Category: Documentary

Matangi /Maya /M.I.A.

Rated: MA 15+Matangi /Maya /MIA

Directed: Stephen Loveridge

Featuring: Maya Arulpragasam

‘This is what happened to a kid whose dad ran off to be a terrorist:’ Life doesn’t turn out the same way as someone whose dad is a banker, a lawyer or a fireman.

Maya’s choice of words is interesting. Usually, it would be the other side using such highly coloured and provocative language to describe the man behind the Tamil Tiger resistance movement. Partisans might be expected to use terms such as liberator or freedom fighter.

Maya was eleven when her mother and her siblings fled the war zone in their native Sri Lanka, to resettle in the refugee enclave in London. Although, the family was warmly welcomed into the fold, life was still harsh. Maya felt as if she didn’t fit in anywhere: she was ‘shot at in Sri Lanka’ and ‘spat at in Britain’. Music was her consolation and she would drift off to sleep listening to British pop through her headphones. That was, until they were burgled. Maya could do nothing but watch as her radio was carried off to a neighbouring flat.

It might have been one of the lowest points in her life as she lay awake listening to the music spilling out from the flat across the way, but it was a turning point, too. Up until then music was Madonna and the Spice Girls, but when Maya heard her first hip hop beats it was an epiphany. She was listening to people with something to say, and hip hop was the way to say it.

While her sister was lamenting the lack of birthday and Christmas cards from their father, Maya found a source of strength and identity in his absence. Her father was fighting for ‘a human rights problem’, everything was ‘inhumane’ for the Tamils in Sri Lanka. ‘What he’s done to us, made us so strong. We are so independent. Fearless fighters.’ But, rather than taking up arms, Maya turned to documentary film making to express her activism.

Haunted by footage of a women her own age in the jungle armed with assault rifles, Maya returned to Sri Lanka hoping to reconnect with her extended family and find some answers: ‘How do women survive in the jungle’ just on a day-to-day practical level and ‘Why was it me that got away?’ Following that visit, MIA was born, and she released her debut album, Arula (named after her dad). A million copies were downloaded from Napster. ‘It happened so fast.’ Finally. MIA had a microphone, and there was no question she was going to use it.

Subversive and defiant, instead of ‘cookie cutter videos with beautiful girls’, MIA started out with a clip of, monkeys and the jungle, before moving on to exploits and video clips that would bring her both international stardom and notoriety. Because, ‘the worst thing they can do to you is make you irrelevant’.

Well, they can try …

But the woman who infamously flipped the bird to the audience during a half-time performance with Madonna at the Super Bowl in 2012 and the singer/songwriter of ‘Born Free’—a song that accompanies a deeply disturbing music clip where pale-skinned, red-haired boys are brutally hunted down by faceless military types clad in black body armour—will not be going quietly.

Kusama Infinity: The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama

Rated: MKusama Infinity: The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama

Directed by: Heather Lenz

Produced by: Heather Lenz, Karen Johnson, David Koh, Dan Braun

Edited by: Keita Ideno, Sam Karp, John Northup, Nora Tennessen

Composed by: Allyson Newman

Director of Photography: Hart Perry

Featuring: Yayoi Kusama

From international scandal when she notoriously crashed the Venice Biennale in 1966 to Japan’s first female representative of in 2003, Yayoi Kusama is possibly the highest selling female artist on the planet today, and the queues for her exhibitions can be so long they can only be described as preposterous.

But, any exhibition is just a tiny window onto a body of work that, in this case, spans around 80 years. So, an opportunity to observe the genesis of the ideas and view a curated selection of the artist’s entire oeuvre, to see the various strands through the eyes of the artist can elicit that special thrill of recognition when you know that you get it, too.

In 1957, Kusama arrived in New York during the heyday of Minimalism with almost nothing but her talent and her boundless ambition. When she left Tokyo, flying first to Seattle, Kusama was mesmerised by the endless crests and swells of the sea below. Later, standing on the point of the Pacific Ocean, she felt as if she was poised on the edge of infinity. In a departure from her signature dot motif, Kusama produced a series of large canvasses, richly patterned with thick, impasto arabesques brushed over a thin stain. Superficially at one with the spare, self-referential style of Minimalism, Kusama’s Infinity Nets were inspired by the diametric opposite.

