Ian Bar: Film As Art

For many filmgoers, much of the work of Stanley Kubrick functions as a gateway to the idea of film-as-art; his aesthetic choices and formalism so hard to ignore, and the films themselves so widely available, that they're regularly cited as sparking the flame of cinephilia in many. The Shining remains the film that converted me – and I imagine many others – from dabbler in cinema to full-on diehard, at the tender age of 12. So it's poignant to watch a documentary (a loose one, at least) on the obsessive, and mostly nutty theories surrounding Kubrick's seminal 1980 horror film, in the context of a film festival as bountiful as TIFF; an environment that exploits one's obsessive streak regarding the medium, especially if you've travelled across the world to attend it.

Most of the theories in said doco – Rodney Ascher's fascinating Room 237 – are not particularly productive in and of themselves. A few early ones, making claims for the film as a veiled grappling with the plight of Native Americans or the Holocaust, are surprisingly sound. More often than not, however, the participants tend toward crackpot conspiracy theorising, or using Kubrick's self-evident and much-publicised perfectionism to treat activity and phenomena at every corner of the frame as highly-composed Rorschach blotches, finding minotaurs and erections and even Kubrick's own face on allegedly photo-shopped clouds.

Fortunately then, that Room 237's value isn't as an essay-film. Ascher remains remarkably respectful to the subjective responses of his speakers, and through his democratic approach, he creates a testament to the fascination and sustenance that interpretation can have for the beholder, however problematic. In turn, we're not being lectured to, so much as forced to examine our own personal boundaries when it comes to the kind of investigative interpretation depicted, which can be described mostly as 'The Death of the Author' taken to its dizzying extreme. More broadly, Room 237 has considerable appeal as a character study of a kind of highly specific, rarely encountered subset of enthusiasts; or rather, given its subjects feature as disembodied voices only, a ghost story befitting the obsession object in question.

Speaking of subjectivity, another early-festival highlight came in the form of Olivier Assayas' Something in the Air, the most surface-level autobiographical film to date from the prolific and diverse French auteur. It tells of his artistic coming-of-age through the experiences of a Parisian teen (and obvious surrogate for the director), by turns inspired and disillusioned by the post-May '68 revolutionary activity amongst him and fellow youths. I was wholeheartedly on board with the film pretty early on, when a group of student protesters gather together at the top of a staircase after running from riot police, catching their breaths in unison as the image fades to black – a detail so quotidian but so right in its poetic force, and it's the kind of scene that the film is ripe with; fluidly relating a tumultuous historical moment through an accumulation of detail that feels culled directly from memory, albeit observed from a place of wistful detachment rather than swoony nostalgia for the good ol' days. If it is all a little 'typically French', to borrow that popular dismissal, it's in the best possible manner.

Being at an overseas film festival means trying to see the films that won't appear on Australian shores, which also poses a problem to writing about them for Australian readers: ie, bragging about cool shit that you'll never see. But upon seeing something as penetratingly beautiful and, yes, accessible as Nathaniel Dorsky's August and After – the latest work from this renowned experimental filmmaker, showing as part of one of a handful of shorts program in the Wavelengths sidebar – it's easy to feel disillusioned with regards to how little exposure avant-garde cinema receives in Australia, and its lost-cause status, even in gallery spaces. (The Country Teasers lyrics comes to mind: “You only mock the avant-garde / because it's a bit too hard”).

But even those seem like petty quibbles when a high-concept Hollywood film as fresh and inventive as TIFF's opening night film, Rian Johnson's Looper, feels like an iffy commercial prospect. It's the kind of film that filmgoers like to see succeed commercially regardless of its quality, and fortunately Johnson (writer/director of the much-loved high school film-noir Brick) delivers an entry in the time-travel-themed sci-fi film whose originality and ambition is matches with soul, wit, style and emotional weight. If Inception fell short to some viewers in its execution, this should surely feel like compensation.