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Video Fool for Love
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Real Dead Ringer for
Love
There’s
a Utopian idea I occasionally stumble across, which proposes that film critics
should only ever speak or write about the movies that they like or love – that
their labour should be that of a fan, driven solely by enthusiasm. There are
days when I fully agree with this idea, and am at my happiest evoking feelings
of elation, surprise or enthrallment prompted by the discovery or re-discovery
of a movie.
But
there are just as many days when I am convinced that the vocation of a film
critic is precisely to be a critic, to tackle the films that one does not like
– maybe even the films that one really hates. I don’t mean by this that critics
should be dismissive, superior or sneering towards movies – attributes that,
generally, I dislike in reviewers. Rather, I believe there is a case for
working from a spirit of what I’d call irritated
engagement – a feeling of having been provoked, troubled and upset. And
it’s in that spirit that I’m going to tackle an Australian film that I didn’t
enjoy one, little bit: Robert Gibson’s Video Fool For Love (1996). It has been little shown, anywhere in the
world, beyond its initial screenings, but it makes for an intriguing case study
in what has been called first person
cinema.
Video Fool For Love is constructed from
a video diary. We are told that, for ten years, Gibson carried around a compact
video camera and filmed everything happening to him and around him –
conversations, travels, car rides, sex, arguments; juicy, action-packed stuff.
Most of the ten years fly by in a flash at the start, until we settle into the
complications of a particularly difficult love triangle, when Robert reached
his early 40s. First, there’s Robert and his troubled lover April, who flies
off to stay in England. While she’s gone, Robert meets Gianna, and they begin a
wild relationship.
Almost
always unsure of himself and his emotions, and equally unsure of his partners,
Robert dithers for a while between April and Gianna, between England and
Sydney. He visits April and becomes engaged to her, but eventually spills the
beans about Gianna, and so that relationship breaks up messily. Back in Sydney,
Gianna moves in with him, but eventually this union falls on hard times, too.
Love really hurts for this guy.
Video Fool for Love was produced and
distributed by the prestigious Australian outfit Kennedy Miller, for whom
Gibson has extensively worked as a film editor on both cinema and television
productions. In the press kit, George Miller is quoted as saying: “Robert
differs from all other filmmakers in that he’s the first to put himself between
his camera and his subject. He is, in the same moment, cameraman and actor”.
Now, Miller is a terrific film director – lord knows, I’m a huge Mad Max fan – but I do think his sense of film history may need a little fine-tuning on
this point.
Gibson
is definitely not the first filmmaker
to put himself in front of his camera, or to make himself the subject of his
own video-film, or to record his daily life, or any of the things that you see
in Video Fool for Love. If I’m
getting hot under the collar correcting this exaggerated promotional claim, that’s
because such hype goes on all the time in the film world, and I find it pernicious.
To
put it bluntly: making a candid-camera video-diary might well be a new idea for
people who have essentially spent their entire, adult lives within the
cloisters of mainstream, normal, industrial filmmaking. If a person’s idea of
cinema is restricted to Schwarzenegger and Spielberg, Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Babe (1995), then I guess this imaginary person would find Video Fool for Love slightly radical, new or confronting. But in
other kinds of filmmaking – in other, less well-publicised sectors of the
cinema, like experimental or independent film, student production, even
documentary – this kind of intimate exploration of a filmmaker’s daily reality
has been going on for a long, long time.
As
early as 1968, the film-diary craze was already being parodied and examined in
Jim McBride’s clever David Holzman's Diary. And these days, premier
film-diarists such as Jonas Mekas are honoured in vast retrospectives at festivals
and galleries around the world. I daresay that Gibson’s film might have been better
had it reflected some familiarity with the years of work and writing, and the
many miles of film and video, that have already been devoted to this cinematic
dream/ideal.
My
irritation on this point reminds me of another golden moment in the annals of
mainstream cinema: the end of the documentary Hearts of Darkness (1991), when Francis Ford Coppola comments that
his kind of mega-budget filmmaking will soon be obsolete, because “Right now”,
as he kindly hypothesises, some “fat little girl from Iowa is probably shooting
a masterpiece on domestic Hi-8 video in her backyard”. But such masterpieces
had already been made, in a dozen different ways, years before Coppola deigned
to imagine and laud them. They were already a reality – in equal parts
fascinating and mundane – before Coppola decided to turn the very idea of them
into a grandiloquent, redemptive fantasy.
