, the vacillating Secretary-General, portrayed as squandering the goodwill invested in him by newly independent member countries in Africa and elsewhere.

If this sounds like demanding as well as depressing viewing, the assumption isn’t wholly misplaced. Keen to prove that his freestyle approach entails no loss of rigour, Grimonprez incorporates on-screen citations complete with page numbers for viewers who want to check his facts (some of which have duly been contested). What this omits, however, is that the film is also extraordinarily entertaining, as numerous reviewers, in the US especially, have pointed out with amazed relief. “I don’t think I’ve seen a better movie-movie all year,” wrote Film Comment’s J. Hoberman, himself a distinguished essayist with a gift for fusing cultural history and the capital-H kind. Other critics have invoked the tradition of the spy thriller, employing adjectives such as “gripping” and “propulsive”. At two and a half hours, the film zips along in a manner hard to envisage had it been backed by Netflix, who would have commissioned half-a-dozen hour-long episodes padded out with talking heads and exposition, whereas Grimonprez relies largely on archival footage and trusts his audience to connect many of the dots.

All the same, Soundtrack To a Coup d’État is as slick a package as you might expect from its Oscar nomination (Hoberman takes note of the “snazzy ‘60s fonts,” one of which disconcertingly resembles the variant of Futura Bold favoured by Wes Anderson). For all the virtuosity of the editing, the “propulsive” quality derives primarily from the raw materials Grimonprez himself has access to, including a library’s worth of 1950s and ‘60s jazz, omnipresent on the soundtrack if often peripheral to the narrative as such. The links between the music and what it accompanies are sometimes direct, sometimes a matter of intuition more than strict logic—and sometimes satirically playful, as in the use of Thelonious Monk’s version of “Just a Gigolo” to suggest the level of commitment that might realistically be expected from the UN.

Gags aside, Grimonprez has two main alibis for yoking jazz and Lumumba together. The first is Armstrong’s goodwill visit to the DRC in October 1960, when Lumumba was under house arrest in the capital, a couple of months prior to his death at the hands of authorities in the Republic of Katanga, a shortlived breakaway state backed by the largely Belgian-owned mining company Union Minière. Katanga too was part of Armstrong’s itinerary, giving a group of CIA operatives a pretext for their own visit, though the film leaves room for speculation on just how significantly this wound up shifting the course of events. The second alibi is a February 1961 protest at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council in New York, organised in the wake of Lumumba’s death by a group including the singer Abbey Lincoln and her husband, the celebrated bebop drummer Max Roach, who played often with Gillespie among other jazz greats.

“The closer you get to the truth, the more you have to include contradictions,” Grimonprez has said. Taking this as axiomatic, the film depicts jazz as a force mobilised for a variety of conflicting purposes, sometimes simultaneously, while leaving open the question of how far the same could be said of any comparably potent artform (such as modernist painting—which, as we’re reminded briefly, was also of interest to the CIA). At the metatextual level, comparable paradoxes are implicit in the film’s manner of playing politics and aesthetics off against each other, inviting us to appreciate the rhythm of Khrushchev banging his fist at the UN alongside Gillespie tapping his feet and letting his cheeks inflate as he blows his horn. Similarly, Roach’s drum rolls are used as a recurrent motif to evoke the threat of machine gun fire, but also to increase our anticipation as Grimonprez gets his own show on the road.

As its title indicates, Soundtrack To a Coup d’État is a film built around a poetic conceit—a somewhat risky one, in that what Lumumba’s fate had to do with jazz was directly and literally not very much. Like most documentarians and essay filmmakers, Grimonprez allows himself a certain license to mislead, albeit without technically lying, or at any rate betraying what he takes to be the spirit of the truth; the image of “skydiving phonographs” being air-dropped behind the Iron Curtain is so striking it’s understandable that he couldn’t resist it, even if on investigation it turns out to be part of an earlier, unrelated propaganda campaign. Likewise, we’re led to suppose that Lincoln’s sustained screaming in Roach’s jazz protest suite We Insist! was in some fashion a response to Lumumba’s murder; in fact the album was released the month before this occurred, though Roach was all the same proposing that the US civil rights movement and the African independence movements of the era should be seen as two battlegrounds in the same war.

Many of the associative leaps in Grimonprez’s film depend on this latter premise, spelled out most explicitly through extracts from the 1960s speeches of Malcolm X, urging African-Americans to understand themselves as Africans first and last. “Don’t think you don’t look Congolese. You look as much Congolese as a Congolese does.” Broadly speaking, the point surely wasn’t lost on Armstrong either, nor on the crowds in the DRC who came to hear him play. But while it may be on record that John Coltrane was a Malcolm X admirer, it’s a leap too far when Grimonprez uses an increasingly frenzied live version of “My Favourite Things” by Coltrane to accompany an account of mercenaries slaughtering their way across the DRC, then has the sound drop out as the music nears its climax, leaving us to interpret Coltrane’s silent look of concentration as an expression of moral horror. In the words of the music critic Philip Clark, this is “misleading at best”; at worst, you could call it kitsch.

There’s also something unhelpfully cursory in Grimonprez’s brief use of Tesla and iPhone commercials as reminders of the West’s ongoing exploitation of the Congo’s resources, not an angle he elsewhere finds much time to pursue. (How he got copyright permission for these snippets I don’t know, supposing he did.) But this too is in tune with the film’s ruling principle of free association; once again, the question we’re faced with is just how much should be expected of artists politically speaking, to whatever extent Grimonprez considers himself an artist in the same sense as Armstrong and Gillespie. That said, there’s limited scope to ponder the philosophical implications on first viewing, given the amount of attention called for just to process the many bewildering images that flash by. Where did the octopus come from? Who’s the guy in a luchador costume, apparently about to leap from a cement wall? What does a passion play in 1956 Belgium have to do with a water-skiing elephant?

Having looked into that last one, I can confirm that the literal answer is zero: the elephant is “Queenie,” who was captured in Thailand in the early ‘50s, acquired by a zoo in Vermont, and became a minor US celebrity performing alongside her owner’s teenage daughter, who was finally reunited with her old co-star at a theme park in Georgia decades on. Given that elephants are national symbols in the DRC, it might be that Grimonprez is asking us to equate the elephant with Lumumba, and to see them both as sacrificial victims; a later shot of an elephant being airlifted onto a boat might also be taken as a metaphor for the plundering of the Congo’s resources, though I’m reasonably sure it’s not the same elephant as the one on the water-skis.

Fretting too much about any of this might seem frivolous, given the weight of what Soundtrack To a Coup d’État as a whole asks us to take on board. But again, this is partly a question of how much earnestness we attribute to the film itself, and whether we take it as a polemic or a “movie-movie” first of all. What comes through most clearly either way is that any pre-packaged narrative should be viewed with suspicion—but also that music remains a gift worth having, even when there are strings attached.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Louis Armstrong visited the Soviet Union in 1965. He did, however, tour behind the Iron Curtain for the first time that year, visiting East Germany and Czechoslovakia among other countries.

