 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
My Thesis Film:
|
 |
|
This film is a true oddity in the landscape of global film
culture in 2018, and as such it exerted its magnetic power on me. I was drawn
to it through the writing of its two critical champions, Rod Bishop in Australia and David Davidson in Canada – who are among the very relatively few people in the world who have,
to date, actually seen it. I, too, have now joined that select group of viewers.
Even the Nearer-My-Costa-To-Thee crew at Cinema
Scope magazine appear to have entirely overlooked its existence so far. (In
all fairness, I should point out that it has also, more recently, managed to
win Best Student Film at the Montreal World Film Festival in September 2018.)
It is – to foolhardily attempt a preliminary nutshell
description – a four-hour student film about the problems of making films (and
getting them accepted, screened and properly appreciated) in the volatile,
contemporary climate marked by (in Bishop's words) "the increasing omnipotence of identity politics" – especially as it
plays out in the cinema scene of Canada, although many other places in the
world no doubt exhibit very similar or at least comparable dynamics.
Erik Anderson is the director, the writer, and the
central actor. He has been making movies – including two previous features –
since 2013, so he is not the youngest postgrad student we see in My Thesis Film. As becomes evident very
early on, he has dual interests, and dual training: in classical philosophy,
and in filmmaking. Second nutshelling attempt: we follow the path of Anderson
as he tries to convince everyone he encounters – friends, professors, family
members – that his next project, his thesis film, should be (and should be allowed to be) a crack at staging or
dramatising the first book of Plato’s Republic (basically, a discussion of what constitutes justice). Meanwhile, he is also
trying to get his previous 79-minute opus – Misogyny/Misandry:
An Evening of Dialectic (2013), which really exists but I haven’t seen it –
accepted into film festivals; he is spectacularly unsuccessful in this mission
(just as he draws a blank on the institutional funding that every other student
gets). One of the best running jokes in My
Thesis Film is that whenever anybody asks him either or both “What’s the
title of your last film?” or “What’s your new one about?”, he chokes and mumbles
something like, “Ah, that doesn’t really matter”, and tries to change the
subject.
About 30 or 40 minutes from the finish line, Anderson
has an epiphany and announces that his thesis film will be about … all this, i.e., the problems and
situations encountered in trying to make his thesis film. Which, is therefore,
the film we are watching. Sort of. Because there is no cinéma-vérité, nothing captured off-the-cuff or in any
improvisatory fashion here. It’s all been carefully scripted, acted and staged.
Indeed, Rod Bishop is quite correct that this is the level on which My Thesis Film is most impressive – he
goes so far as to assert that “Anderson’s casting, direction of actors and
penetrating dialogue is so far superior to most student films, it’s more than
capable of holding its own with any ‘indie’ production from North America”.
When My Thesis Film takes its big “meta” step
– somewhere between a Charlie Kaufman conceit and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) – it, in fact,
loses a few degrees of its hitherto generally well built-up coherence. A
professor starts gesturing to “that camera over there” filming “this
conversation which is going to be in the film” – and we see somebody in the
corner with a camera, but it’s not the camera actually shooting (with perfect mise en scène clarity) the scene we are presently
watching on screen. A closing homage out in the street to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) doubles back,
meta-textually, to an earlier scene we watched Anderson set up with his
sympathetic (but more successful) gal pal, Karen (Shaista Latif) … and so on.
Two factors
have emerged, since the first completed version of My Thesis Film in 2016, to complicate (in intriguing ways!) all
attempts at discussing it dispassionately. The first factor is that there’s now
a second version, dated 2018 (and this is the four-hour one I’m reviewing): its
running time has been considerably upholstered by a prologue containing that
Platonic Republic project he really
wanted to make at the outset. I do not think this was an entirely wise
decision: it’s the weakest part of the whole, and it further destabilises the
credible or logical unfolding of the everyday-life-gradually-turning-meta
narrative conceit. (And Anderson, in his thesis exegesis available online,
makes clear that he was completely invested in that narrative aspect of the
film project, actually shaping and telling a story in certain conventional ways
– My Thesis Film is not an “essay” or
conceptual collage in any sense or to any degree, despite a fleeting, jokey nod
to Jean-Luc Godard and his Masculin féminin [1965].)
The second
complicating factor is that, rather sadly and horribly (like a bad cosmic
joke), My Thesis Film accurately
predicted its own dismal fate: it has apparently been rejected by almost every
festival to which it’s been submitted, and has (as I indicated at the start)
received precious few screenings of any kind anywhere (the Montreal prize
notwithstanding). Was its gargantuan length a problem? This is hard to credit,
given that (as Bishop remarks) “Film Festivals everywhere regularly screen
three-hour films” – and look at the generous international screening career
handed to maverick figures like Lav Diaz or Albert Serra. Be that as it may,
the situation of My Thesis Film’s
widespread public negation quickly has the effect of magnifying and redoubling
everything that is staked out within its content: has it been the victim of
those very same cultural “forces” it sets out to (variously) parody, criticise,
provoke? And here we circle back to those questions of identity politics.
In a moment.
First, a little more on the style and manner of My Thesis Film. It’s somewhere between an “old school” Mumblecore
movie – meaning, its absolutely central element is talk, talk, talk – and a
somewhat more sophisticated comedy of manners, almost like Eugène Green or Luc
Moullet at moments (Davidson also draws the comparison with Moullet). Anderson’s
personal film culture (judging from his exegesis) does not appear to be
especially cinephilic (which is no crime per
se!); certain writer-director-performers who play meta– or
quasi-autobiographical games are name-checked (Lena Dunham, Woody Allen) in the
film but Anderson, whether he knows it or not, veers (in tone and
point-of-view, at least) closer to Ross McElwee’s personal documentaries, or
even to a vérité horror-show like
Australia’s little-known Video Fool for Love (1996). That is to say, we are pretty much trapped within the skull, the
personality, and the world-view – not to mention the tears – of Erik Anderson
as he depicts himself on screen. Being part of a staged fiction, "Erik" himself is naturally a character, and thus a mask, a foil. But masks can be tricky things.
