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“An Idleness Bordering on the Wacky”: |
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Australia’s
Only Genuine Auteur? This essay seeks to unravel that ambivalent, perhaps-recommendation-perhaps-not feeling about Cox’s art. This issue is larger than any criteria of aesthetic judgment that might be deemed internal to the work; as Gibson’s note suggests, art is a notion imposed almost forcibly on the viewer by the films, and by the rhetoric that surrounds them. Art becomes a salient feature of his oeuvre because it is so blatantly quoted and pointed to. Art furnishes the very iconography of his cinema, circumscribing the world in which his characters live – their home decor, jobs, hobbies, deepest life aspirations. Several of Cox’s films represent artists centrally (Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh, 1987; The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, 2001) or peripherally (Man of Flowers, 1983), and even the passionate, art-loving amateurs that populate his stories (like the classical music DJ of My First Wife or the clockmaker in Golden Braid, 1990) tend to be figures grandly symbolising The Artist. Although there is a sentimental and indulgent place reserved for certain effusions of kitsch – especially when it is associated with lovably eccentric elderly people, in the form of (for instance) cheery sing-alongs around a domestic upright piano – art tends to be restrictively defined in Cox’s universe: it is Art with a capital A, high art, elite art, and almost always classical art by the great painters, composers, sculptors, and so on. Pop plays little part in the Cox universe (the hero of My First Wife is driven to existential distraction by the loud rock music blaring in a neighbourhood pub), and kitsch frequently receives a darkly disapproving, satiric treatment (Sheila Florence’s clock-in-a-stuffed deer in Golden Braid or the familiar tunes in Cactus [1986]). Is it enough to observe that the obsequious relation which Cox’s oeuvre establishes with the most conservative and institutional definition of art has secured its recognition as a certain, special, elite sort of cinema – the so-called art cinema? Many things have changed in the public circuits of arthouse cinema since the era that Cox himself – and many moviegoers of his generation – look back on with fondness, the burgeoning market for ‘foreign films’ in the specialist cinemas and Film Festivals of the 1960s in Australia (he arrived in the country as a Dutch immigrant student in 1963). Cox’s career has been subject to fluctuating fortunes as the landscape of arthouse production, distribution and exhibition – as well as the critical discourse sometimes bolstering, at other times undermining this sector – has shifted and altered. One small but significant index of how these queasy changes may have affected Cox as a filmmaker, or found an uneasy symptomatic reflection in his work, is in the status of the references to New Age culture in his films. What was widely hailed as the attainment of a genuinely spiritual New Age serenity in his treatment of elderly characters in A Woman’s Tale (1991) and Innocence (2000) – not incidentally, the two works of his most eagerly embraced in the USA – curdles into the brittle, worldly satire of lifestyle fads and gurus in Lust and Revenge (1996) and Salvation (2008). Nonetheless, we need to go back to basics on the entire film-as-art question to grasp the public circulation of Cox’s cinema, today as yesterday – for few directors seem to so readily inspire such nostalgic and old-fashioned rallying to their supposedly heroic status. It is a little odd, for instance, to encounter a 2009 article on Cox which begins by citing David Stratton’s statement from a decade previously that the filmmaker is “probably Australia’s only genuine auteur” – a claim that is strictly nonsensical, unless we take ‘genuine auteur’ to be some cryptic synonym for ‘artist’, and an artist of an obviously especially rare and possibly endangered kind – and ends with the proclamation that “Cox has continued to make successful personal films in a world that prefers standard Hollywood narratives”. (2) What kind of mythologising is going on here? Clearly, something more is at stake than the act of ‘saving’ or redeeming a single filmmaker. A
Walking Contradiction It might seem impossible, after all these decades of cinema (amongst the other popular, mass produced forms), to maintain the simple assumption that commerciality necessarily entails both corrupt, dominant ideological motives and the endless production of culturally worthless trash. Yet, the functioning myth or illusion of an elite art cinema, off in its separate, ritualised social space, suggests that, despite all the contrary ideas that could be provided by history or common sense, some old cultural battle lines remain very entrenched indeed – even in a relatively young country like Australia, where these battles had to be (to an extent) imported. Despite some less than lustrous years in his public career from the mid-2000s on – Human Touch drew poor box-office business in 2004, and his final features Salvation and Force Of Destiny (2015) were little screened anywhere, even at Australian film festivals – there has been a resurgence of interest in Cox’s work, and a rise, once again, in his cultural legitimation. He was honoured with the Ken G. Hall Award in 2006, and the Australian Directors Guild Cecil Holmes Award in 2009. Critical studies – by Marek Haltof (who eight years previously wrote a book in Polish on the director called Authorship and Art Cinema: The Case of Paul Cox) (3) and Greg Dolgopolov in the book Diasporas of Australian Cinema, and by seven contributors to a special Senses of Cinema dossier – followed in the wake of a two-day tribute, titled “Paul Cox: Miracle Maker”, respectfully paid to the filmmaker at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in August 2009. From outside Australia, American celebrity-critic Roger Ebert [1942-2013] reiterated his fondness for this figure who is “a great film director, a great artist, and above all, a great soul.” (4) And so, the hagiographic tone that frequently accompanied the commentary on Cox’s work – and which will be unraveled below – returned in full force. This is partly (and understandably) in sympathy with the director’s brave fight, in his personal life, against cancer (to which he devoted his final film as well as a 2011 book, Tales from the Cancer Ward); and also partly due to a redoubled collective nostalgia for a lost ideal of art cinema in this day and age when – due to the deals inexorably and inevitably made between independent and commercial distributor-exhibitors – the likes of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) takes the place on designated arthouse screens once occupied by Cries and Whispers (1972), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Andrei Rublev (1966) or Amarcord (1973). However, every filmmaker – particularly one with a career as long and substantial as Cox – deserves an honest critique. This has been precisely what has been often missing, even suppressed, from the general public discourse on Cox’s peculiar contribution to Australian cinema. (Just take a look at the current Wikipedia entry on him, which cites, from the negative side of the critical ledger, a sole, damning phrase from the pugnacious Vikki Riley [1962-2012] – derived from a capsule Filmnews review that is not even of a Cox film, even though that publication dutifully covered most of them!) As a proclaimed film artist – proclaimed by others and frequently by himself – who makes movies about long-cherished ideals of art and artists within the circuit of arthouse cinema, Cox might seem an open-and-shut case for cultural analysis. In fact, his circulation is far stranger. The decided oddness of his films teases out some of the contradictions and struggles underlying the historical institution of art cinema. While Cox’s expressed attitudes hark back to a pristinely Romantic conception of the artist that ignores much of 20th and 21st century modernism and postmodernism, his style and method have obscure links to a cinematic avant-garde that has long found itself excluded at the gates of international art cinema, in Australia as elsewhere. Thus,
by focusing on what I perceive as the unusual, ill-fitting, misshapen
and repressed aspects of this director’s
work, I hope to open up some general questions about the place and
situation of art cinema in Australia today. Glimpse
of the Infinite As well as those who bought the idea in 1987, and were moved by its resonance in the film itself, there were already many who were ready to pounce on the whole event as the latest – last? – pale avatar of Romanticism in art. A typical but keenly astute attack by Richard Brown in the long-running Australian film magazine Cinema Papers summarised the by-then standard objections. It […] comes as no surprise that Paul Cox should choose to make a documentary on this artist, given Cox’s apparent reverence for (artistic) suffering and high-art values. Even the emphasis on van Gogh’s death in the title is a sure sign that suffering and death are key issues here. It’s the old cliché that to be truly creative (and ultimately to possess ‘genius’) one must go beyond the tolerances of bourgeois society to the very limits of existence. Only in this way can one’s art be ‘authentic’. (6) Here, the droll citation (in emphatic scare quotes) of once reverential words and concepts (artistry, creativity, genius, existential authenticity) sums up the skepticism, common among cinephiles by the late ‘80s, about Cox’s status as a local art cinema icon. Widespread, but in fact rarely written down or, at any rate, published: it is rather difficult to hunt down bad press on Cox beyond specific, usually brief film reviews and passing comments in some more general surveys of the national production scene, such as Scott Murray’s 1994 “Australian Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s”, in which the assessment of Cox’s later work as “bland, even clumsy” is withering. (7) Cox’s identification with van Gogh is indeed a little strange when we consider his medium of choice. Narrative or documentary filmmaking is hardly a solitary, spontaneous effusion, as painting or music can be. Cox’s own declarations on this point vacillate wildly: on the one hand, “you can’t make a film on your own … it’s very much a communal effort”; while on the other hand, his van Gogh and Nijinksy films needed to be shot by himself (a relatively rare occurrence in art cinema features, beyond exceptional instances like Steven Soderbergh and Philippe Grandrieux), since “I couldn’t explain to anyone what they were about.” (8) Cinema’s inextricable links with industry and commerce mean that even an artistic filmmaker needs sizeable sums of money and large, paying audiences if he or she wishes to make a feature per year, which Cox managed, on average, throughout most of the 1980s and ‘90s. Yet Romanticism – however obviously misguided its ideology to some observers – has not entirely been extinguished from our culture (whether dead by old age or murder); Cox’s continuing reputation is surely one sign of that. What keeps such Romanticism alive? How does it circulate? In a feature in the leisure section of the Melbourne newspaper The Age in 1991, author Thomas Keneally was reported as “describing Cox as being like [canonical Australian novelist Patrick] White, a bit of a genius and something of an Elijah”. (9) Such is the predominant image of Cox: cantankerous, eccentric, uncompromising, with an intractably personal vision and way of working, and absolutely necessary for our souls – a heroic Elijah who disadvantages himself and his career by rocking the boat of national culture. Cox thus fits into a grand old equation: The Artist vs. a Philistine Society. This is an historic characterisation of Australian life and culture that has long functioned in the pronouncements of many of our official opinion-holders and arts policy-advisers such as Keneally, Philip Adams, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Max Harris and Barry Humphries. According to this characterisation, we bravely endure, and struggle to change, a staid, conservative, conformist desert, whose philistines (including, naturally, petty bureaucrats in Government arts offices) are deeply afraid of innovation and individual artistry. Cox himself never hesitated to accuse funding bodies, the media and the mainstream audience of wilfully misunderstanding, ignoring and suppressing his work, as if it were far too threatening for ‘average’ Australians to even deal with – although his record of funding success, commercial release, critical support and faithful audience following (at least for a goodly portion of his career) indicates a quite contrary truth. Cox has often (it can be fairly said) played the role of victim or even martyr – as, for instance, when he accompanied the release of The Nun and the Bandit (1992), which constitutes the nadir of his career alongside Exile (1994), with the self-fulfilling prophecy (uttered on television) that “in Australia, The Nun and the Bandit won’t be appreciated on any level”. It may well be the case that this artist-against-society attitude of Cox (and some of his most vocal supporters) is a strangely outmoded, peculiarly middle-class reverie projected onto the lumpy lower-middle and working class mass that dwells in darkest Australian suburbia. It is an attitude that, anachronistically, enshrines Old World Europe as the origin of our true cultural heritage; as Tom O’Regan [1956-2020] pointed out, the central dramatic logic of My First Wife pits the “sensitive European immigrant” against “philistine