No disrespect to Heat or The Doors, but when I heard of the untimely death of Val Kilmer, it was the comic roles I thought of. Gay Perry, obviously, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Nick Rivers, the blond Elvis in the great Top Secret! Dieter von Cunth in MacGruber (truthfully, I find that one a bit hard to take, but it shows how willing he remained to lend himself to silliness). And, certainly not least, Chris Knight, the eccentric but soulful physics prodigy in Martha Coolidge’s 1985 Real Genius—not the most celebrated college comedy of its era, but beloved by its fans, said to include many scientists and engineers.

Those were the days when the nerds got their revenge, when the geeks outpaced the freaks, when Hollywood went all in on nutty inventors stronger on bright ideas than fashion sense or social skills (and, say it with me, those were just the directors). By way of illustration, Real Genius was released within a week of both Weird Science and My Science Project, all of them rushed out to capitalise on the phenomenal success of Back To the Future, to say nothing of Ghostbusters the year before.

It hardly needs pointing out that many of these movies were just as chauvinistic as what preceded them, even if Hollywood was getting slightly more open to letting women call the shots (the breakout girl-geek comedy wouldn’t arrive till 1986: Whoopi Goldberg as a dreadlocked computer whiz in Penny Marshall’s altogether inexplicable Jumpin’ Jack Flash). Coolidge, certainly, was a surprising person to be catching this particular wave, a feminist who started out making documentaries in New York before drawing the attention of Francis Ford Coppola with her gruelling 1976 docudrama Not A Pretty Picture, based on her teenage experience of date rape. Having been fired during post-production on National Lampoon’s Joy Of Sex, she wasn’t thrilled by the Real Genius script she was originally sent: just another “gross, boy-oriented teen comedy,” as she told one interviewer many years on.

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(Photo credit: Darron Davies)

The following incorporates material included in different form in speeches given in honour of Corinne Cantrill on March 23 and March 30, 2025. See also the separate tribute to Corinne published in The Age on March 14.

1. C For Corinne

“She was one of the pushiest women I ever knew,” the filmmaker Paul Winkler told me over the phone a few weeks after Corinne Cantrill’s death in February 2025 at the age of 96. I’m reasonably sure he meant it as praise, but anyhow he wasn’t wrong. She pushed her way through life, forcing it to yield up whatever treasures it had to offer. To watch or rewatch her cinematic autobiography In This Life’s Body is to be astonished by the range of experiences, contexts, countries, passions and preoccupations she recalls herself as passing through, not merely over the course of her life as a filmmaker, but during her equally rich previous existence as Corinne Joseph, before the meeting with Arthur Cantrill at the age of around thirty that led to her becoming Corinne Cantrill, and then to the pair becoming “the Cantrills,” lifelong collaborators and leading lights of Australian experimental cinema.

Even before the narrator of In This Life’s Body leaves Australia for Europe at the end of her teens, we’ve heard about her childhood in working-class Sydney in the midst of the Depression, her Jewish Communist father and Theosophist mother and the protracted war between them, her years at Fort St Girls High School with its “lioness” headmistress Fanny Cohen, her terror at the outbreak of the Second World War, her innocent dates with servicemen on leave, her introduction to the bohemian Pakie’s Club and its cosmopolitan regulars, her well-paid work modelling in artists’ studios all over the city, her weekends in the bush, her botany research at Sydney University while the male students who generally monopolised the labs were off fighting, her agonising three-year entanglement with a practised seducer of young girls, her joyfully straightforward physical relationship with a boy her own age, her periods of self-intoxication when she felt she could walk on water, her bouts of depression and despair…

These adventures, along with others over the next decade, could be the basis for at least half-a-dozen novels, all of them page-turners (there are several points of resemblance to an Australian woman of genius from the previous generation, who I don’t remember ever hearing Corinne refer to: Christina Stead). Nor is there any reason to doubt that her account is substantially true as far as names, dates and facts are concerned, even setting aside the accompanying images, mostly still photographs, that appear to corroborate much of what we’re told.

If there’s a frustrating aspect to the film, it’s that despite the running time of two and a half hours many long stories have to be cut so short they’re barely stories at all. Instead, the voiceover is full of condensed but definite verdicts, as sweeping as they are memorably expressed. “My mother was full of genteel pretensions,” the narrator says, an annihilation in a phrase. Later, looking back on her travels: “I am glad to have lived in Paris before the cars ate it up.” Later still on her many lovers, some but not all of whose portraits are ranged across the screen: “How fine these men are!”

Even as she pronounces equally assured, occasionally severe judgements on her younger self, it’s clear that the speaker has lost little of her romantic sense of life, a grand adventure for those with the courage to embark on it. At the same time, it’s clear that with this courage goes the practical shrewdness of a survivor, aware from an early age of how much depends on the ability to size up situations and people accurately, and on grasping the rules of the world before deciding whether they’re to be followed or dismissed. “I’ve always had my own money,” she says, looking back on those teenage years, “known its value, and how to use it well.”

Yet for all their ring of certainty, enhanced by the speaker’s early elocution lessons, these judgements are open to question from the moment they’re put forward. Indeed, they’re constantly being rethought and questioned by the speaker herself—and after completing the film in 1984, Corinne immediately began once more to rethink and question what she had done.

The primary art of In This Life’s Body is neither in what’s said nor what’s shown, but in the gap between the two: the stunning assurance of the language, juxtaposed with the mute “found” images the narrator alternately interprets and refuses to interpret, scrutinising them not in the manner of a judge sorting through evidence but as an artist faced with objects that possess the same shifting, uncertain significance which objects do in general. Periodically the voiceover switches from first person to third person, allowing us to understand the “I” who is telling us her story as one more object of scrutiny, rather than as the creative force behind the whole, whether we identify that force as Corinne Mozelle Joseph or Corinne Cantrill or “the Cantrills”—the film is credited equally to Corinne and to Arthur, who helped with the editing—and whether or not we think a name really matters all that much.

2. Remembrances

“I’m not very well, Jake,” Corinne would say to me, when I came to see her and Arthur at home in Moonee Ponds, or later in Castlemaine, and unimaginatively went through the conventional ritual of asking how she was. As a rule this response would be followed by “I’m in terrible pain,” and by the observation either that she would be dead soon, or that she hoped to be. Remarks of this sort were a constant in my friendship with Corinne, across fifteen or twenty years; gradually I came to take them for granted, along with many of her other distinctive but regular habits (as well as those of Arthur and the third member of the household, their autistic son Ivor). In other words, I stopped hearing what she was saying, or at least stopped asking myself what it meant, beyond being a typical instance of her bluntness.