I
am talking here about the history of what is called personal cinema. It has a long and involved history, with many
different styles and tendencies. Those acquainted with the marginal sectors of
film production in Australia know well the local versions of this personal
cinema, from Gary O’Keefe’s beautiful, Super-8 observations of everyday life
and Corrine Cantrill’s intimate autobiography In This Life’s Body (1984) to Dirk De Bruyn’s journeys in search of
his past (Homecomings [1988], Conversations with My Mother [1990]).
Perhaps
the most widely admired example of personal cinema comes from documentary
filmmaking: Sherman's March (1985) by Ross McElwee. Like Video Fool for Love, Sherman’s
March is a ragged, romantic comedy cut from the cloth of the filmmaker’s
real encounters and conversations with women. Its emotional keynotes are
neurosis, suspicion, self-doubt and one male’s chronic inability to commit.
McElwee’s movie also has, far more successfully than Video Fool, a political, historical dimension woven into the
personal journey. But Sherman’s March,
good as it is, is just the tip of the personal cinema iceberg.
The
very idea of personal cinema needs some explaining. Once upon a time, a long
time ago, it was apparently a scandal to suggest that movies – industrially
produced and financed entertainment films – could reflect and express the
personalities and preoccupations of their directors. That’s why the auteur
theory/policy swung into action in the 1950s, in order to argue that even
Hollywood directors on contract to a studio were expressing themselves
artistically, just as much as the directors of certified, festival-blessed art
films in Italy, Japan, France or Russia. Nowadays, the polemical battles fought
around this idea are old news, barely comprehensible to today’s generation of
young film students. Of course, we all know that Spielberg is an auteur, that
he reveals himself in his films as much as Orson Welles or Ingmar Bergman – we
know it, and Spielberg knows it, too (and he knows that we know). So, in that
sense, the notion that there is a personal dimension to film art is now a
simple, accepted fact.
But
personal cinema per se is something
rather different and more special. It tunnels deeper than the auteur theory
ever imagined any filmmaker could. Personal cinema is all about staking a
unique intimacy between the filmmaker, his or her material and also, finally,
the viewer. Personal cinema can be defined by a certain kind of content:
everyday life recorded off the cuff, warts and all, complete with all the small
spectacles and vicissitudes of sexuality, illness, work and boredom – plus a
hundred fleeting epiphanies glimpsed out the window.
In fact, when I contemplate the history of
personal cinema, I immediately think not of Sherman’s
March, but a marvellous short from the 1970s by the kooky American
avant-gardist George Kuchar, Wild Night
in El Reno (1977) [watch on YouTube].
This is one of the many films or videos Kuchar made which are just, basically,
glimpses of the changing weather seen through his apartment window. But what a
hyper-dramatic glimpse it is!
Personal
cinema, however, isn’t just defined by these (sometimes tawdry) areas of
content or intimate subject matter. Even more crucially, it’s defined by a
particular kind of effect that arises
from how the film treats, sees and records this material. Personal cinema
strives to be not so much raw and naked in its effect – although it is sometimes that – but, more
importantly, it strives to be fresh.
It proposes a type of filmmaking uncontaminated by the conventional rules,
codes, methods and clichés of narrative (as well as documentary) cinema. Personal
cinema aims for an experience of revelation,
an experience of seeing something in the everyday world as you’d never normally
see it or sense it. This is very fragile dream, easily disturbed and perverted
– but it’s a dream that can come true; you sometimes see it spring to action on
screen.
I
remember now another film: a short Japanese film shot on super 8 and video
called Embracing (1993), made by the now celebrated Naomi Kawase
when she was in her early 20s. This incredibly delicate, quiet film about
Kawase’s search for the father she had never known spends the majority of its
time with the tiniest sensations of everyday life – like the rustling leaves of
a tree, or the shadow she casts on the ground as she shoots her footage. These
sensations express everything: all the emotions, encounters and events to which Embracing otherwise simply alludes.
There
are many kinds of personal films. At one extreme, there are works like Nanni Moretti's whimsical Caro diario (1994), or the painfully
autobiographical films of Philippe Garrel – films which have the intimate,
revelatory feel I associate with personal cinema, because they give you that
frisson of brushing up against something real and material, with the directors
sometimes there in the flesh, in front of the camera. But these particular
examples are completely scripted and staged, not improvised; they don’t employ
a wildly roving, cinéma-vérité style. In the middle-ground
of this loose genre, there are tentative pieces such as Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991), essay-films that play with the paradoxes of
mixing documentary elements with fictional/staged/re-enacted levels; this is a
popular playground for independent filmmakers today.