contemporary Australia”. (10) Greg Dolgopolov has revised this image to also include the pronounced Eastern European, and specifically Russian, content and references in many Cox films – in his favourite-film lists for Sight and Sound magazine over several decades, Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov (who was Georgian by birth) featured prominently. However, since that historic day in 1991 when even TV Soap magazine hyped David Lynch, auteur of Twin Peaks, to its readers as a “demented genius” – inaugurating the roll-out for Tim Burton, Lars von Trier, Vincent Gallo and so many others – can it really be said that the mass of Australians (like audiences everywhere) are still so unmovably resistant to the notion of the special artist and his or her difficult work? Whatever the complexities of this debate, it is at least arguable that the elite anti-philistine position maintains itself only by holding to an astonishingly outmoded view of art and the supposed role of the artist in a Western nation such as Australia. Possibly the hardest figure for popular and art house filmic fiction alike to represent is the conceptual artist – by which I mean virtually anyone from Marcel Duchamp onwards whose work has anything explicitly to do with art-as-gesture, intellectual theory or political philosophy. In contemporary American mainstream movies like Legal Eagles (1986) and After Hours (1985), conceptual artists (variously into performance, installation or multi-media art) are invariably presented (as Pauline Kael once so accurately put it) as weirdos. (11) They are dehumanised, ruthless career artists, emotionally cold, manipulative and scheming; or simply too much head, not enough heart. “Life Lessons”, Martin Scorsese’s episode of New York Stories (1989), dramatises the matter in a nutshell: a slimy, styled-in-black performance artist (Steve Buscemi) versus a real artist (Nick Nolte) who rages around his vast studio splashing paint like the mass media’s favourite cliché of Jackson Pollock, the tortured soul. Tellingly, when Cox dares include artwork which is a little less canonical and more modern – such as the extravagant ‘environmental’ chicken-wire cone sculptures by Asher Bilu, a sometime collaborator of the filmmaker – he finds it necessary to insert an over-the-top artist figure, Ouspensky (Terry Norris), to explain to us that we should be experiencing a “glimpse of the infinite”. A point of comparison from contemporary Australian literature is also useful here: Janine Burke’s 1989 novel Company of Images. (12) Burke is an art historian closely aligned with the feminist movement in Australia, and her interests and inclinations spread into every kind of creative endeavour, including conceptualism and poststructuralism. Nonetheless, John O’Brien, in a review of Company of Images, took the novel as a fantasy of artists and the ‘life of art’ deeply revealing of the same Romantic mentality that Cox and his fellow-travellers share: a sublime world of feeling, expression, angst, confession and the almighty struggle with form. So what’s art up to in all this? Burke’s approach is essentially inspirational and autobiographical. Artworks are important because of the people and influences that form them (...) There’s no sense of art being an interaction with the world at any level other than the personal (...) Instead it’s the ‘special thing’ that makes artists different from the rest of us (...) Art is a version of the darkness and lightness of their talented but troubled souls and it allows us to see the darkness and lightness of our own, less talented ones. (13) In other words, O’Brien interprets Company of Images (mistakenly, in my view) as myopic and nostalgic, feverishly invested in the last traces of a sensibility and a vocation for the artist which (at the very least) are no longer the sole or solely valid ones. Perhaps he was really thinking of Paul Cox’s movies! For Man of Flowers plays out exactly this myopia through the figure of its villainous, modern artist (Chris Haywood); it is revealing to note that, where for Scorsese a Pollock-type painter figures an authentic artist, Cox revives an even earlier and more conservative divide (functioning before Pollock was legitimated) between the profound, patient classical painter and the agitated, garish, action painter. Yet, while even a Cox appreciator like Brian McFarlane baulks at the “somewhat easy tilt at ‘modern art’” (14) in Man of Flowers, Romanticism of the most traditional persuasion finds itself riding shotgun with this auteur filmmaker, because it has been transmuted into a new vehicle, with its own strange conditions of cultural existence: that which we call the art cinema. The
Rhetoric of Institutional Art Cinema In this account, I will not entirely follow the scholarly lead taken by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson in their more restricted claim that art cinema constitutes a “distinct group style” with recurring conventions and tropes, perhaps even a distinct filmic genre, with a “unified set of viewing strategies”. (15) The reasoning on which his model is based seems to me dangerously circular: the aesthetic of art cinema is to be deduced from the pool of films precisely chosen, in the first place, to fill the pre-defined slots in the institutional circuits of arthouse cinema. Since its initial formulation in the mid ‘80s, Bordwell & co.’s model of art cinema has enabled in some places – although this was doubtless very far from its intention – a thoroughly dismissive attitude towards any and every imaginable kind of artistically ambitious filmmaking as just another ‘arty’ genre; this is a flip critical posture we now see regurgitated daily online. However, I would propose that any discussion of art cinema today needs to be terribly mindful of what this sifting procedure of the vast pool of possible films into an ‘art genre’ – whether performed at the level of industry or the humanities academy – viciously excludes: plenty of evidently artistic cinema, such as most of the important work that has come from Asia over the past three decades, has, in many places (Australia included) found itself unfairly undistributed, unseen and undiscussed (Thanouli 2009, see note 15). Further aporias constituting the arthouse corpus – which I will henceforth, inspired by Steve Neale’s 1981 account (see note 15), designate institutional art cinema for conceptual clarity – will also shortly become clear. Institutional art cinema, historically and culturally well-entrenched, maintains a careful distance from both popular art and the spiritually closer realm of experimental or avant-garde film and video – even though the hands-on, process-oriented practices that typify this latter realm might seem to make it a better candidate for a film art that closely resembles painting, music, writing or sculpture. Institutional art cinema can, to a great