Before the recent commemorative screening of In This Life’s Body at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, it had been a number of years since I’d seen the film. Going in, I remembered the narrative as framed by Corinne’s account of a recent, sudden life-threatening illness, prompting her to take stock of her past. What I had forgotten is that she also speaks of chronic pain as a familiar companion for years prior to this illness, more or less acute but never fading entirely. Reflecting on this now, I don’t find it hard to grasp why the Corinne I knew referred to her pain so insistently—or why anxiety about mortality looms large not just in In This Life’s Body but in the Cantrills’ work more generally from the 1980s on.

Of course Corinne dramatised her pain and her anxiety, as she dramatised every aspect of herself: a thoroughly down-to-earth person in many ways, she also gloried in the theatricality excluded from the Cantrills’ cinema (or nominally excluded: the exceptions are frequent, and not restricted to their “expanded cinema” performances). But self-dramatising doesn’t always mean exaggerating: often it entails speaking the truth, or what feels like the truth, in a manner intended to set it at a distance. That’s what I think Corinne was largely doing when she turned her complaints about her health into rituals of her own, performed with her customary immense vigour and often an unmistakable relish in their shock value. What she wasn’t doing was telling me that I was responsible for her pain, or that I should somehow try to fix it (she was, in all my dealings with her, reliably direct rather than passive-aggressive). In a way she wasn’t talking to me at all; in another way she was warning me about what it would be like when I grew old in turn.

The Corinne I knew was always old, in my youthful eyes—youthful at least in a comparative sense. She would have been around seventy when I first observed her doing her hard-sell routine on behalf of Cantrills Filmnotes, the long-running magazine she and Arthur edited and published, at the screenings of the Melbourne Super-8 Film Group—which I joined at the end of my own teens just in time to buy a copy of the final issue, with its farewell editorial in Corinne’s best scorched-earth style (“To continue the magazine would be to bring distinction to Australian society, which would be inappropriate”).

By the time I really started getting to know her she was at least seventy-five—and she was over eighty when she and Arthur asked me to collaborate on curating a 2010 retrospective of their work at ACMI. That retrospective focused on sound, and was presented under the title “Grain Of the Voice,” taken from the essay by Roland Barthes—all of which was mainly Corinne’s inspiration, certainly not mine, though I did offer suggestions for which films to include and what order they should go in, which she and Arthur accepted or rejected (notably, she had no interest in showing the atypically human-centred In This Life’s Body, which at that point I hadn’t seen).

Perhaps I wouldn’t have been enlisted for the retrospective if I hadn’t started writing regularly for the Age newspaper a few years earlier. But while it’s true this is partly what made me a useful person for Corinne to know, it’s equally true that if Corinne liked you she would find a use for you one way or another, whatever your station in life. She probably also thought, not altogether wrongly, that I could use the fee ACMI were offering: one of the forms taken by her enormous kindness to me is that she never ceased to worry about my well-being, in particular the likelihood that the Age weren’t paying me enough, judging by how often my by-line as a freelancer appeared there or didn’t.

Regardless, once we got down to working on the retrospective I was treated by both Corinne and Arthur as an equal collaborator to a degree which amazed me then and amazes me more now—especially knowing that if I saw Corinne as old, she saw me as very young, barely grown-up at all. The year after the ACMI retrospective, she and Arthur were jointly given the Order of Australia, something I had long been aware was on the horizon; like other Cantrill associates, I had received a letter months earlier soliciting my views on the proposed honour and swearing me to secrecy. Perhaps a week or two after the ceremony, I unwisely told Corinne and Arthur about this, and about the letter I’d sent in response, affirming that they were indeed among the most important of all Australian filmmakers.

There weren’t many occasions when I managed to astonish Corinne, but that day I did. “They asked you?” she demanded, in a tone of sincere disbelief bordering on outrage. “A little 32-year-old like you?”

3. The Immaterial Truth

Even in the cult-like realm of experimental film aficionados, where obscurity is a currency in itself, the Cantrills’ work is more gossiped about than seen, especially internationally. There’s an obvious reason for this: to this day, none of it has officially been made available for home viewing, on the grounds that its significance is inseparable from the material nature of the film medium, a stance the Cantrills have stuck to more stubbornly than all but a few of their avant-garde peers. It’s true that over the last decade or so a handful of their films have been digitised with their consent, for purposes of scholarly research and even for cinema screenings on specific approved occasions. But we’ll be waiting a long time for the Blu-ray box set, if it ever eventuates.

While this might sound like self-defeating purism, the position is entirely reasonable on its own terms. When the work is properly projected from well-preserved prints, all becomes clear: red in a Cantrill film is really red, not an idea about the colour but the thing itself. My one real quibble is with the words “material” and “materiality”; while a film print is a material object, a print is not a film, any more than a musical score is music. The film is what we see on the screen: projected light, to borrow the title of one of the Cantrills’ film-performance works. And light, going by what I recall of my high school physics classes, is not matter.

I never had this conversation with Corinne; I’m not sure she would have been very interested. Perhaps more significantly where she’s concerned, terms like “materialist” or “anti-illusionist” applied to artworks suggest a striving for detachment and an emphasis on theory over feeling, qualities that couldn’t be further removed from Corinne either as an artist or as a person. To the degree she cared for theory at all, I suspect she never ceased to be a disciple of the poet Harry Hooton, a crucial influence on her in the later 1950s—and as the Cantrills record in their 1969 feature Harry Hooton, made after its subject’s death, Hooton defined art as “the communication of emotion to matter and nothing else”.

The notion of materialist filmmaking also often implies some form of demystification, an insistence on the literal that precludes metaphor. But this too was very far from Corinne’s approach—as is evident from many Cantrill films, but perhaps most directly from At Eltham, made in 1974 after the Cantrills first moved to Melbourne and the first film she considered to be more hers than Arthur’s (unlike with In This Life’s Body, the credit on screen goes to Corinne alone, though Arthur was still responsible for the sound). Literally it’s largely a documentary record of changing light in the Australian bush, but the opening and closing passages identify it as a elegy for the poet Charles Buckmaster—and its longer title, used in some Cantrill filmographies though not on screen, is At Eltham: A Metaphor On Death.

Indeed, across the Cantrills’ body of work the breaking waves of the ocean, the changes in light over the course of a day, the life cycles of plants and trees and the transmutation of reality through the medium of film itself are all offered as metaphors—or, more precisely, as specific instances of broader processes unfolding constantly on different scales and in different contexts, in both the “natural” realm and the human one, to the degree the two can meaningfully be separated. Even a straightforward early work like Bottles Into Dolls, one of half-a-dozen short documentaries about after-school activities made by Corinne and Arthur in the early 1960s for the Children’s Library and Craft Movement, can be taken as illustrating a much broader conception of what making art entails—and of how this relates to the task, never complete for any of us, of shaping a self to face the world.