Instead of reduction, Kusama’s Nets represent a highly tactile and exuberant accumulation: ‘I am obsessed with Nets, they fascinate and haunt me.’ Rather than an art that speaks only to itself, Kusama’s work began with her deepest private experience, moving out to embrace the world and the infinity beyond: ‘I convert the energy of life into the dots of the universe.’

In her response to Minimalism, Kusama found herself among a cohort of white males, the rising stars of Pop Art, but the career trajectory was very different for the young Japanese émigré. In lieu of sales and grants, she worked tirelessly to secure patronage and, while she often achieved her goal, her desperation translated as aggression, further distancing her from the rarefied circles she hoped to move among. Since her goal was no less than, ‘To create a new history of art for the USA’, Kusama increasingly sought ever more radical and subversive avenues to bring attention to her practice.

Even so, Kusama was showing more in Europe than in America by 1966 when artist Lucio Fontana invited her to exhibit in front of the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She assembled an installation composed of 1500 reflective silver spheres with a sign in the middle that read, ‘Your Narcissism for Sale’. When asked to desist—despite the invite, Kusama was exhibiting without official permission—she had the perfect Pop Art comeback: ‘Why cannot I sell my art like ice-creams and hotdogs?’

By turns luminous and illuminating, this is the story of an artist who refused to accept oblivion. In response to decades of stonewalling by the art establishment, Kusama has sought ever more varied avenues to express her vision, from painting and sculpture to pioneering installation, naked happenings, performance and film. Very much aware of ‘the publicity that got a lot of attention’, Kusama has frequently waged her art as a guerrilla campaign. But at its heart are Kusama’s dots, ‘because stars don’t’ exist by themselves’.

I Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story

Rated: PGI Used To Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story

Directed by: Jessica Leski

Produced by: Jessica Leski, Rita Walsh

Featuring: Elif Cam, Sadia, Dara Donelly, Susan Bower.

Designed as a glimpse into a teenage girl’s sparkly, heart-studded, secret diary, this engaging documentary opens with black and white footage of girls who have flocked en masse for the smallest glimpse of The Beatles during their 1964 world tour. Like some curious kind of behaviour that David Attenborough might explain in a nature program, this knot of screaming, crying, hair-tearing, swooning girls is a phenomenon that had begun to sweep the globe, leaving many a parent and those not caught up in the frenzy utterly bemused.

But. Who are these girls and what has become of them?

In this cross-continental exploration, these questions are addressed through the lives of four very different women, from Susan Bower an Australian television producer, one of the original fangirls captured in the archival footage of the Beatles tour, to Elif Cam, a schoolgirl living in Long Island, New York whose obsession with One Direction has paralleled the five years it has taken the filmmakers to produce their own labour of love.

According to Elif, when One Direction perform ‘It’s like they’re singing to me, “You’re beautiful”.’ And, what young girl could resist a really cute boy looking deeply into her eyes and whispering her all of her heart’s desires, even before she is really aware she has them? While, Dara the more technically-minded Australian brand strategist couldn’t resist the allure of, ‘Five guys in the rain dancing in slow motion’.

Analysing her own longstanding and unshakeable attachment, Dara sets out a chart on an office-grade whiteboard to examine ‘Boyband Basics’.  There’s: ‘The mysterious one, the cute one, the sensible dad/older brother, the sexy one—shirt off—and the forgotten one.’ And, there are definitely, ‘No girlfriends, no brothers and no beards.’

In some quarters, boybands are seen as manufactured, manipulative and relatively unskilled. Given that only one boy in the band might even be able to play the guitar, it can be social suicide for the girls to reveal their secret passion. But, that is precisely the allure. It’s about the perfect boy. And, in a boyband, there’s a boy to match the dreams of every girl.

For Elif, the girl on a video that went viral when she cried uncontrollably at the thought of seeing One Direction, ‘They’re not even like human beings. Nobody can be that perfect’. And, it seems that for all of the girls, the most perfect thing about the perfect boy is that he is unattainable.

At a time in their lives when girls are starting to feel the first flutterings of interest in boys, when their emotions are wayward with wild crushes galore, and at a time when real boys ‘are jerks’, boybands offer unconditional love. They sing of love and tantalise with hints of sex, but it is never overt. They are the boys who will never break your heart.