Within the
movie itself, testy Profs accuse him of being narcissistic, self-serving,
self-pitying, even just a Film Fool for Truth. (They also add various things
about him being an entitled cis white male, etc, etc.) In the film – and across
the entire work of the film – Anderson proposes something different: sure, it’s
all going through and with him, it’s his personal story and his personal truth,
but what he hopes to stage is something more humanly universal and (dare I say) relatable: a kind of modern
philosophical agora (or classroom)
via cinema, a clash of viewpoints, a staged discussion, a “dialectic” of
different value systems and ideologies. OK, let’s go with that.
But does My Thesis Film succeed in this worthy
goal? Only partly, in my opinion. That sneaky word universal is the first of many give-aways as to the loaded – even somewhat
rigged – way that Anderson conceives his dialectical “contest” from the get-go.
On the one side, there is (dear me) philosophy, metaphysics, even
“existentialism” (all these words get a good workout in the four-hour running
time) – this is the universally human, timeless stuff, you understand. Then, on
the other side, there’s a sometimes very fuzzy amalgam of “post-structuralism”
(whatever Anderson thinks that is), post-colonial critique, “intersectionality”, political campaigns for the equal screen-representation of
all races, genders, abilities, and so on.
Don’t get me
wrong, Anderson has devised some sparky, at times spot-on satire: as in the
disastrous philosophy class of an old Prof played superbly by Robert Fothergill
(facing “offended critics” from the student body within the first two minutes
of his first lecture); or a blowhard filmmaker describing his highly acclaimed
“Derridean” slow-cinema-in-twelve-static-long-takes masterpiece; or a seminar
session where the media students present and defend their various thesis
projects (the worst being the lament from a male student about an “existential
male crisis” trend as reflected in Fight
Club [1999]!).
Anderson, in character, keeps on arguing that what he really wants is fairness for all, a level playing field where what is good – what is best, as in great art – will naturally rise to the state of cultural recognition and appreciation. But alas! What a vulgar, hyper-politicised, homogenising, reductive, unfair world of mass culture we presently live in, where (these are the comparative pairs named by "Erik" in the course of a conversation scene) no distinction is made between a Martin Scorsese movie and The Room, between Tyler Perry and Spike Lee, or between Amy Heckerling and Claire Denis. You might correctly guess the film lost me at that point – the point where an apparent call to recognise and take into account individual diversity seems (to me, at least) underwritten by some very familiar cultural snobbery about what is and is not to be considered film art.
You’re
seeing, by now, the immense and intense difficulty, even the trap, posed by this film – beyond all
those other factors I’ve already mentioned – for anyone who wants to talk about
it? Namely: if you criticise the way it sets up the terms of its argument (deconstruction!), you run the risk of
sounding almost exactly like the characters in it (the professors, certainly, but mostly the women, and
particularly the perpetually ideologically-outraged character of Cleo played
gamely by Shaina Silver-Baird) who already mouth something resembling this
critique. By anticipating, including and pre-parodying the argument against it
– even if this may not have entirely been Anderson’s initial intention leading
up to Version 1 – the movie has outflanked you already in its cagey
discourse-game-posing-as-open-dialectic. Something has happened (I suspect,
somewhat beyond the director himself) that has drained some of the welcome
self-deprecating comedy of My Thesis Film (which would have contributed to its “balance”), and turned it into a kind of
polemical battering ram.
This relates
a great deal, too, to that skilful way the whole thing is
put together. Quite simply, while Anderson is prepared to mock (in that
Allen-esque way) his own screen-self – one of the funniest party scenes
revolves around everyone in an argument casually insulting his drab looks and
unsexy clothes – he also ascribes an awful lot of weight to his own presence, and position: there must be literally
hundreds of close-up shots of him grimacing or shuddering in worldly, quizzical-sceptical
doubt at all the ridiculous “intersectional” platitudes thrown in his face; as
well as plenty of scenes in which he gets to do a double-or-triple take, such
as when he keeps returning to the reception desk at a film festival centre to
question the fairness of how he has just been treated … And can any viewer doubt that Anderson almost unfailingly always gives himself the best last-word lines in any dialectical showdown he depicts (as, for instance, in the argument over cultural "meritocracy")?
Rod Bishop
(who’s more captivated by the film than I am) pinpoints My Thesis Film, in social and cultural terms, as being among the
contemporary “blow-back effects from left-liberal activism” (I hasten to add that
Rod’s own political values are very definitely on the left, albeit – as the
loyal producer of Philip Brophy’s Body Melt [1993]! – in
a complex way). This spectacle of a “head-on confrontation with political
correctness and identity politics” is of immense value, he claims, and not just
as a symptom of the times (since, to begin with, it’s an inarguably well-made
film, and that level of quality has to count for something). Furthermore,
Bishop makes the important point that Anderson’s “approach isn’t from the
political right”, and I see the truth of that.
David
Davidson, for his part, links Anderson’s work to an emerging trend or loose
grouping in current Canadian cinema, including Spice It Up (2018) by Calvin Thomas and Yonah & Lev Lewis –
another one I have yet to see. Davidson remarks, more broadly, that “it appears that the new generation of local filmmakers, who have
started making work around 2010, are starting to be more explicit about the
challenges of creation and getting programmed in this city” (i.e., Toronto).
And many other cities of the world, may I add. If you want to muck in with
these kinds of film-culture arguments, My
Thesis Film is an accommodating pond to jump into.
|
