Conor Bateman's Blog, page 3
July 28, 2016
The Death and Life of Otto Bloom
Otto Bloom has a problem. Unstuck from the natural flow of time, he experiences memory in reverse. That is, he forgets everything that has happened to him but he knows with absolutely clarity what will happen next.To make matters worse, he’s trapped in an independent Australian feature film which has little more to hold onto than its logline.The Death and Life of Otto Bloomaspires to inventiveness—in content and form—but its ideas are so simplistic, its stabs at emotional pull so limp, its a...
July 25, 2016
Fear Itself – An Interview with Charlie Lyne
Critic-turned-filmmaker isn’t the most accurate way to describeCharlie Lyne. His movie blog,Ultra Culture, launched in 2008 and soon developed a strong following. The site was known not only for its irreverent takes on film and music but also its shortform video elements, ranging from out of context movie clips to a pretty much perfect autotuning of Mark Cousins. His first feature,Beyond Clueless, was an essay film about teen movies that adopted a more clinical air than his writing. In betwee...
July 23, 2016
Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton
“Dead. Inert. Impotent. I might as well be garbage flapping in the wind.”
Guy Maddin, the filmic persona, returns after a nine-year absenceto complain about financial woes and stake political claims about cinematic war inBring Me the Head of Tim Horton, a 31-minute short co-directed with Evan and Galen Johnson. While much has changed since 2009’s masterfulMy Winnipeg, the Guy Maddin character still finds himself stuck at an almostself-imposed creative dead-end. Low on cash, he pitches to the...
July 19, 2016
Kinet – Online Publishing Platform for Avant-Garde Cinema to Launch July 25
Teased obliquelythrough Twitter earlier this month, Kinet, a free online publishing platform for low-budget avant-garde and experimental cinema, launches on theJuly 25.
The website – kinet.media – is the product of a collaboration between filmmakers Kurt Walker (Hit 2 Pass) and Isaac Goes, the impetus for it being that most modern experimental work in cinema is rarely seen outside of the festival circuit and gallery screenings. In an email announcing the project, they wrote:
“…the site functi...
July 5, 2016
The Was – Soda_Jerk vs The Avalanches
On Sunday night, in a gallery at the edge of a deadened Kings Cross, Australian video art duo Soda_Jerk unveiled their latest film:The Was, a 14-minute collage short smashed together from 129 different films and television shows, in which characters are neatly cut out of their host film and positioned within the in-between spaces of another. Jay and Silent Bob play with a boombox in the New York subway asJean Reno inSubway makes the rounds. The titular gang fromThe Warriors make the same trai...
June 27, 2016
Rats in the Ranks – A Video Essay About Honest Politicians
Note: this video essay was first presented at the 2016 Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne.
Election season is upon us here in Australia, with the double dissolution of theFederal Parliament on May 9thsetting the stage for a July 2nd election. That means that, yes, we’re nearing the end ofan exhausting8-week campaign, marked by a fundamental misunderstanding of the word “bigotry”, a Prime Minister slowly regretting calling this election andidiotic witchhunts perpetrated on both aQ&A audie...
June 18, 2016
The Childhood of a Leader
“Mother says we’re citizens of the world,” the sociopathicLittle Lord Fauntelroy tellshis French tutor. He’s right to be uncertain, what with a mother of French and German descent who speaks four languages, an American diplomat for a father, no clearly defined homeland for his youth and having to navigatehis parents’ demands with discordantly crisp English articulation. This displacement of national identity runs to the heart of actorBrady Corbet’s directorial feature debut, The Childhood of...
June 13, 2016
A War
Tobias Lindholm moves through familiarterrainin his latest film-as-ethical-dilemma,A War (Danish:Krigen). Like 2012’s A Hijacking before it,Lindholm presentscontrasting worlds and attitudes through dueling narrative strands; the earlier film sets the horrors of being held captive by Somali pirates alongside the hostage negotiations underway in a corporate office in Denmark, A Warhas the activities of a Danish platoon in Afghanistan intercut with scenes on the home front, a company commander’...
June 12, 2016
Land of Mine
When we look at modern filmsabout World War II, a conflict that came to an end 71 years ago, we should first be askingwhy these films are beingmade today. We’ve had cinematic interpretations of the physical and figurative scars the war hasleft for decadesand its cultural currency seems to have hardlywaned. The very notion of a period-set war film seems to give feature films a base level of substance they don’t have to earn; anemotional pull gifted by virtue of subject matter. Even when it be...
May 30, 2016
Machine Gun or Typewriter? – An Interview with Travis Wilkerson
Travis Wilkerson’s latest experimental feature film,Machine Gun or Typewriter?, screens as part of the new Essential Independents Film Festival across Australia. As we put it in our review, the film “at once a landscape essay film, a fractious collage piece and an abstract confessional, restlessly serving the film noir narrative trope of a missing woman.” During the festival run we spoke to Wilkerson about his filmmaking process, the political climate in America today, and the joys of the Kor...