Fahrenheit 11/9

Rated: MFahrenheit 11/9

Directed by: Michael Moore

Written by: Michael Moore

Produced by: Carl Deal, Meghan O’Hara, Michael Moore

Starring: Michael Moore and a host of sympathisers and suspects.

No one is safe and nothing is sacred, at least nothing that the big end of town wants to sweep under the carpet when Michael Moore throws back the rug to expose the outrageous chicanery that gets them what they want.

With a Michael Moore documentary you can expect to be appalled by the issues at stake and riveted by the oblique angles from which they are viewed. In this instance, Moore’s thought provoking compilation of theatre, confrontation and shenanigans charts the alternative history of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, and beyond. If anyone in America could be described as Trump’s arch-nemesis, it would most likely be Moore. Where the one with extravagant comb-over and the unusually long necktie famously evades questions, his shaggy nemesis in the baseball cap is equally invested in finding the answers. Even if those findings might not be the ones you expect.

While I have been continually gobsmacked by the audacious commentary aimed at the Trump administration, so much has already been said and written that I had wondered whether I might be in line for a lengthy rehash. Not so. From the opening scenes, the little voice in my mind kept asking in a stunned whisper, ‘Can he really say that?’ And that was before one word had even been uttered. The choice of music implied something that words could not say (at least, not without being sued or locked up).

Just when I thought I knew everything there was to know about Trump’s ascendancy—social media, Russian interference, the ill-timed FBI investigation—there was one factor that we had all overlooked. According to Moore’s deep investigative research, Gwen Stefanie was responsible for the Trump phenomenon.

Even so, Trump’s Stefani inspired tilt for office was merely the prelude, with Moore zeroing in on Trump’s plan to run the country as a business. In 2010, Rick Snyder, former chairman of Gateway Computers, had already delivered a full-dress rehearsal in the state of Michigan when he was elected governor. Invoking a state of emergency, Snyder privatised the public services in the city of Flint. With capitalism and unbridled greed running amok, the result was a water crisis that has decimated the city’s economy and poisoned its citizens. As Moore notes, ‘No terrorist organisation has figured out how to poison an entire American city’.

Flint alone would be a resounding indictment on the state of things in America today, but Moore takes aim at a constellation of culprits. Democrats, Republicans, the United States Electoral College, even the general public are implicated. Moore spares no one when he asks:

How the #*!@*# did it happen?

America has long proclaimed itself to be the champion of democracy, but Moore’s wide-ranging think piece reveals an America sleepwalking toward the destruction of the American dream (not the one with the house and two cars), but the dream of a ‘one person one vote’ democracy. For many Americans it is still only an aspiration and whatever freedoms they have won are in imminent peril.

Backtrack Boys

Rated: MA15+Backtrack Boys

Directed, Produced and Written by: Catherine Scott

Consultant Producer: Madeleine Hetherton

Cinematographer: Catherine Scott

Composers: Kristin Rule, Jonathan Zwartz.

Audience Award for Best Documentary, Sydney Film Festival

Audience Award for Best Documentary, Melbourne International Film Festival

Filmed over two years, Backtrack Boys is an observational documentary about Founder and CEO, Bernie Shakeshaft and his unique outreach program to help young kids to:

Stay alive

Stay out of jail

And to chase their hopes and dreams.

I was thoroughly charmed by this film – writer, director and cinematographer Catherine Scott allowing the story to speak for itself.

Growing up in the Northern Territory, Bernie was taught how to track dingos by Indigenous trackers from Tennent Creek.

Rather than tracking dingos from behind, chasing them, they taught Bernie to backtrack, to observe their behaviour to see where they’d been to see where they’d be tomorrow.

Bernie reckons they weren’t teaching him how to catch wild dogs but how to catch wild kids.

His outreach program is unique in that it’s all about giving board to young people, who’ve had trouble with the law and at home, to stay and train the many dogs on his property to become dog jumpers.  Each kid is given a dog to train, or rather, the dog picks them: dogs don’t judge, they just keep coming back again and again.