extent, be defined by the tracks of its cultural circuit: from premiere Film Festival exhibition to select art house distribution, and later to repertory cinemas (now in decline) or museums of audiovisual art (such as ACMI in Melbourne), television channels with a declared commitment to artistic or multicultural programming (in Australia, SBS and its digital offshoot World Movies, which became a free-to-air service in 2019), and lastly enshrinement (if a film is lucky) on a DVD or Blu-ray ‘quality’ label, such as Madman’s ‘Directors Suite’ in Australia [2006-2010] or, pre-eminently on the international stage, Criterion in USA. (For the record, there is, to date, no Cox film released on DVD/Blu-ray by Criterion; the global rights to a ‘Paul Cox Collection’ are currently held by Jeremy Thomas’ HanWay Films, and certain titles are available via streaming through Bloomsbury Video Library.) Institutional art cinema represents an intriguing, sometimes contradictory transmutation of the Romantic ideals of High Art and Lofty Artist into the technology and industry of the feature film. As if in a Faustian pact with mainstream cinema, narrative (at feature length) became, with the 1950s and the rise of Film Festival culture, the indispensable prerequisite for an art film (whereas it can be absent or contested within avant-garde cinema) – and it remained that way for a very long time, until the surprising success of documentaries (still feature length) in the ‘90s and beyond, such as those by Michael Moore, opened a new niche in the market. (The Chris Marker-style essay-film, however, still finds it near-impossible to crack this market, with the rare exception of a work such as Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I [2000].) Most central to the successful formation of the identikit art film is the figure of the auteur. It is often overlooked that, long before it went into bat for popular cinema, auteurism as a critical or cultural principle was firstly and most powerfully the practice of finding and valorising the cinema’s great artists, the Chaplins, Murnaus, Dreyers, Fellinis and Kurosawas who would win artistic legitimation for the mongrel, tainted medium of film; this movement goes back long before the auteurists of Cahiers du cinéma to (at least) the writings of Louis Delluc in the 1910s and ‘20s. Thus the film d’auteur is one that resembles, say, a canvas by a great painter by virtue of its signature touches, its familiar themes, and its catalogue of obsessions (which can border on the perverse or the pathological) deemed personal to the filmmaker – in all of which we come to recognise the identity of the artist. (Words like ‘familiar’ and terms like ‘personal obsession’ pop up in virtually every piece written on Cox, positive or negative). (16) However, such necessary repetition of the markers of artistic identity can also be the great curse, the fatal trap, for every self-styled auteur – today more than ever. By the time Cox’s career had hit the dawn of a new century, his cinema seemed to many observers to be merely facile, static, treading the same ground over and over. What seemed striking and personal in his early shorts and features can now seem tired and calculated, a species of cliché. Positif editor Michel Ciment once rightly exclaimed in admiration of the truly great directors: “What a complex path leads from I Vitelloni (1953) to Intervista (1987) for Fellini, from Los Olvidados (1950) to That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) for Buñuel, from Citizen Kane (1940) to The Immortal Story (1968) for Welles, from Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) to Fanny and Alexander (1982) for Bergman!” (17) Did Cox’s cinema change, evolve, deepen over a comparable time-frame? It is a question that his devotees invariably dodge. Institutional art cinema broadly delimits its available range of references, styles and subject matters. Part of its rhetoric of self-differentiation is an anti-Hollywood stance, and independent filmmakers as fundamentally different as Cox and Ken Jacobs have happily played up this public posture. As early as 1977, Cox was in the habit, when he made guest appearances in the media-studies classes of Melbourne, of asking the students what film they had most recently seen; on the day that I witnessed one of these performances as a student (at what was then known as Melbourne State College, now part of University of Melbourne), the mere mention of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) was enough to trigger his immediate and violent denunciation of it as “Hollywood crap”! Fourteen years later, his tune had not changed: a small item in the Melbourne newspaper The Age, titled “Director Complains”, ran: “The Australian film director Paul Cox told a federal parliamentary inquiry yesterday that Australian film-makers were being forced to imitate US-style films to attract production funds and distribution deals.” (18) Cox’s disdain for Hollywood, it should be noted, easily extends to a disdain for most film critics, and for the general activity of criticism, as just another part of the oppressive, industrial system: his wicked, self-identifying delight in including Nijinsky’s nastiest remarks about no-nothing dance critics in The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky is palpable. (See Coda). Cox’s films deck themselves out with a reassuring iconography of recognised great works of art: an enormous array of paintings, prints, arias, novels, etc., is sampled at great length and with heavy emphasis. Significantly, one of the few extended academic appreciations of his cinema, by Victoria Duckett, is devoted entirely to an ingenious discussion of the classic paintings and music featured in Man of Flowers. (19) Such sampling is a trope that Cox may well have borrowed from the cinema of his beloved master, Tarkvosky, and perhaps (even if only unconsciously or intuitively) for the same purpose that was explicit in the trajectory of the celebrated Russian filmmaker: in order to have cinema accepted as an art on the same level as the established arts, he felt compelled to incorporate – for both strategic and aesthetic purposes – the canonical masterpieces from other media. When the art featured by Cox is non-canonical – like the modernist sculpture in Human Touch – it must therefore come with an added annotation (usually in the form of character dialogue) that signifies it for us as either possessing a positive (‘glimpse of the infinite’) or negative (‘soulless and mercenary’) value within the milieu or habitus of art that Cox traces and invokes. The Bordwellian account of art cinema is useful to this extent: it offers the sketch of a style which, on the one hand, tames the purely formalist possibilities of avant-garde cinema, while on the other hand muddying up the standard linearity, homogeneity and naturalism of classical Hollywood cinema. That