The elemental forces in the natural world exemplify the movements of our many natures...that forming, breaking and receding wave of movement. Perhaps our problems arise when the flow of our natures is blocked, and hate, spite, fear, treachery become dominant, never receding, never allowing the waves of other natures to form and move within us.

—Corinne Cantrill, “Notes on In This Life’s Body,” Cantrills Filmnotes 45-46, October 1984

With love to Arthur and the Cantrill family.

“I hear you’re a hunter. That you travel the Lost Lands. I have need of such a man.” There’s something wonderfully reassuring about a speech like this, especially in the mouth of Milla Jovovich as a cryptically tattooed but beauteous witch—“beauteous” is definitely the right adjective—in a far-off future so grim it’s rendered solely in shades of charcoal or sepia, aside from stray details like the scarlet robe of a cruel priestess named Ash (Arly Jover), among the powermongers vying for control of the walled City Under the Mountain.

In The Lost Lands is based on a 1982 short story by the Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, which it follows in outline till the wilfully disjointed ending. But in spirit it’s more of the same from the British writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson, best-known for his long-running Resident Evil series of video game adaptations, starring Jovovich, his wife and muse, as a genetically modified warrior named Alice, who could be an ancestress of Grey Alys, the Jovovich character here.

As a genre filmmaker, Anderson is so straightforward he looks sophisticated, or the other way around: he’s not into campy winks, nor socially relevant themes. His main way of departing from convention is simply to mix up as many genres as he can: while the opening narration of In The Lost Lands denies that the film is a fairy tale, he has no qualms about putting a traditional witch at the centre of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi narrative that borrows especially heavily and openly from Mad Max: Fury Road.

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This article contains spoilers for Ma vie ma gueule.

You do (you don't) wanna be crazy
And you don't (you do) wanna be crazy
To clarify: yes/no on the crazy
We hope this helps!

—theme tune, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season three

Truthfully, I’ve never quite understood the idea of “identifying” with a movie character. Empathising, sure—but it’s rare that anyone in a movie reminds me of myself in any direct, literal way. Nor do I have any special desire for this to occur. Still, I’ll admit to occasional twinges of recognition during Sophie Fillières’ Ma vie ma gueule, an untranslatable French title I’m using in preference to the feeble English alternative This Life Of Mine (though not a literal rendering, My Life My Ass might be closer to the spiky spirit of this and other comedies by Fillières, who died at 58 from a longterm illness soon after the shoot wrapped in 2023).

Perhaps my reaction to this particular film isn’t hugely surprising, considering it’s about a middle-aged writer—like me, like Fillières, and for that matter like Agnès Jaoui, who stars as Barbie Bichette, a sometime poet with a day job composing ad slogans, two more or less grown children (Angelina Woreth and Edouard Sulpice), and an estranged husband offscreen. Whether she has anything like an ongoing literary career is uncertain, but the ambition remains: we first see her hunched over her computer in her Paris apartment, working on what might be a memoir or a novel.

She’s blocked, of course; writers in movies always are. But it’s the details that count, like the tortoiseshell glasses she’s wearing with the right arm missing (I used to own a similar pair of glasses I wore around the house, the arm still intact but so bent out of shape I couldn’t get it round my ear). Peering over her shoulder, we see that all she’s actually written is the title—which she proceeds to try out in every possible font, till a phone call grants her permission to set aside the whole enterprise for the time being. Soon after she’s headed out the door, using a headset to continue her phone conversation with her unseen friend, who for some opaque reason she feels compelled to lie to, claiming to be arriving home from the gym, whereas in fact she’s on her way to the gym, justifying her otherwise incongruous pink sneakers, although halfway down the stairs she heads back up to the apartment to check she hasn’t left the oven on, or something like that. C’est moi.

If Barbie sounds like your sort of person as well, be warned she’s not your average quirkily relatable neurotic, any more than the film is the cosy dramedy promised in the ads (in Australia at least). While we start by following her everyday ups and downs, the downs soon dominate, a trajectory culminating in what appears to be a total breakdown, both mental and physical. For much of the second half she’s confined to some kind of clinic—and even when she emerges, you could hardly say she’s cured in any conventional sense.

Thankfully, I’ve never experienced anything like this myself. Nor have I any reason to think Fillières did either; in the film’s production notes, she explicitly warns against assuming the film is directly autobiographical. Still, I have no doubt that as Barbie’s creator she felt at least as closely connected to the character as I did as a viewer; in light of the rest of her body of work, this would be a fair bet even without the specific knowledge that she filmed scenes in her own apartment, lent Jaoui her jewellery to wear on camera, and arranged a cameo from her actual shrink.

All of Fillières’ films are comedies, but all of them have the same fraught quality, even if Ma vie ma gueule pushes this further than any of its predecessors. Putting it bluntly, her women are always at least a little crazy (perhaps her men are too, but with one or two exceptions they’re less intimately observed). Crazy here really does mean crazy, not just kooky or off-the-wall—which doesn’t make the films anything like realistic studies of mental illness, but does ensure that whimsy and anguish are two sides of the same coin.

Yet this craziness isn’t solely a negative thing, or not always. Sometimes it resembles the mania that often powers rom-coms, as with the title character played by the director’s sister Hélène Fillières in the 2000 Aïe, who claims to be an alien from another dimension (though she also claims to be bulimic, warning her suitors about her stinking breath). At the depressive end of the spectrum is Nathalie (Chiara Mastroianni), the heroine of the 2009 Un chat un chat, perhaps Fillières’ funniest film: another blocked writer, so at a loss for inspiration she briefly stops speaking altogether, she also bakes disgusting cakes in her sleep, throwing the eggs into the bowl shells and all. As for Barbie, some of her behaviour later in the film suggests schizophrenia, including addressing her nurses interchangeably as “Fanfan” and dismantling a wall light to check if it contains a camera—yet we can see that all of this has its own logic, and that she’s just as perplexed by the actions of others as they are by hers.

While the characters listed above don’t all look or act alike, there’s a family resemblance between them—especially their large, dark eyes, staring out in bewilderment at the world’s refusal to make sense. Emmanuelle Devos, who made three films with Fillières, is a different physical type, with lighter grey-blue eyes and more of a glossy, indolent quality. But she shares the jerky, fidgety body language of all Fillières’ heroines: her character Pomme in the 2014 If You Don’t I Will is the clumsiest of the lot, injuring her hand juicing oranges and later cutting a finger zipping up a jacket, mishaps that could have befallen The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau.

Throughout her career, Fillières also worked repeatedly with members of her actual family, including her sister and later her daughter Agathe Bonitzer; a quality of family joking permeates the films, which seem couched almost in a private language, as if wilfully partaking in the madness they portray. Running gags often make the leap from one film to the next: one character after another claims to have given up smoking, only to beg for a cigarette when stress kicks in. Even Barbie’s pink sneakers strongly resemble those worn by Sandrine Kiberlain in the 2018 La Belle et la Belle—and also, according to Jaoui, by the filmmaker herself.