But
right over at the other extreme of such filmmaking, we have the soil where the
idea and practice of personal cinema really took root and grew: all the arty
Super-8 films and low-band, low-tech video diaries that have been made since at
least the 1960s. Here you get the rawest stuff – the virtually pornographic sex
and/or masturbation pieces, the obsessively and grubbily voyeuristic works –
the kind of subject matter that Video
Fool for Love very gingerly and fleetingly evokes. Over the years of this
extensive Super-8 and video-art experimentation, however, a sophisticated
practice has also developed: the genre of the self– portrait (or autoportrait as the French specialists call it). This is a form in which a self – an individual’s
life or sensibility – is evoked not through raw documentary evidence, but rather
a highly idiosyncratic arrangement of the traces, the various souvenirs that
have been collected or left by that individual. One of the best known (and most
elusive!) self-portrait films is Chris Marker’s masterpiece Sunless (1983).
If personal cinema can be defined by a certain kind of content, plus a particular treatment of that content, then Video Fool For Love is a movie I find sorely lacking on both counts. Often, diaristic films/videos are enlivened by qualities of wit and insight, and especially of epiphany – the sudden, offhand glimpse of something, or a comment made by someone, that serves to throw everything we’ve so far seen and heard into perspective. Gibson’s film is utterly bereft of wit, insight or epiphany. Gibson himself, as the central narrator-hero of his own work, is no Moretti or McElwee – and the comparison that is sometimes made by reviewers between Gibson and Woody Allen seems to me way off the mark ... because he’s more like Henry Jaglom!
So,
he tries to compensate with tricks at the post-production end. Every now and
then, Gibson as the filmmaker departs from the raw vidéo-vérité documentary effect of his footage, and performs a
display of his editing skill. In these sections, he overlays ironic rock songs
on the material; or (as in one awful section) he injects images filmed off the
TV screen of the Gulf War starting up – which leads to the conceit of him
referring to his ex-lover April, and her nasty heartbroken letters, as a “scud
missile”: how smart!
Most
viewers who don’t like the film pick on that missile remark. But I thought
there was an even more terrible bit of business elsewhere: the scene where
Gibson takes a shot of Gianna complaining that his video diary has no structure,
and then intercuts it, interrupts it, with a shot of himself whining about his
fear that he can’t give her an orgasm. So we get a mocked-up conversation that
obviously didn’t happen: “You really have no structure, Robert!” / “I just want
to give you an orgasm, Gianna!” The whole contrivance manages a painful
exhibition of both Gibson’s maudlin-masculine tendency and his aggressivity –
his ability to manipulate this material and master it (and thus, on one level,
his lovers) any damn way he wants to.
But
I don’t want to get too moralistic with my own line of criticism here –
moralistic about either Gibson’s personal behaviour, or his tyrannical control
over the film. Because all of that is completely on the surface and
acknowledged: he openly displays his bad romantic manners, his self-indulgence,
as well as his knack of making things come out just the way he wants them to.
There’s always been such grandiose, self-flattering, deceitful, evasive aspects
inherent in personal cinema, whether it’s Gibson, Godard or Mekas at the helm;
all acts of autobiography are inevitably self-serving, in sometimes complex,
devious and unconscious (or only half-conscious) ways.
But Video Fool For Love goes a bit
further than just simply being candid about these dimensions of the video diary
project. Gibson also steers toward fiction, a kind of Tabloid TV,
quasi-investigative re-enactment – with after-the-event reflections by himself
and his parents. He keeps talking, within the film, about how he wants to make
his life a “multi-media event”. And he deliberately leaves in bits where he is
blatantly trying to direct and shape the real occurrences. So you have a
planned tension in the film between the raw reality of things and these sorts
of lordly, fictional contrivances (on this point, see Monica Zetlin’s excellent
review in Cinema Papers, no. 109,
April 1996).
Cast
in this somewhat generous light, it could be argued that Video Fool For Love plays with the idea that Life is a Movie – that
it is contaminated or at least influenced by movies, TV, pop songs, and so on.
That allows Gibson to play up the love story and romantic comedy clichés in an
ironic, knowing way – as if putting his own life in quotation marks. Of course,
many mainstream Hollywood romantic comedies, since at least Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), have been doing just
that kind of ironic schtick; there’s
a great deal in Jaglom’s films. But sometimes this knowingness is itself just
another kind of mask: at the end of Video
Fool for Love, when Gibson reels back through his favourite video memories
of Gianna, freezing, printing and pinning them up on his wall, I don’t think he’s
being ironic at all, anymore – he’s just being sentimental in a rather lazy,
uninspired way.