is to say, it embraces narrative (the trait that most unequivocally separates it from hyper-formalist avant-gardism) while at the same time emptying out narrative’s more ‘vulgarly’ entertaining and reassuring drives, introducing degrees of indeterminacy (between, say, fantasy and reality, or past and present), overtly meaningful or symbolic devices, and more intractably subjective kinds of realism (boredom, hallucination, psychosis – Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ledger of the ‘free indirect’ mode in his theory of the Cinema of Poetry). (20) Like all broad forms of cinema, institutional art cinema comes to define itself by way of a particular textual economy – the balance of story to style, or (in Pascal Bonitzer’s terms) narration to figuration. (21) In a sense, the economy of this institutional art cinema lies in how it anchors the purely expressive play of style (the figurative play of light, colour, shape, sound, etc., that might constitute the entire substance of an avant-garde work) with basic (sometimes minimal) elements of narrative and representation – identifiable characters, some manner of stable fictional world, perhaps a hermeneutic enigma (what will be revealed?), or simply a predictable plan of everyday actions: Jerzy Skolimowski’s return to filmmaking after a long absence, Four Nights with Anna (2008), offers a model example. Characterisation – particularly, as Bordwell argues, structured as subjective perception – is perhaps the key anchoring element: the reason why Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (2006) or Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen (2009) will always make it into arthouse distribution in most countries way ahead of the collected works of Tsai Ming-liang or Ulrich Seidl is that the former (it is said by arthouse buyers) have what the latter lack: ‘three-dimensional’ human beings you can feel for and identify with, not mere ciphers or figures. Let us now turn, more particularly, to the largely supportive critical commentaries on Cox’s cinema, and the comfortable role they play within the rhetoric of institutional art cinema. As has been noted, there is a curious lack of rigour, of any in-depth analysis in the available accounts of Cox’s work, even when signed by those who champion him most fervently. Victoria Duckett opines that “discussion about Cox has not yet moved beyond the immediacy of any given person’s response to his work … Cox is either an independent director making unnecessarily artistic films, or a European auteur valiantly fighting the stifling hold that bureaucracy has over filmmaking in Australia. In either instance, we are told very little about what he might have brought to film”. (22) Philosopher Alexander García Düttmann cuts to the chase with his impression that “spectators who love the films Cox has made tend to await his next film eagerly rather than engage in endless analyses of his past work” – and, in this, the films “challenge a commonplace of aesthetics” by failing “the test when repeated viewing, or reading, or listening, no longer reveals the force originally attributed to them”. (23) We shall return to the possibilities of an ‘idiosyncratic’ approach raised by García Düttmann’s astute (and refreshingly honest) remarks. Brian McFarlane’s essentially positive evaluation of Cox in his book Australian Cinema 1970-1985 is revealing in light of the preceding remarks about the identikit of institutional art cinema. Cox is claimed and valued by McFarlane as representing an attempt at cinema that is “other than linear realism” in the Australian feature context. His overtly expressive use of form is praised: moving away from the “more or less naturalist treatment” of his first features, Cox is “prepared to be ambitious, to risk charges of floridness and pretension (...) and to make use of screen space in quite daring ways”. At the farthest limit of art cinema’s aesthetic economy, Cox can even be commended for being a “highly self-conscious filmmaker” whose “methods foreground the artificiality of film as a system”. The constraints of art cinema are made abundantly clear in McFarlane’s central assessment that Cox has “a restless visual flair and energy that sometimes to threaten to shake his structures, but (...) there is a sufficient grasp of the central narrative concern to keep his potential excesses in control”. (24) Even the sophisticated defence of Cox by García Düttmann ends on a similar note of tenacious control: “His is an art of wandering off that dislodges its focus without renouncing it.” (25) Institutional art cinema, then, is a regulated economy resting on ‘structures’ and ‘central narrative concerns’. ‘Energy’, ‘flair’ and ‘excess’ cannot exist purely for their own sakes (as they can in avant-garde cinema, such as the example of Carmelo Bene’s work in Italy between 1968 and 1973), but must be channeled into the deep expression of character and theme. Cox’s positive commentators thus set themselves eagerly to the task of unraveling, teasing out these hidden complexities of character and theme – hidden because, as Bill Routt and Rick Thompson once suggested, elite art distinguishes itself from popular art by its store of secrets which have to be interpreted, its meanings which are not simply “on display”. (26) This interpretative process is at work, for instance, when the overtly stylised apparitions punctuating Cox’s films – most famously, his signature use of blown-up Super-8 footage – call forth a symbolic reading that is also a psychoanalysis of the main protagonists’ inner complexes. Jan Epstein mythically decodes the “three incarnations” of the “Great Goddess” in Bernard’s hallucinations in Golden Braid (“maid, mother and crone”), concluding that the character “associates loving with dying”. (27) Michael Dempsey, an American exegete of Cox, grasps the inserts in My First Wife as “John’s actual, distorted memories of moments when he felt perfectly happy ... the essential point (...) is that they are fading, losing their power to move him”. (28) Haltof interpreted these recurring Super-8 passages in Cox as the privileged expression, within a multicultural framework, of diasporic memory and longing. (29) If there are uneven proportions of story to style in the films – signs that they might be lurching out of control – such tremors can be settled, thematised (Robin Wood-style) in terms of “an interesting tension between the film’s handsome, sometimes florid surfaces and the sense of incipient disruption that always seems about to threaten them” (McFarlane), (30) or a pervasive “evanescence of meaning” in the world Cox depicts (Dempsey). (31) Paths