To note these repetitions isn’t to deny Fillières’ comic range. One side of her inventiveness is verbal: not all her wordplay survives translation, but no knowledge of French is needed to appreciate her mastery of the non-sequitur, displayed at its finest in Un chat un chat, where a typical stretch of dialogue veers from synchronised swimming (“The nose-peg was too much”) to an attack on the Rosicrucians (“Their kids only get wooden toys. You wash your hands all day. Lunatics”). Misunderstandings are frequent, with proper names a reliable source of confusion: a suspiciously high proportion of characters go by more than one name, while others have to share a name with someone else. A favourite scene, repeated with variations, involves old acquaintances who meet and start to reminisce, then start to suspect that each has misrecognised the other. “That wasn’t me,” Barbie eventually has to tell one such deceptively familiar stranger. “It probably wasn’t you, either.”

Tying in with this, the physical comedy of the films goes beyond the occasional moments of outright slapstick: Fillières’ ingenuity is especially evident in her staging of encounters between her characters, a matter of mise-en-scène in the most traditional sense. One instance in Ma vie ma gueule occurs early on: Barbie is seated alone on a bench, back-to-back with a pair of gossiping teenage girls on a second bench faced the opposite way. Gradually it dawns on her that one of these girls is her daughter, and that she herself is the subject of their conversation, which includes disparaging comments about her lack of a sex life. Clearly, she has to put a stop to this—but clearly, too, it would be better not to reveal she’s been eavesdropping. So she rises from the bench, steals away, then heads back the way she came, walking in front of the girls as if she just happened to be passing by…

Nor is it just Fillières’ characters who are called upon to perform discreet manoeuvres of this sort. Her particular filmmaking touch might be seen as a balance between discretion and bluntness, especially when it comes to kinship relations and how they’re defined (men move in and out of her heroines’ lives, but she’s at least as interested in tensions between parents and children, or between women who could imaginably be mother and daughter). Equally, she might be seen as balancing word and image, or the abstract and the concrete. Bodily functions are often discussed but visual gross-outs are strategically rarer; sex is constantly evoked, but seldom if ever directly shown.

Yet the films do sometimes show us startling things, such as the baby boy in Aïe, naked from the waist down, who has a portion of a rotting umbilical cord protruding from his navel, the kind of disconcerting anatomical reality the codes of civilisation seem specifically intended to repress. Confronting such realities head-on, or avoiding them altogether, are two equally risky strategies in a game involving an effectively infinite number of levels and pieces, where the first rule dictates that many of the later rules can’t be articulated, or not in so many words. It could drive a person crazy, trying to sort all that out.

Fillières’ most direct precursor in French cinema is another filmmaker who died young, the widely beloved yet also now somewhat underrated François Truffaut, who shares her lightness and briskness, her knack for small surprises, her fascination with words and authorship, her obsessive yet easily distracted protagonists, and her sensitivity to the irrational, viewed often but not always as a force to be kept at bay. Along with all that, both possess what can be called a Rousseauist side: a suspicion, however ambivalent, that the best chance for human fulfilment is to escape society and its expectations altogether, or at least a willingness to dream it might be so.

This dream in Fillières’ work takes the form of a joke, but a joke kept running long enough to suggest she was tempted to take it seriously. In one film after another, characters yearn to get out of Paris, where they can’t seem to stop bumping into people, and to escape to some idealised realm of solitude, whether the woods or the Antarctic or a hotel room in Japan. Un chat un chat finds room for a literal philosophical disquisition about Rousseau, included as a tease—like the moment in If You Don’t I Will when Pomme randomly gives her name to a stranger as “Gena Rowlands,” leaving us to join the dots between Rowlands’ role in A Woman Under the Influence, directed by her husband John Cassavetes, and Pomme’s own choice to step outside both her collapsing marriage and any conventional notion of sanity.

Pomme hasn’t altogether lost her mind, but she really does go and live in the woods for a week or so, thus finding the courage to start anew. Barbie’s solution to her difficulties is still more drastic: leaving the clinic and her children behind, she crosses the Channel by ferry, calls on an old friend, then embarks by train for the Scottish Highlands, where for a small sum she’s able to purchase a single square yard of land, which comes with a certificate of ownership and the honorary title “Lady Bichette”.

On the face of it, this acquisition is of no earthly use; even camping is prohibited. But it’s all hers, allowing her to stand proudly at the centre of her own domain, as if she’d reached the edge of the world and could go no further (though the film has a couple of additional surprises in store). Her madness has won, or we could see it that way. But as she breathes the clean air and looks toward the horizon, we have the option to identify fully with her triumph, her sense of being home free.

Special thanks to David Heslin.

There’s a million ways to start a movie, but also only one: by turning on the lights. In the pre-credits sequence of his 1958 conspiracy thriller The Fearmakers, Jacques Tourneur does it with typically deft sleight-of-hand—fading in gradually enough that the image arrives in stages, but fast enough there’s no time to wonder if there’s an unseen character at the controls or if it’s the director himself who has flipped the switch.

Briefly, the light is all we see. Or rather, what we see is part of the interior of a disc-shaped light fitting, a narrow ellipsis that hovers like a flying saucer at the top of the otherwise pitch-black frame. Then the light gets brighter, incandescent, so the exterior of the fitting is briefly visible while the bulb at its centre vanishes into whiteness (if it needs saying, the film is in black-and-white throughout). By now we can make out the essentials of the shadowy scene below: a silhouetted figure is slumped in the foreground with his head bowed, the light beaming down on him from directly above.

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To Audrey Lam

Look at the range of pictures there are, and the different styles.

—An instructor at the New York Public Library, displaying a collection of images of “dogs in action”

Documentary filmmakers sometimes refer to their real-life subjects as their “characters”. Supposing Frederick Wiseman made a documentary about your workplace, imagine the suspense of showing up at the premiere, waiting to find out what kind of character you were going to be. Wiseman’s films are typically studies of large institutions, meaning that he tends not to shoot in any one location for long, and that individuals rarely appear in more than a single scene. Factoring all that in, you might be able to predict what you would be saying and doing if you made the cut. But there would be no way to guess what significance Wiseman had seen in your words and actions, and what place he might find for them in his mosaic.

Of course, writers also do this sort of thing, including critics when they write about artists. Elvis Costello, of all people, speaks eloquently about this from the artist’s perspective in the 2017 Wiseman documentary Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, where we see him interviewed on stage after publishing a memoir of his own (his only scene in the film). Costello, who up to this point has been talking mainly about his father, is asked for his views on a highly rhetorical passage by the critic Greil Marcus, who sees Costello as driven by “revenge and guilt”. His response is a model of diplomacy, rebutting Marcus as much through his genial manner as his words: he doesn’t believe his life’s work can be summed up so neatly, but he’s not going to begrudge a fellow creator the chance to shape something in turn. “It’s his job to create a thesis like that. That’s what he does.”