I would have thought the group of mischievous kids would have hammed it up for the camera, unable to handle being filmed.  But there’s a genuine insight captured here that tells of a level of comfort and openness with film maker, Catherine Scott, that allows us to see into this fragile world of rehabilitation as the kids open their hearts to Bernie and the volunteers; to struggle with anger and hurt and disappointments, and the consequences of lashing out.

Although the film could be used for teaching youth workers, I didn’t feel like I was under instruction – it was all about meeting the kids: Zac, Russell, Alfie, Sindi.  And to be taken on a journey as they figure out their path in life.

Gentle and matter-of-fact Bernie, who states, ‘I’ve spent so much time with dogs that I think more like a dog than I think like a person’, is able to calm the kids to see reason so we’re shown moments like Zac sharing as they’re sitting around the camp fire that he wants to leave the world with no regrets; no hate in his heart.

We’re taken from the out-skirts of Armidale in New South Wales where Backtrack Boys is set-up surrounded by green paddocks with grazing sheep and horses, to country shows including the Wellington show where the boys show off the dogs’ jumping skills, and their own.  To the detention centre where Tyrson’s waiting to get out and back on track again; to parliament and putting on a show at Government House; to Russell’s fear of going to court to face charges and the uncertainty of whether he’ll walk out again.

Seemingly simple, the film is a series of moments, as we’re shown what the quiet observer sees – the rewards of Bernie’s hard work with Rusty, wild and swearing and chewing gum in the morning to him later organising the bathroom and noting the need for more toothpaste after brushing his teeth.

It’s a sad and realistic documentary, making any break-through and win all the more sweet.

Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist

Rated: MWestwood: Punk, Icon, Activist

Directed by: Lorna Tucker

Edited by: Paul Carlin

Produced by: Eleanor Emptage, Shirine Best, Nicole Stott, John Battsek

Starring: Vivivenne Westwood, Andreas Kronthaler, Kate Moss.

Throughout her long career, avant garde fashion designer and activist Vivienne Westwood has been a giant safety pin digging into the side of the British establishment.

From the first little backroom shop in the King’s Road that she shared with Malcolm McLaren selling records (him) and clothing (her), Westwood claims to have invented punk, with McLaren managing (or perhaps mismanaging) the Sex Pistols and Westwood responsible for the punk aesthetic.

She has often described herself as a woman on a mission and, in the 1970s, the mission was to confront the establishment through sex. Pronouncing England as the home of the flasher, Westwood designed a line of rubber wear for the office to sell from their shop now flagrantly rebranded SEX in huge, hot pink letters.

Her designs from that time onwards have become no less confrontational, from the 1976 Destroy tee shirt calling out the establishment as fascists to the 2003 show where she sent her male models down the runway wearing fake breasts over their polo necks. Believing that clothes are deeply emotional, Westwood creates clothing, ‘to face the world in a spectacular way’, as with supermodel Carla Bruni’s 1994 appearance on a Paris catwalk in a scanty faux fur thong. At last, a fitting riposte to the 1936 surrealist Object, the fur-lined teacup.

Despite the sensation her designs create, Westwood takes a very practical approach to design. As one of her assistants observes of Vivienne and partner Andreas Kronthaler’s collaboration, ‘They work with their hands, they work on the body, they have a rapport with the body’. Westwood has been making her own clothes from an early age, and her working class background probably goes some way to explaining the campaign of guerrilla warfare she has been waging against the establishment. Far from hiding torn edges and safety pins, Westwood features them as symbols of insubordination. She wants her clothes to ‘tell a story’, one spiked with mischief and defiance.

But there is an even more personal impetus underlying both Westwood’s designs and her activism. When she was nine, Westwood was transfixed and horrified by a painting of the Crucifixion. It was a seminal moment. Since then, it has become her mission, ‘To stop people doing terrible things to each other’. Wanting to change the world, she joined a Greenpeace expedition to the Arctic Circle. The environmental devastation she witnessed there left her traumatised. Over time, her mission has become ever more focussed, homing in on the financial establishment as, ‘The rotten financial system,’ and, ‘A hydra that is destroying us’.

Even so, this Designer of the Year (twice) who performs cartwheels on the catwalk has been struggling with a conundrum common to many underground artists. As the work gains recognition, it is at the same time being subsumed into the very establishment it is agitating against.