of Personal Cinema There are many ways in which Cox’s films are astonishingly unformed, oddly clumsy or amateurish, as if he had either aimed for an off-hand effect, or was not fussed about getting rid of it once it arose – an effect that puts his films subtly at odds with both classical narrative and institutional art cinema. “There is an idleness here,” suggests García Düttmann, “something bordering on the wacky” (34) – as if, for Cox, near enough a particular effect, mood or meaning is almost always good enough. This ‘idleness bordering on the wacky’ can be seen on every level of Cox’s filmmaking practice: Narrative. Cox seems very uneasy and hesitant with the full blooded articulations of his given stories – their key turning points, exchanges and passionate acts, which are not so much elided in a celebrated ‘minimalist’ manner (à la Robert Bresson or Abbas Kiarostami) as fumbled. His films often skip what might be deemed essential dramatic scenes, and skimp on the explanation of the sketchy scenes that remain. See, in this regard, Island (1989); or compare the official synopsis for Golden Braid (which describes the hero’s ultimate, cathartic transcendence of his obsession) with the abrupt, virtually illegible sequence of narrative actions in the finished film. In fact, one could profitably carry out a press-kit-to-film comparison for every Cox work where these materials exist, and the results would be (according to my non-exhaustive research) quite similar. Of Human Touch, the press kit tells us that it concerns Anna (Jacqueline McKenzie), who is “intoxicated” by the “dense artistic and erotic environment” inhabited by her unlikely patron, Edward (Chris Haywood); and that posing nude for Edward’s photographs “starts her on an intimate journey of self-discovery”, thus impacting on Anna’s partner, David (Aaron Blabey), who slowly “responds and starts to understand what is required of him”. None of this is really evident in the film itself. Cox seems unable to suggest the sorts of clues that allow a viewer to fill in the picture, intellectually or emotionally; the substance of Human Touch, like many a Cox film, tends to vanish in the gaping holes between scenes. Theme. Cox’s films invariably tackle what Claude Chabrol once labeled (and denounced) as the Big Themes: Life, Love, Age, Death, Art, Compassion, Evil, Redemption (35) – he has even made a film (a documentary on Egyptology in collaboration with Phillip Adams) with the bald title of Death and Destiny (1984)! But these themes are usually too big and too vague for the slender dramatic scaffolding that supports them, especially when that narrative structure is as rickety as the preceding paragraph has asserted; curiously, his most artistically successful Big Theme movie is also his most conventional, Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (1999). Even what a particular film announces it is about – haptic relations, in the case of Human Touch – tends to be fuzzily demonstrated and worked through in dramatic (or comic) terms, as if the guiding thread or central metaphor of a film has been lost along the way of its elaboration. (36) Characterisation. In her Filmnews review of Golden Braid, Liz Jacka complains of the recurring “psychological implausibility” of Cox’s characters. (37) Even some of the filmmaker’s most ardent admirers and collaborators, well versed in the realistically indeterminate character motivations of institutional art cinema, have problems with the inexplicable, illogical actions of Colo (Isabelle Huppert) in Cactus or Helen (Wendy Hughes) in My First Wife. At the key turning points of the narrative, the internal transformations of Cox’s characters are rarely well conveyed, and just as rarely mesh with the externally dramatised events. The acting is, naturally, a large part of the characterisation problem in Cox’s work: by any reasonable measure, the performances – both across the ensemble of actors, and even within the performance of a single actor – are frequently (sometimes alarmingly) uneven. One is hardly surprised to hear the testimony of his regular collaborator Chris Haywood that “There have been occasions when the days are running out and Cox is busy choreographing a long tracking shot (to contain a whole scene) that the time he normally gives to his actors to find their own rhythms and pace is lost in the scramble to shoot.” (38) Mise en scène. Cox’s dramaturgic staging reaches surrealistic heights of disjunction, particularly between central foreground and ambient background action (examples include the scenes of the outdoor cafe in Island and the restaurant in Golden Braid). Examples abound in his oeuvre of scenes that appear stiff, sluggish, obscure, not quite ‘all there’ (eg., the ending of Cactus). Once again – as in the narrative structuration – the amorphous, big idea precedes its realisation and at times appears to be inadequately translated into, embodied within, concrete detail. García Düttmann also testifies to the sense that it is as if “the artist’s subjectivity had not been entirely absorbed into the films themselves, or as if my response depended on a remainder, on a willingness to relate to a specific intention, to a particular sense of oddity and whim”. (39) Dialogue. Several of Cox’s script collaborators (including Bob Ellis, John Clarke and Barry Dickens – all, curiously enough, well-known as professional humourists) have drolly described, in press and media interviews, the detached, almost proudly dsyfunctional way that Cox approaches the question of dialogue. It is written to order within rather grand, arbitrary parameters (“make it dry, funny and poignant”). As spoken by the actors in the final film, it often seems to float somewhere above the specific logic of the scene or the characters’ internal, psychological workings. We are far here from either the deliberately, exquisitely oddball dialogue constructions of Elaine May and John Cassavetes (40) or the severe Strindbergian forms of speech so carefully stylised and orchestrated by Ingmar Bergman. Much of the dialogue in Cox seems simply clumsy. (Indelible line delivered, with palpable uncertainty, by Bud Tingwell in Innocence: “We shared a lot of lust”.) Soundtrack. The soundtracks – in the sense of sound designs, not soundtrack albums of assembled music – in Cox’s films are among the rawest in contemporary cinema (and I intend no slight here against the professionalism of his sound technicians). They are largely constructed from direct sound recordings of actors in noisy outdoor locations or real domestic settings – the dialogue constantly interrupted (and sometimes drowned out) by the random sounds of birds, passing cars, clocks, etc. (Cactus’ recurring, deafening whipbird is an unforgettable example). Of course, just as commercial cinema has perfected an aesthetic of wholly constructed and artificial post-synchronised sound, innovative cinema has explored, in many remarkable instances, an aesthetic of direct sound, which Michel Marie has pointed to in the work of Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer and Jean Eustache among others, and which today continues in Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Dardenne brothers. (41) Cox’s soundtracks, however, appear to have no deliberateness or sense of concrete cinematic form whatsoever. Similar observations could be made, to an extent, about Cox’s choice and placement of diverse musical selections, even when he using an original score (as in Paul Grabowsky’s frequent mock-classical musical stylings for all the films since A Woman’s Tale). Camerawork and Editing. Often vaguely praised for his ‘eye’ and for the ‘gorgeous work’ of the cinematography in his films (a technical role that, as mentioned, he sometimes fills himself), Cox’s visual style is often sloppy, at least by any conventional aesthetic standard. Watch Vincent or Man of Flowers on fast forward and you will see how regularly monotonous, meandering and ungenerative of meaning his camera strategies are (especially his ubiquitous, meandering pan shots). Often Cox places an inordinate, lazy faith in evenly-lit, long-take master shots (Lust and Revenge is an especially clear example of this); and he has an unfortunate penchant (particularly evident in The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky) for inert, blandly centred framing, simply following whatever occupies the middle position of the shot. As for editing, judged by Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum – “When you put two images together a current should pass between them to unify them” (42) – Cox fails badly, indeed. Montage relations are regularly inert and undynamic, even (or especially) when a super-significant insert or shock scene transition is used for juxtaposition or counterpoint (as in the heavy-handed intercutting between a domestic argument and the sound of the gardener raging around with the lawnmower in Human Touch). Finally, the (in)famous Super-8 effects, used in film after film, subject themselves to a law of diminishing returns, able to signify little beyond ‘here we go again’ – diaspora or no diaspora. (The Nun and the Bandit once again signals the lowest point in Cox’s career when it juices up its obligatory Super-8 passages with an earnest signifier of indigeneity: the overlaid sound of a didgeridoo!) All this suggests that if Cox belongs to the institutional art cinema, he must surely inhabit its slightly ratty (idiosyncratic) fringe. This fringe in fact has a discernible, historic character, one that is rarely publicly acknowledged. Cox is a naïve art filmmaker. Although naïveté has been theorised as an important aspect of popular cinema (particularly in the genre of melodrama), (43) its rightful place in the history of art cinema is equally undeniable. Naïve art cinema forms a tradition that runs from Jean Vigo and Roberto Rossellini through to Werner Herzog and Canada’s Guy Maddin – and, not coincidentally, Cox has appeared in feature films by both of the last-named figures (as well as a short by F.J. Ossang!). In the Australian cinema context, Cox’s closest cousin would thus undoubtedly be Rolf de Heer, whose trajectory is, on so many levels, very similar. (44) Like Rossellini (or later, Godard), Cox is a casual director who fixes on the broad, abstract idea of a project (‘a man obsessed with clocks is redeemed by the love of a good woman’), and finds himself “hesitating, alienated, absent” before the onerous demands of illusionism and story-telling; (45) like Herzog, Cox remains defiantly “self-trained and unteachable”, drawn to present what is excessive, bizarre, eccentric and incongruous in behaviour or environment. (46) For all its apparent beauty, Cox’s cinema is perhaps wilfully less seductive, less communicable as art cinema than is usually assumed, and rather more obtuse, ungainly, ingrown, even stupid – in the glowing sense given to this word by Roland Barthes (and adopted by Elsaesser) of being productively thick, obstinate, recalcitrant. (47) These are aspects of Cox’s work that are simply not readable within the terms (or the blinkers) of institutional art cinema. The dominant mode of art cinema, which we rightly call slick, is one based on control, mastery, refinement: typical art-words for sublimation, repression, secondary revision of raw or disturbing material. (Only in recent years, with Lynch’s Inland Empire [2006], has this mode been successfully transgressed and expanded.) Slick cinema is rigorously worked over, managed, virtuosic; its rightful masters include Joseph Losey, Ingmar Bergman and Bertrand Tavernier. Cox plumbs a quite different, uneasily neighbouring mode that I would call impulsivism – which puts a premium on the spontaneous directorial impulses that arise during shooting, and trusts the truth of whatever results. Moving away from Rossellini’s didactic-pedagogic drive to impart limpidly clear messages (a key characteristic of much naïve art), Cox tends more towards Herzog’s aspiration to put on the screen visions and prophecies – to make the audience experience, in a kind of ecstatic, magical, hit-or-miss communion with the filmmaker, intense emotional states. Impulsivism can break the mould of institutional art cinema altogether, and often finds its spiritual soulmate in the cinéma maudit realm of the avant-garde (a central inspiration for Herzog, for instance, was the wild, uncoded cinema of Stan Brakhage). It is a mostly unrecognised fact – written out of virtually all the major positive commentaries on the director (with the exception of Haltof’s), and seemingly quite unknown to fans beyond Australia such as Ebert – that Cox began in the sphere of experimental cinema, making many avant-garde shorts that won acclaim at Filmmakers’ Co-ops and festivals; Illuminations (1976) was the most widely seen and acclaimed of these during the ‘70s. It’s as if, from the moment Cox adopted narrative form for Inside Looking Out (1977) – however clumsily or bizarrely – his avant-garde past could be forgiven, his roots erased. Yet, one of the most striking and intriguing facets of Cox’s career is that, from one angle, his films maintain a dialogue with local avant-garde cinema, while the art cinema institution that embraces him certainly does not, never has, and probably never will. I am not claiming that Cox has a burning love for, or even a working familiarity with, contemporary avant-garde cinema – not for this naïf. But Cox’s particular manifestations of impulsivism do put him in calling distance of what, in avant-garde circles, gets lightly theorised as personal cinema – a more idiosyncratic and riskier realm than formulaic, institutionalised art cinema. Tom O’Regan hits on this when, for him, the Super-8 sequences in My First Wife “go on just a shade too long”, exhaustedly drop the “existential weight of the husband’s state of mind” and then “derepresentationalise and thus diminish the scope for us to see anything clearly”. In this flickering, distorted acinema (Jean-François Lyotard’s term), O’Regan intuits Cox’s drive to “place [him]self, [his] whole being” in the service of the cinematic apparatus, likening him to a Dr Faustus. (48) For an average arthouse audience, this kind of personal display might well be too naked or indulgent – or, at the other extreme, might not be readable or translatable at all, not even as a signification of the artist’s metaphysical Being. Take Vincent, which is – once you get beyond seeing it as an institutional art film, auteur film, or not-exactly-informative biopic documentary – actually a very unusual movie, momentarily echoing many works inimical to institutional art cinema. The hand-held figurations of tableaux vivants recall Godard’s Passion (1982); the soundtrack narration purely from the artist’s letters evokes Chris Marker’s Sunless (1983); the filming of a landscape in the present while we hear a description of it from the past bears comparison with the work of Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, or Júlio Bressane in Brazil. 