The ironies here are complex—and considering Wiseman’s somewhat dry reputation, surprisingly playful. First, even as he asserts his autonomy Costello is functioning as a character in Wiseman’s film, most probably unwittingly (as a rock star used to having cameras pointed at him, it’s unlikely he’s given special thought to where his image might wind up in this case). Second, the statement could be taken not just as Costello pre-empting any thesis Wiseman might be advancing, but as Wiseman more self-consciously pre-empting any critical bid to sum up the film’s purposes in turn. Third, watching a Wiseman documentary isn’t meant to entail stepping into a hall of mirrors: isn’t he the last vérité filmmaker still standing, his working method largely unchanged since the 1960s, steering clear of voiceover and all fourth-wall-breaking tricks?

In fact, a form of reflexivity is implicit in the whole approach to filmmaking exemplified by Ex Libris, which begins as usual for Wiseman from the goal of giving a selective yet reasonably comprehensive picture of a broad subject. Thus we’re introduced to a huge cast that includes authors, musicians, and their audiences; librarians fielding inquiries by phone and in person; researchers sorting through archival collections, or using microfilm scanners or the Internet; security guards, cleaners and other ancillary staff; teachers and participants in the wide range of classes, workshops and other events that take place in the dozens of branches across the city (or rather, in three of the five boroughs: the libraries of Brooklyn and Long Island are managed separately).

All straightforward enough, but immediately complexities arise: the New York Public Library is not in all senses fully public, is physically many libraries rather than one, and oversees many activities scarcely connected with books. More significantly, as always in Wiseman we’re dealing not with a single system but with two systems that mirror each other: the system of the institution, and the formal system unique to the filmmaker.

One element in Ex Libris that brings this home is the constant talk of the Internet, understood as becoming ever more central to the library’s role, to the point where the upbeat CEO Tony Marx dreams of putting the whole collection online. While the 95-year-old Wiseman is no digital native—he kept shooting on film well into the 2000s, and still doesn’t appear to have a website—in hindsight he himself might recognise the prescience of his long-held preference for weblike structures that expand in space rather than progressing in time (a striking early example is his 1981 Model, which like Ex Libris starts from the centre of New York and moves outward). As in the online realm, the effect is to put all information on an equal level, while rendering any stopping-place arbitrary; it’s no wonder Wiseman’s films often run for three or four hours or longer, with only occasional stirrings of what would typically be referred to as “drama” or even “incident”.

This doesn’t mean they should be understood as sociology by other means, still less as instances of what film critics now dubiously call “slow cinema”. Eschewing all claims to scholarship on the one hand or transcendence on the other, Wiseman really is interested in the everyday. Most of all he’s interested in work, and the range of forms it can take: it can mean making movies, it can mean canning sardines, and equally it can mean sitting at a table with a pen in your hand and a takeaway coffee in front of you, saying things like “Where is sustainability key?” The varieties of work Wiseman has filmed over the years have little in common, not even the promise of financial reward; what mainly defines them as work is that those engaged in them might on occasion yearn for them to be over.

So it is with Wiseman’s films. But as a rule he skirts the edge of boredom, his editing often evoking the games played by the tethered mind to keep itself active: studying the attendees at a meeting, for example, and trying to deduce what each might be thinking in turn. His own more voluntary embrace of tedium is that of a dedicated birdwatcher or trainspotter, as evidenced by a filmography that resembles a neatly-labelled set of photo albums (Boxing Gym, National Gallery and City Hall are representative titles from the last decade). In this context, the distinctive thing about Ex Libris is not its 205-minute running time but its focus on people working with information rather than with, say, sardines—meaning they’re grappling directly with many of the same practical questions as the filmmaker.

These questions concern how information is collected, stored, and made available, and above all how any such collection should be organised. While the familiar Dewey Decimal system is largely bypassed, we’re given a detailed rundown on the far quirkier filing system of the library’s picture collection, with royalty assigned its own shelf away from everything else. But this is only the beginning. The many branches of the library amount to an ad hoc classification system in their own right, recalling the Chinese encyclopedia famously described or invented by Jorge Luis Borges: there’s a library for the blind and visually impaired, one for research into Black culture and one for the performing arts. In parallel, Wiseman as a filmmaker could often be described as sorting his human subjects into categories of one sort or another, especially in his montage sequences—though his habit is also to linger long enough on individuals to underline that a label is at best a convenience rather than the last word.

Both the comedy and the formal complexity of Ex Libris arise from shuttling between levels of abstraction, something inherent to Wiseman’s filmmaking and likewise to how any institution functions in practice. Books can be viewed either as vessels of knowledge or as physical objects, or both at once (“The Gutenberg Bible is currently unavailable,” a caller is advised—how else would you say it?). Authors too can be viewed in a range of ways by those who encounter them in the flesh, as we see with the guest stars here (mostly men, aside from Patti Smith). Celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins gets an especially worshipful reception from his flock, in contrast to a lesser-known but more endearing historian of the Jewish deli, who in the funniest scene holds forth to an elderly, not especially receptive crowd on the sexual significance of the pastrami sandwich (“I mean, subconsciously, right? There’s a lot of subconscious symbolism that I’m trying to suggest is going on here”).

Characteristically, Wiseman lets us hear from each of these authors at length, while refusing to tell us what to make of any of it; it’s easy to find resonances with the film’s broader themes, harder to know which of these are strictly meant. One solution would be say that the responsibility of determining meaning lies with the viewer. Another would be to understand the ambiguity as meaningful in itself, especially if it leads us to ponder the library’s intentions along with the filmmaker’s. How far have these authors been invited along to supply specific facts and insights—and how far are they performing a simpler yet more abstract kind of work, representing the idea of the intellectual as such?

So many systems, frameworks, forms of classification, they come close to cancelling each other out. But not all classifications carry equal weight. While Wiseman may not openly “take sides,” it’s hardly an arbitrary choice to include at least five scenes where the history of slavery is discussed from different angles, while juxtaposing groups gathered for different purposes in a manner calculated to bring home that racial inequality remains a central fact about American society. Nor is it chance how often we’re reminded that this nominally public institution relies on philanthropy along with government funding (as we can see from Ex Libris’ closing credits, this is true of Wiseman’s films as well).

Gradually the film assembles its picture, without wholly committing itself to an argument. The library is an anomaly, a paradox in various respects: catering to the well-off and the underprivileged, founded on an uneasy alliance between liberals, radicals and cultural conservatives, hierarchical and democratic in equal measure. Visually it’s the hierarchical side that’s most evident, especially at the main branch in midtown Manhattan with its stone lions and marble pillars, built in the 1890s with money from blue-blood families like the Astors and renamed in the 2000s after the billionaire CEO of a private equity firm. The democratic side is often represented more through words than images, yet not easily dismissed: while the film may not qualify as a wholehearted endorsement of Tony Marx’s faith that “access to information” is the long-term solution to inequality, we’re at least encouraged to view such access as a valuable starting-point.

