Cartoon Rabbit

The Melbourne International Film Festival sounds like an illustrious kind of affair when you pronounce its full title. When you pronounce only its acronym, MIFF, it sounds like a bunny rabbit from a children's cartoon. How people manage to say it with any gravitas is beyond me but they do.

Oddly I've never been to MIFF much, because it clashes with Byron Bay Writer's Festival and this time of year normally sees me heading north for my annual beach, ideas and organic coffee fix. This year though I'm doing the whole MIFF experience. Starting last night with the Documentary Shorts Program.

MIFF's Shorts definitely sounds like a children's cartoon. Being documentary there were no cartoon rabbits although there were, perhaps surprisingly, both cartoons and rabbits. Animation in doco is a bit of a hip trend and the night saw two films that made heavy use of it. Cyanosis intersected animations in and out of observational footage to represent the world as seen by a delusional brain-damaged painter, using the nightmarish visions from his paintings to weave a semi-imaginary landscape around him. Under Construction took place mostly in a virtual landscape representing now demolished suburbs of a Chinese city, with real footage appearing only in fleeting ghost like images. Animation as memory, in this case, a representation of the forgotten rather than the imaginary. In both cases they were powerful tools, but also in both cases they were slightly overused and even I, who am a great fan of animated documentary, found myself hankering for a greater dose of reality.

Rabbits in documentary are not quite as hip but they still put in a showing in Szmolinsky. Szmolinsky is the German guy who breeds giant rabbits and was planning to sell them to Korea to alleviate food shortages there. The film centred around, a) surprising you with how giant the giant rabbits were, and b) the scandal over him selling them to Korea where it was assumed they would end up in inhumane farms. Apparently, I've discovered following up the story on the net, they never got to any farms but all got eaten by Kim Jong-Il and his closest cronies in a banquet... not that any of that got covered in the film, which cut off at the five minute mark, feeling a bit like something created for assessment.

The much hyped A Triumphant Tale I know for a fact was created for assessment, because it was produced out of the same course I'm doing. A tale of two bakers competing in a vanilla slice contest, it was built up big but ended up being a bit vanilla itself, and rather heavily iced with stylistic devices that didn't suit the tone or subject matter of the film. City of Cranes also bore the name of a film school in its credits, and its four chapter structure looked suspiciously like a student film that had been expanded, but was by far the most visually arresting film of the night. A portrait of tower crane operators in London, it soared on the strength of its wonderful photography. The cranes and the city they looked down on were the stars, while the interviews with the crane operators played only a supporting role, the human voices serving primarily to remind you of the human presence in the cranes and to stop it being a film only about machines. By contrast, Mimi and Vali was visually more restricted, being about two elderly sisters living together in a cluttered house, but got by on sheer strength of character. Using only interviews and observation of the ladies at home it still managed to be the most emotionally affecting film in the program.

Dirty Pictures by John Smith used even less devices. In fact it used none at all. Not even editing or plot. This British guy sat in a hotel room in Bethlehem, filmed the roof and spoke about his day. Later, he started filming the rest of his room - tea cups, cupboards, his bags, his shoes. For the first half, this was far more entertaining than it should have been but towards the end he was stretching it a bit. Apparently John Smith (if that IS his real name) does this in hotel rooms all around the world.

This was the first of our class group outings to the festival and we later dissected them all in a bar on the riverbank. Some loved all the animation, some hated it; people were alternately tickled or confused by the giant rabbits; others were nearly ready to put a contract on the head of John Smith. There is always a feeling I get at these group things like there is a bunch of film-makers out doing something and I'm the tag-along fraud. I always find this. Among actors I feel like a writer out of his depth, among writers I feel like a film-maker out of his genre, among film-makers I feel like an actor with pretensions. Sometimes I feel like a lost public servant but then again in the public service I felt even more out of touch, like a cartoon character trying to fit into an otherwise verite style documentary. Somewhere someone's watching going, "No no that character's totally inappropriate for this story. This isn't working at all. Two stars."