If fashion or popular culture interest you in any way this documentary is a must-see, and for the rest of us it’s a fascinating insight into a fiercely original spirit.

 

American Animals

Rated: MA15+American Animals

Directed and Written by: Bart Layton

Produced by: Katherine Butler, Mary Jane Skalski, Derrine Schlesinger, Dimitri Doganis

Director of Photography: Ole Bratt Birkeland

Editor: Nick Fenton

Starring: Evan Peters (Warren Lipka), Barry Keoghan (Spencer Reinhard), Jared Abrahamson (Eric Borsuk), Blake Jenner (Chas Allen II) and Ann Dowd (Betty Jean Gooch).

American Animals is a different kind of heist film that plays out in the style of a documentary shown like a suspense thriller.

The film’s based on the true story of four college students who decide to rob the Special Collections Library of Spencer’s College housing incredibly rare books including Audubon’s Birds of America valued at $10 million dollars.  In broad daylight.

Writer and award-winning director, Bart Layton (winning the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut for The Imposter) utilises the techniques of documentary by basing his script on interviews with the four robbers, Warren Lipka, Spencer Reinhard, Eric Borsuk and Charles “Chas” Allen II and their families and victim of the heist, librarian, Betty Jean Gooch.

He includes the interviews in the film, the facts and post-crime analysis, with the guys recounting each of their unique perspective alongside the dramatization of actors playing the parts, sometimes repeating immediately what was said by the real-life person.  Which could have been repetitious but instead added this interesting layer to the film that Layton uses to create something more than just a documentary or just another heist movie.

It was like putting distance between who the guys are now compared to the people who planned and ultimately committed the crime.

The fantasy of successfully pulling off a heist shown by actors added to the vision of how they saw themselves to cut to the reality of what they had actually done and how it felt, crossing a line that can never be uncrossed.

‘This is the History of Demolition’ says a poster on the wall of Spencer Reinhard.  It stuck with me as the fantasy of pulling off a heist in the middle of the day, to steal rare books worth millions, starts to get way too real.  It’s like watching Spencer’s life fall apart.

There’s a scene when Warren and Spencer are talking about the planning in the early days, where Spencer is waiting for something to happen in his life to give it meaning, ‘Like what?’ Warren asks.

‘Exactly. Like what.’

It seems easy fun, the planning, travelling to New York to meet a Fence, the drawing of blue prints, the stake-outs where Eric, an accountant major, who plans to join the FBI, takes to the planning of the heist like a fish in water.

As Warren says, it’s a, Take the blue or red pill, moment.

It’s the adventure they’ve all been looking for.

And it makes for a great story like an Ocean’s film but with young guys in college, sussing it out like idiots looking up how to rob a bank on Google.

And there’s thought into the way the shots are taken, the opening up-side-down, the cutting from character to real person; a face in front of a computer seen behind the text on screen.

Yet more than the clever cutting of imagery, the matching of each actor to each part was uncanny, and a successful technique because the splicing between the real and the drama works on a completely different level.  Which also says something for the actors such as the familiar faces of Evan Peters (I’m fast becoming a fan and may have a crush) and Barry Keoghan, another one to watch and last seen in his disturbing performance in, The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The film is a solid package that has a cool soundtrack (The Doors, ‘Peacefrog’ for example), is visually creative and has a fascinating story, with suspense, humour, intrigue, adventure while also showing the toll taken when crossing the line from fantasy to stark reality.

Ghosthunter

Rated: MGhosthunter

Directed & Written by: Ben Hunter

Produced by: Rebecca Bennett

Music by: Rafael May

Director of Photography: Hugh Miller

Featuring: Jason King

Produced with the co-operation of the NSW Police Force

Writer and director, Ben Hunter originally saw Ghosthunter as a story about grief.

Seeing an advertisement in the paper about a Ghosthunting business, and then finding out Jason King, founder of the Ghosthunting crew, had started the business when he had his eyes opened to the Other side because he saw the apparition of his recently departed brother, sitting on a couch across from him – Ben wondered if Jason was projecting his grief outward.

