Conor Bateman's Blog, page 7

The Fool

Mostly skipping Australian shores, the long and winding road from the Locarno competition in 2014 to the 2015 New Zealand International Film Festival has seen Yury Bykov’s The Fool(Durak)suffer from the success ofAndrey Zvyagintsev’s far more prestigiousLeviathan, another recent Russian film dealing with local government corruption. Though both films reflecting growing social unrestthroughout Russia, Bykov’s film is less a call-to-arms than a bleak portrait of a nation defeated, not necessar...

The Strange Little Cat

For the first fifteen minutes ofRamon Zürcher’sThe Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) we become intimately familiar with the layout of the kitchen in an apartment. Whilst the various members of the residing family and their two pets make their way through the space, the focus is not on what they say but where they’re looking when they say it; interacting with one another on and off screen, the sequence of shots and the characters’ lines of sight efficiently tell us a huge amount o...

Out of Nature

Martin is in his mid-30s, married and with a young child, who is caught inthe realisation of his potentially mundane life trajectory. In the opening minutes of the film he stares out the window and makes snap judgements about passers-by and their contentment, which only partially explains why Martin finds himself so tongue-tied and uncomfortable around other people. He’s unhappy with his now intimacy-less marriage and his inability to truly engage with his son, instead finding solace in his...

Rams

Iceland’s first ever win in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival came earlier this year in the form ofGrímur Hákonarson’sRams, which took out the top prize. That section, which runs parallel to the Palme d’Or and is designed to promote innovative young voices in world cinema, boasts an eclectic list of winning films and directors, with 2009 winner Yorgos Lanthimos (forDogtooth) and 2012 winner Michel Franco (forAfter Lucia) each having a film up for the Palme this year....

For the Plasma – An Interview with Writer/Director Bingham Bryant

For the Plasma,the debut feature film from Brooklyn-based filmmakers Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, is a strange and surreal look at the intersection of technology and nature, following two women in a remote cabin in Maine who monitor the surrounding forest and find a strange series of patterns. It had its Australian premiere this week at Grey Gardens Projects in Fitzroy and we were able to speak with writer and co-director Bingham Bryant ahead of the film’s second screening.

For the Plasma...

Psychedelic Reigns Supreme As MIFF Announces Exciting 2015 Program

Melbourne International Film Festival is always a gargantuan offering in the Australian film festival calendar. With a record-breaking 370 titles screeningthis year,the festival promises to showcase a huge range of films, from the cream of world cinema’s crop – the bevy of Cannes titles added last month is a good starting point – to their decades-spanning Psychedelic cinemaretrospective series.

The festival opens on 30 July with the world premiere of Paul Cox’s latest feature, the semi-autobi...

For the Plasma

Using genre trappings as a vehicle for the introspection of characters isn’t a new approach in independent cinema, the cultural cache of science fiction often enough to allow minimalist, dialogue-heavy features to pass off as fully formed. The recent film Coherenceessentially embodies this notion, using time travel and the gradual complexities of that plot system to mask over a somewhat unconvincing screenplay.For the Plasma, the debut feature of Brooklyn-based filmmakers Bingham Bryant and...

Hollywood Burn (dir. Soda_Jerk and Sam Smith, 2006)

In our regular column, Less Than (Five) Zero, we take a look at films that have received less than 50 logged watches on Letterboxd, aiming to discover hidden gems in independent and world cinema. This weekConor Bateman looks at the ambitious and hilarious video art collageHollywood Burn.

Date Watched:2nd July, 2015
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 1

Dan and DominiqueAngeloro, sisters who work under the moniker Soda_Jerk, have been making waves in the Australian video art scene sin...

Anthology Series 006: Dead of Night (1945)

The Anthology Series is a roundtable column here at 4:3 where we look at the oft-overlooked genre of anthology films. Also known as portmanteaus, the anthology film is composed of a series of short films grouped together by theme or some awkward overarching premise. Some of the more popular portmanteaus in recent memory includeParis, je t’aimeand horror anthology seriesV/H/S. There are also anthology films done by the same director, thinkLove Actually, Argentian Oscar-nomineeWild Talesand Rob...

The Royal Road

Jenni Olson’s latest workis an ode to nostalgia and memory told through the form of a gradually digressive essay film about a road. That’s a reductive way to put it, butThe Royal Roadsprings from the narrative allure ofCalifornia’s El Camino Real, which then serves as the visual anchor for a multi-faceted monologue in which Olson talks through the history of San Francisco and California, the impact that cinema has had on the formation and confirmation of her sexualidentity and, as she puts i...