Life
is a movie, OK – that’s a fair premise for a film about modern romance, which
is what Video Fool For Love ultimately
wants to be. What I really want to know is: when exactly is life behaving like
a good movie or a bad movie, a useless, damaging movie or a truthful, profound
one? The worst thing about Video Fool For
Love is that life comes out as even less than a bad, stupid movie – it
comes out as pure TV cliché. Watching it, I remembered an early 1990s comment by
Jacques Aumont in an exhibition catalogue, wryly observing that we live in the
age of “generalised biography, of permanent, mediatised autobiography – that
is, when all is said and done, the age of advertising”. I don’t entirely share
Aumont’s general pessimism about the media, but I do think Video Fool For Love is a spectacularly distressing instance of permanently mediatised autobiography.
Here’s
what I mean. Every real person in this movie – especially Robert and Gianna –
play-acts for the camera. They project themselves as if larger-than-life screen
characters. Their decisions to fall in love, go on a holiday, get married, try
out some new sexual position – all of this seems to be lived out in a bizarrely
performative, exhibitionistic, superficial way, as if in the strenuous attempt
to follow some kind of witless, TV soap opera script. (For a far more genuinely
provocative “conceptual video” on the same basic track, check out Sophie Calle
& Greg Shephard’s Double Blind aka No Sex Last Night [1996].) When,
at a climactic moment, Gibson virtually forces himself to cry before his own
camera after Gianna has left him – that’s the utter nadir of this empty,
acting-out principle. People seem to have no connection or commitment to their
own life-actions here, beyond a vague sense of whimsy or an equally dim desire
for some drama. There is, in short, a terribly soulless and alienated quality
to the whole damn parade. An aside: I disagree with those critics who say that
the film is misogynistic to the extent that its male maker allows Gianna no
voice or space of her own. To my eyes at least, Gianna seems completely
complicit in this whole crazy game of skin-deep, let’s-pretend emotions.
The
video camera, with its ubiquitous presence, is definitely a party to this
all-round alienation. But the camera, alone, does not create it. You get the
feeling that, even if the camera were not on, these people would still behave in the same way. Because the alienation is
already deep in there, imbedded in these media-saturated, peculiarly
Sydney-side, inner-city arty lifestyles. (I know it’s a lazy, glib comment, but
I have entirely agree with the fellow Melbournian who said to me after a
preview screening: “It’s a very Sydney film, isn’t it?”) Once again, I’m trying
not to be too moralistic about this: if I thought it was offering me this
spectacle of alienation as something to ponder, I might applaud it. But alas …
When
I get to this extreme in trying to nut out my own hostile, critical feelings
about Video Fool for Love, I begin to
suspect that it perhaps doesn’t really deserve to be judged before the grand
history of what I’ve been calling personal cinema. Maybe it has much more in
common with the recent trend dubbed “camcorder culture”. Which is not a cinema
phenomenon at all, but rather a TV trend, which started with the intimate
domestic snooping of Sylvania Waters (1992) and marches on with a wave of TV series here and overseas where
so-called ordinary people are being asked to record and then compress their own
lives into snappy self-portraits for television. What I’ve seen of this Reality
TV trend so far, I don’t like – because it gives us just about nothing except
the spectacle of people deliriously happy to present themselves as TV clichés
for TV consumption. (Something that Albert Brooks foresaw with clairvoyant
precision in his satirical comedy Real Life [1979].)
The
late Serge Daney described this trend on as one in which the TV medium is
finally handed over to the people, but only on the condition that people hand
themselves over to TV – that they become body-snatched tele-people. Aumont saw
it as the triumph of advertising; Daney sums up the trend as “the marketing of
the individual, the disappearance of experience”. It all sounds grim, Gothic
and defeatist – maybe too much so. But there is a critical point to this
grimness. For it’s that green ray, that moment of truly individual experience,
which has made the dream of personal cinema a precious ideal for so many of us.
I can hardly see any truly individual experience in Video Fool For Love.
And
that’s why it depresses me.
Postscript
2018:
Video Fool for Love is an almost
impossible film to find today in any viewable format; there is little
documented trace of its existence anywhere online. Since its making, Robert
Gibson has continued working as an editor (mainly in TV, apart from Fred Schepisi’s Fierce Creatures [1997]), and has
assembled another, subsequent autobiographical video-based piece, the almost
hour-long (and ominously titled) Death of a Chook (2015) – the metaphoric beheaded chicken being himself.
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