The basic question, or one of them, is about just how much can be accomplished through privileged good intentions. But the more closely the film is examined, the more the implicit connections between scenes and the consequent potential meanings multiply, to the point where you might yearn for a summarising statement to make sense of it all.

There are Wiseman films that do provide something like this, including his recent, moving Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, which does have a central figure, and is a portrait of an artist. But Ex Libris is a network, not a narrative: the goal is to make us feel that any sequence, almost any image, could be the summarising one. It could be the actual closing scene, which begins with the British writer and artist Edmund de Waal reading a passage supposedly about porcelain, which in the context of the whole film is loaded with ironies far too complex to summarise here. Or it could be Ta-Nehisi Coates a little earlier, reflecting on what reading about mediaeval serfs taught him about his own identity: “That’s the power of the African-American experience, when you come to understand it—it’s actually a statement about the human condition.” Or it could be the young white guy with a baseball cap and a plastic shopping bag, sitting on the library steps next to his girlfriend as she checks her phone, while he holds an American flag out in front of him with glum irresolution, as if he wasn’t sure what he was meant to do with it.

Special note to New York readers: Ex Libris screens 3pm Friday March 7 and 2pm Sunday March 9 at BAM as part of “Aisles and Isles: Films In the Library”.

Great Moments In Entertainment Journalism (a potentially continuing series): in a recent article in New York’s Vulture magazine, an Oscar pundit questions the selection process for nominees for Best International Feature Film, formerly Best Foreign Language Film. About time, you might think: given the Oscars in their entirety are meant to be a competition for world cinema, the rationale for retaining the category is far from clear. But that’s not exactly where he’s coming from. Rather, he’s focused on the rule dictating that each country can submit only a single official entry; perhaps it’s time for a more flexible approach. Then again, there’s the risk that such a shift “would only further empower the international-cinephile class,” which we’re reminded is the class that “dominates institutions like Cannes”.

Yes, you read that right: the Cannes Film Festival, run by a pack of international cinephiles. Concerning, even if nothing can be done to fix the situation for the moment. To spell out where I’m coming from in turn, I assume I myself would qualify as a member of the international-cinephile class, albeit one who speaks English, lives on the other side of the world from Europe and has never been to Cannes. From that vantage point, I wouldn’t claim that the culture underlying the global film festival circuit is ideally lacking in bias. What I would claim is that for all the admirable-in-principle recent efforts to broaden the Academy’s membership, the Cannes line-up in any given year can be counted on to represent a wider world of cinema than the Oscars.

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Should there be trains in Oz? My gut feeling is absolutely not, although it probably wouldn’t have bothered the nation’s original chronicler L. Frank Baum, who gave us Tik-Tok the clockwork man in Ozma Of Oz, the third volume in the saga. The sleek green train in Jon M. Chu’s Wicked is clockwork too, which is a nice touch, clouds of white steam emerging from its workings as it races past the windmills and poppy fields, carrying the gifted budding sorceress Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and her frenemy Galinda, also known as Glinda (Ariana Grande), to the Emerald City to see the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). They’re travelling from Shiz University, which is on the opposite side of Oz from Munchkinland, so we needn’t ask why Dorothy and her friends had to walk. For all that, the train rankles. Perhaps it’s just the idea of an Oz story owing anything to Harry Potter.

There are other anomalies in Wicked, part one of a planned two-part adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same title, adapted in turn from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life And Times Of the Wicked Witch Of the West. To cut a long story moderately short, Wicked in any form is officially a prequel to Baum’s original 1900 The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, which is out of copyright, rather than to the more widely beloved Wizard Of Oz movie, directed by Victor Fleming and others for MGM in 1939 and now confusingly owned by Warner Bros (Chu’s Wicked is a Universal release). This means, for example, that we’re given the origin story of the silver shoes Dorothy wore in Baum’s book, not of the immortal ruby slippers someone at MGM decided would look better in Technicolor. Just the same, the new film mimics the look of the old one as far as it legally can: if you’re doing an Oz musical, there really is only one template to work from.

Likewise, there can be no doubt which version of the Oz story inspired Maguire to write his own. Above all, it’s a question of colour—that is, the colour of Elphaba, Maguire’s name for the future Wicked Witch, who wasn’t green till 1939, when Margaret Hamilton played her. This change too presumably originated as a bid to get the most from the medium, but Maguire and his successive adapters have interpreted it differently: Wicked is so directly a story about racial prejudice it hardly qualifies as a parable. The new movie sharpens the point through the casting of Erivo, who is Black, unlike Idina Menzel who originated the role on Broadway in 2003 (and is otherwise known as the voice of the extremely white Elsa in Frozen). While stage Elphabas have come from a range of backgrounds, the choice here is plainly not a “colour-blind” one—even if Erivo’s green make-up also evokes the tendency of modern fantasy and SF cinema to render the ethnicity of actors literally invisible.

It’s true that Elphaba’s greenness wasn’t passed down from her ancestors in the usual sense. Rather, it’s an inherited mark of sin, her mother (Courtney Mae-Briggs) having been plied with a magical green elixir by her salesman lover while the head of the household (Andy Nyman) was off governing the Munchkins. There are questions you might want to ask about that, and also about the way a campaign against talking animals serves as a further metaphor for racism, a device carried over from Maguire’s book. As best we can judge, most such animals have always belonged to an informal Oz servant class, like the brown bear (Sharon D. Clarke) who was the young Elphaba’s beloved nanny (I almost wrote “mammy,” remembering Munchkinland is literally its nation’s South).

Nothing if not a layered text, Chu’s Wicked is in some ways so old-school it’s come round to being up-to-date, not least in its out-and-proud pride in being a full-blown musical (a far more elaborate one than the 1939 film, which had only a couple of big production numbers). Even without having seen the stage version, it’s clear how much Schwartz and his book writer Winnie Holzman took from Stephen Sondheim’s still more enduring revisionist fairy tale Into the Woods, including a handsome prince (Jonathan Bailey) who in the words of his Sondheim equivalent “was raised to be charming, not sincere”. It’s also clear that in the transition to the screen, Elphaba and Galinda’s adventures at Shiv have been systematically Harry-Potterised—which may explain how the movie manages to run over an hour longer than the 90-minute first act of the stage show, despite covering the same basic plot with no added songs.

