 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Vincent
|
 |
|
Paul Cox's Vincent – once you get beyond seeing it as an art film, auteur film, or a rather uninformative biopic art documentary – is actually a very strange movie, momentarily echoing many lesser-known avant-garde neighbours. The hand-held figurations of tableaux vivants recall Godard's Passion (1982); the soundtrack narration purely from the artist's letters recalls Chris Marker's Sunless (1982); the filming of a landscape in the present while we hear a description of it from the past recalls Straub/Huillet. More exactly, the meandering counterpoint of image and narration (sometimes illustrative, sometimes not), the brutal monotonality of the sound (a voice with vague, sporadic noises underneath), and the gapingly unsutured, achingly personal camera-exploration of a vanished past (which can never be touched or reinvented) all combine to conjure a distinct group of recent Australian experimental films, including Dirk De Bruyn's Homecomings (1987), Simon Cooper's A Distant Relation (1990), Gillian Leahy's My Life Without Steve (1986), Mark Jackson's and Mark Stiles' Universal Provider (1988), and Bill Mousoulis' short super-8 essay films. If this comparison gives Vincent an especially melancholy gloss, that is because impulsive, personal acinema (to use Jean-Francois Lyotard's term) has an in-built pathos: betting all on the fragile, fleeting, unpreparable moment of communion between filmmaker and subject, film and viewer, it thus risks losing all, courting oblivion in the eyes of individual viewers and official art/cultural history. Of course, Cox is far more assured of continuing cultural support and a place in film history than the truly intractable, ephemeral impulsivists of the local scene like Marcus Bergner and Frank Lovece. Still, we miss out on a whole fascinating dimension of perversity in Cox and his oeuvre if we overlook what Tom O'Regan rightly calls his "unfamiliar risk-taking". MORE Cox: Cactus, The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, Human Touch, Lust and Revenge, The Nun and the Bandit, Innocence © Adrian Martin October 1991 |