He organises to meet with Jason, finding a Western-suburb large-as-life Sydney boy who works security, who doesn’t like to read and had only found his recently passed brother in adulthood because he turned up and announced he was his brother.  Jason questioned his mother about the existence of this brother, who confirmed that yes, it was true, and for reasons he couldn’t fathom, had never told him.

Did they have the same father?

Documentary director Ben Hunter was happy to help solve this mystery without realising the story he was about to uncover.

Sourcing hospital records about Jason’s medical history, it becomes apparent he had multiple hospital admissions with what was noted as clumsiness.  Soon becoming obvious that Jason suffered from chronic abuse.

It was a question of asking Jason, Do you want to continue?  Do you want to find this mysterious father?

Denial from his mother about the injuries and any further responsibility or input into the documentary, the research continues over seven years as layers keep being peeled from Jason’s past – the gaps in his memory revealed as victims of his father’s abuse reach out.

There are so many complicated emotions as this unexpected story unfolds with the interviewing of Jason and his friends, family and other victims.  Along with the police involvement tackling the crime, the film turns into a more unsettling reveal of a deeply damaged individual struggling to keep his good heart.  We see Jason’s ignorance turn to revelation and all the ugly that comes with the knowledge his Dad was an abuser.

What crushed me was the fact that after all these years of Jason trying to find his father, then finding out he’s a monster, to then fill in those gaps of memory – to see the victims names written on the bricks of an apartment hallway where he used to live but had forgotten until seeing those names – then for his father to say he doesn’t remember him, his son.  It’s devastating.

I went to this particular screening because of the Q&A with director, Ben Hunter.

When questioned as to how he handled the unfolding of such a confronting story, one where he had no idea where it was headed but doing his best to uncover, give air and still remain safe, I wasn’t surprised when Ben answered that he seriously considered taking on the advice of people telling him to pour a circle of salt around his person because that’s what you do to keep out the ghosts.

It took courage to keep following Jason as he remembered his father while walking down those cinder-block hallways as lights flickered into darkness.

Ben followed for seven years.

It picks at me because the story is still unfolding as Jason fights against the damage already done – he keeps saying he just has to move forward… Into what?

McQueen

Rated: MA15+McQueen

Directed by: Ian Bohôte

Co-Directed & Written by: Peter Ettedgui

Produced by: Nick Taussig, Andee Ryder & Paul Van Carter

Composer: Michael Nyman

Featuring: Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen became a fashion icon for his confronting sabotage of tradition, his haute couture fashion shows exhibiting the visions from his tortured soul.

Bruised, battered and embraced by the industry, McQueen rose from humble beginnings growing up as a lad in Leeds to become head designer for Givenchy which led to backing from Dior; his label, McQueen rising as much from infamy as from his genius to create.

His shows were made to provoke emotion: revolt, repulsion, revelation.  As long as there was a reaction: “I would go to the end of my dark side and pull these horrors out of my soul and put them on the catwalk.” ― Alexander McQueen.

McQueen is a documentary pieced together like tapes from his life.  Recordings of old footage taken by friends and McQueen himself to archived interviews of the designer and those closest to him: his mother, his industry supporters such as his mentor Isabella Blow close like family, to current interviews made for the film from his older sister and nephew and colleagues including stylist Mira Chai Hyde and assistant designer Sebastian Pons.

We’re given a back-stage pass into McQueen’s life from his beginnings as a youngster obsessed with drawing dresses to his drive to succeed in a world shockingly different to the tubby, shabbily dressed boy who used his dole money to buy fabric while going back to his parents for tins of bake beans.

I’m not a fashion obsessive but it was fascinating to see the man work, to see his process and gain insight from those closet to him.  But more than anything I enjoyed seeing his creations, his fashion shows like theatre, his work like sculpture, his vision unique.

McQueen’s ability to turn garbage bags into dresses by waving his magic hands was absurd and genius.

And he was cheeky: As Detmar, Issie Blow’s husband, remembers McQueen telling the models, “You’ve got to put your pubic hair in Anna Wintour’s face. It was just very naughty behaviour.”

The film follows his life through the themes of five major works, displaying his morbid fascination of the dark with titles like, “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims,” his 1992 graduate college collection and “Highland Rape.”  His shows were inflammatory and macabre.

McQueen rose to fame because he didn’t care what people thought.  He rose because he took risks.