Other templates are perhaps less conscious. If Wicked is understood in the terms not of the musical or fairy tale but of melodrama, we aren’t far from Douglas Sirk’s ferocious 1959 Imitation of Life, with Grande channelling the blonde perkiness of Sandra Dee and Erivo in the Susan Kohner role as her racially “mixed” counterpart. Naturally Wicked is nowhere near as blunt as Sirk’s masterpiece, as no Hollywood studio release of the 2020s could be. But the camouflage of fantasy still gives Chu and his team some freedom to venture into dangerous territory, while leaving us guessing how far Elphaba’s wickedness is destined to go. In part two, will she truly break bad, or remain a misunderstood victim—and will Dorothy truly bring about her watery doom, or will she be reconstituted in time for the curtain call? Oz is a land of magic, meaning that anything can be altered with the wave of a wand. But without an element of permanent tragedy, the story itself may be in danger of melting away.

If the forthcoming Wicked: For Good matches the running time of its predecessor, the whole epic will last a little over five hours, roughly two hours longer than the combined halves of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, designed to be shown back-to-back with an intermission. Both the first Wicked and The Brutalist are in the running for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, with nine additional nominations apiece—and both aim to justify their length as slow-burn stories of mistreated outsiders whose simmering rage is very gradually brought to the boil, with ambiguous results.

The ambiguity starts with the films’ respective titles, which could apply to more than one character in each case. Corbet’s Hungarian-Jewish protagonist László Toth (Adrien Brody) is a Brutalist in the architectural sense, whose Bauhaus sense of form may have helped him to emerge from Buchenwald with at least a sliver of his former self intact (“I’m not what I expected,” he says with typical wry understatement). After some further misadventures—the film itself is not as streamlined as all that—he finds his way to Pennsylvania, where an eccentric industrialist named Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) commissions him to design an ambitious “community centre,” promising full creative control.

What could go wrong? There are a million possibilities, a few of them arising from factors such as László’s heroin habit, but most of them from the personality of Van Buren, revealed immediately as a pompous fool, later as something far worse. Even before the awful truth is out, Van Buren’s loyalty and generosity scarcely compensate for his self-involvement, pretension, and unpredictable temper—a mix of traits liable to ring bells for anyone involved with independent filmmaking, to the point where you might wonder if any of Corbet’s own former backers posed for the portrait.

Which doesn’t mean Corbet lacks pretensions in turn. Like the work of Paul Thomas Anderson and the younger American male directors who have followed in his wake, The Brutalist is about its pretension, swollen with it, yet simultaneously ready to burst its own bubble. Shot on 70mm like Anderson’s The Master, it’s self-consciously an epic-on-a-budget, masking yet glorying in how little we truly see of László’s work-in-progress. Often a handheld camera follows the characters from behind, as if they were clutching an invisible thread meant to lead us through the story: many types of images can be hung on this thread, from passages of pseudo-Soviet montage to extracts from a vintage stag film and an instructional short on the history of Pennsylvania, both of which Corbet likely secured the rights to for free.

In several ways The Master appears to be a touchstone for The Brutalist, set in the same era and centred on a comparable power struggle between two contrastingly damaged men (both films also feature memorable handjob scenes). But Van Buren remains a small-scale grotesque next to the version of L. Ron Hubbard played in The Master by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who gave us far more opportunity to enter into his character’s pain. The relationship between the central duo in The Brutalist is also less charged than its equivalent in The Master, at least on László’s side: there’s little sense that Van Buren’s sentimental attachment to his protégé is reciprocated, although whatever remains of Lászlo’s own sexuality is an open wound both before and after his reunion with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, playing the most sympathetic character by a fair margin).

Looking back further, Corbet would no doubt like us to think that his real roots are in European art cinema—but as in Wicked, various classical Hollywood precursors are also visible. The scenes where László is first roped into going along with Van Buren’s plans have a touch of Sunset Boulevard, if Norma Desmond were really the bimbo Sunset Boulevard pretends to want us to think. Then for a while the film flirts with being The Fountainhead, before the penny drops that what we’ve really been watching all along is Land Of the Pharoahs, with László turning the tables on his oppressors by overseeing the construction of a gigantic tomb for someone else.

If much of The Brutalist is suffused with dread, this relates not only to László’s own possible fate, but to the prospect of him losing his humanity to the point of letting innocents be sacrificed to his grand design. Yet in practice our sympathy with the protagonist is no more threatened than in Wicked: even when a train crash suggests he’s recreated his wartime nightmare by osmosis, there are no fatalities, nor could he literally be blamed if there were. His actual bad behaviour is explained if not excused by the suffering he’s gone through, including the way he’s retraumatised by his monstrous American sponsor (what any of this might mean allegorically is unclear but worth pondering, as are the parallels with Oppenheimer, last year’s Oscar smash).

As it happens, Wicked has a grand design of its own near its heart, the unscrupulous Wizard’s bid to unify Oz via the construction of the Yellow Brick Road. But we’ll have to wait for the sequel to see how this plays out. Likewise, we’ll have to wait and see if the screen version of the Wicked story culminates in a traditional crowd-pleasing showdown, as The Brutalist effectively does, complete with a woman who stands by her man and a villain who gets his comeuppance. As if uneasy about this capitulation to convention, Corbet makes a point of wrong-footing us in other respects, leaving the ultimate fates of both Erzsébet and Van Buren to the imagination, and excluding László from the climax before having him resurface as a silent, almost ghostly figure decades on.

Still, there’s poised ambiguity, there’s not being sure what you want to say, and there’s blurring the lines sufficiently to let different audiences read in what meaning they choose. Any film that makes a showing at the Oscars is likely to have elements of all of these; similarly, while László is defined by his refusal to compromise, in another sense he’s been compromised all along, or at least from the moment he consented to a purportedly non-ideological project having a Christian chapel at its centre. Nor would Corbet dispute that his own career has entailed its share of such compromises, judging from the Italian disco track that closes the film, a variant on the traditional creed of anybody in the impossible position of a commercial filmmaker aspiring to art: “One for them, one for me.”

This article contains minor spoilers for Severance through to season two, episode four.

“This isn’t, like, hell or something?” asks Helly R (Britt Lower), the unwilling new hire at Lumen Industries, having woken to find herself trapped in a surreal basement office space with no memory of her former life. The team behind the Apple+ TV show Severance were wise to get that question out of the way, just as M. Night Shyamalan was wise to impose one condition before agreeing to direct the pilot of the short-lived science-fiction mystery series Wayward Pines: “As long as everybody isn’t dead, I’m in.”

Still more wisely, Severance unlike Wayward Pines laid some vital cards on the table from day one: the core situation is spelled out in the 2022 pilot, written by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, who have remained as the show’s joint overseers into the long-delayed season two. Helly isn’t dead, nor is she even figuratively in hell, as Mark S (Adam Scott), the supervisor showing her the ropes, is quick to reassure her. Purgatory might be closer, bearing in mind that in one sense Helly chose her fate—as did her new colleagues in Lumen’s Macrodata Refinement department, including the snarky but not ill-natured Mark, soon revealed as the actual protagonist.

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