As one model states of his finale in his collection of beauty and madness in, “Voss”: ‘Fat birds and moths – isn’t that Fashion’s worst nightmare?!’

But when he became famous, that’s when his personal life began to unravel.

Director Ian Bohôte (producer of, 20,000 Days on Earth) gives us a documentary that allows the work of McQueen to speak for itself by focussing on his life through each collection – his anger after, “Search for the Golden Fleece,” his first collection designed for Givenchy, to his rebellion in, “Voss”.  We see his grief in “Plato’s Atlantis” and we see his final show before his death.

We see the tortured soul of the man as he reveals everything in his work.

As the timeline of his life moves forward, his rise to fame equals his personal downward spiral as those close to him discuss what they could see happening to McQueen.

Yet, his expression continued to amaze – his honesty and grief sometimes ethereal.

The documentary takes you on that journey showing the sensitivity of what made the man.

It’s a sad story that challenges while informing – not a celebration but more a documentation of his life: honest, like the man.

Midnight Oil 1984

Rated: MMidnight Oil 1984

Writer, Director:  Ray Argall

Producers:  Rachel Argall, Ray Argall

Starring :  Peter Garrett, Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie, Andrew James, Martin Rotsey, and Peter Gifford.

 

In 1984 as Australia faced the turmoil and uncertainty of political conflicts, systemic poverty, mega powers flexing their nuclear muscle, and the home-grown unwashable stain of a nation’s refusal to acknowledge the legacy of racism towards its indigenous culture – Midnight Oil embarked on a national tour of their album Red Sails in the Sunset and unified a nationwide voice of protest with their music.

Ray Argall’s documentary, Midnight Oil 1984 gives candid unseen angles and film footage of Midnight Oil at the height of galvanising social change through their music that hit the top of Australian and International music charts. Argall’s lens muscles into the action of sardine packed audiences – the audiences packed because of entrepreneurial self-promotion – in sweaty pub venues with no air conditioning and walls and ceilings dripping with honey thick sweat.

Argyll’s lens dips into the wide mouthed stares of audiences, witnessing social change at the windmill circling arms of a 6’4 gyrating maniac lead singer, as he unifies them together in songs of protest.

I too stood like a stunned possum in headlights the first time I saw Peter Garrett live in the 80’s with Midnight Oil, at New Zealand’s, Sweetwater’s Music Festival – where they played alongside UB40, Psychedelic Furs, Toots and the Maytals and others – I too gaped, at what I thought was a gyrating maniac.

He looked like someone had rented his body for the weekend, an alien perhaps or a rogue angel on a vacay down under in New Zealand, an alien or angel, who in their haste to jump in the body, had lost the manual and now had no clue how to steer the 6’4 convulsing kinetic frame that was Midnight Oil’s charismatic and out-of-this-world, lead singer, Peter Garrett.

Director Ray Argall’s, Midnight Oil 1984, delivers up a powerful moving snapshot, of a time when one of Australia’s greatest rock bands, collided with Australian politics and delivered the voice of the common people to a world stage.

Intimate backstage scenes permissible through Argyll’s lens reveal a very unrock and roll off stage lifestyle – hot tea beverages are sipped between sets, yogic stretching by Garrett on the floor of a minimalist and functional dressing room – not a band rider in site; kilometer-upon-kilometer-long jogging tracks for Drummer Rob Hirst, as he gets body ready for his marathon on stage drumming performances. His drum kit nailed to the floor at every performance.

The band’s reputation was built on intense live performances, where they leapt on to stage and tore the places apart with their energy and the political rage of their lyrics.

Newspaper archives and recent band member interviews offer welcome backstory and give insights to the meteoric and controversial ascension of Peter Garrett into the political arena.

The legacy of Midnight Oil with their fight songs, social conscience and their unique stage presence chiseled the landscape of Australian rock history and changed a nation with what they bought to the stage.

Enigmatic and indefinable, for me Garrett vibrates with the stage presence of a rogue angel, and once seen he changes you for having looked and stared. Fellow band member, Drummer Rob Hirst, and Garrett’s friend of 45-years agrees, that whatever it is that Garrett does on stage, it cannot be called dancing, but whatever it is, it works.

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