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 contemporaneous Australian experimental films, from a contemporaneous set including Dirk De Bruyn’s Homecomings (1988), Simon Cooper’s A Distant Relation (1987), Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986), Mark Jackson’s and Mark Stiles’ Universal Provider (1988), to Bill Mousoulis’ low-budget features My Blessings (1997), Desire (1999) and Spring Rhapsody (2004). If this comparison gives Vincent an especially melancholy gloss, that is because impulsive, personal acinema has an in-built pathos: betting all on the fragile, fleeting 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 (Bressane’s work is particularly poignant at this level). Such melancholia becomes especially apparent, almost two decades after Vincent, in Cox’s tender tribute (mostly comprised of clips from his past work) to his longtime actor Norman Kaye, the ‘man of flowers’, in The Remarkable Mr Kaye (2005) – a film haunted by the literal mental and physical devastation wreaked by encroaching Alzheimer’s Disease. In the general cultural scheme of things, Cox is far more assured of continuing cultural support and a place in film history than the truly intractable, ephemeral impulsivists of the local avant-garde scene, like Marcus Bergner or Sally Golding. Still, we miss out on a whole fascinating dimension of perversity in Cox and his oeuvre if we overlook what O’Regan rightly takes to be his “unfamiliar risk-taking”. (49) A Scenario of Alienation Moravia’s men characters belong to reality; his women belong to myth. And the blueprint hardly changes over six decades: bourgeois intellectual, immobilised by thought, anguished at his ‘inauthenticity’ (on account of being bourgeois); and Woman, all ‘instinct’ etc, frequently regarded by the aforementioned bourgeois intellectual as a kind of sacred monster. (50) Suzanne Kiernan’s description of the blueprint used by Italian novelist Alberto Moravia fits the films of Paul Cox remarkably well. This should not be too surprising, since the outlined scenario is one of the classics of institutionalised art cinema and the no-less institutionalised and canonised literature from which it draws, evident in many films from the Rossellini/Ingrid Bergman collaborations of the ‘50s through to Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And would it be news to anyone nowadays to point out the patriarchal sexism underlying much institutional art cinema? However, the simple conflation of Cox with the unproblematic endorsement of what Richard Brown called “high-art values” misses something else that is strange, recurrent and obsessive in his work. It is the contradiction all his films dramatise between the supposed vital need for a high art life, and the even more urgent need to finally, magically transcend it. Art is what gives life its meaning and sublimity – and is at the same time the central agent of human alienation. Art (whether painting, music-loving, or clock making) is about things, not people; it incites obsessive, fetishistic, solipsistic, necrophiliac behaviour; it is a solitary, not communal activity. Art inspires with its transcendent air, its aura of the highest human achievement; but it can also become a morbid, solitary affair, blocking the journey back to life, the natural world (always so prominently and solemnly displayed in Cox’s films) and other people. Cox’s films, one to the next, catch themselves in a loop. They start by presenting a hero who has withdrawn from the existential ugliness of the philistine, material world into the sublimity of art. At first, our pathos is solicited: yes, the world is hard and brutish, better by far to lock oneself away with the recognition of this truth, and the beauty of art to warm one through the infinity of lonely nights. Then, the film moves to a more critical, distanced mode, as the hero becomes madder, angrier, more self-destructive. What he lacks, it is clear, is Love; but, not seeing this, he turns to the worship of dead art-things and shuts out the Great Goddess who is offering him human salvation. Finally, there is crisis, catharsis, revelation: the hero transcends his obsession and, in the final scene, embraces a life of simple emotion, a life no more glamorous or notable than yours or mine. This specifically, is the scenario of Golden Braid, but it fairly indicates, in my view, the rough blueprint from which all Cox’s films are constructed. As a thematic structure per se, it constitutes a perfectly valid, indeed fertile set of preoccupations; Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, 1996) and Takeshi Kitano (Hana-Bi, 1998) have done wonders with quite similar blueprints. The crucial point to make here, beyond any aesthetic evaluation of Cox’s work, is that the moment of transcendent happiness, which comes so magically, so abruptly, so implausibly at the end of his movies (lending them a spurious air of redemption), can hardly sustain itself to the final fade or freeze. Inescapably, at the start of the next Cox piece, we find ourselves back again, mired in the indescribably beautiful hell of bourgeois alienation, with the paintings and the prints and the books and the records ... For how could Cox ever really escape this vicious circle? Those who use art as a visionary means to dream a beyond-of-art either break through, give up, or are stuck wrestling with the contradiction. For Mishima, the personal fantasy of a “union of pen and sword” dramatised itself in suicide – and yet (as Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters [1985] so cruelly and lucidly asks) who was there that could read his final act of performance art as he himself experienced it? For Rossellini, the drive to empty and purify cinema – to transform it into a pure thought-track or remote-controlled caméra-stylo of the auteur – led him to abandon it to a substantial degree, opting instead for the greater transparency of television. Cox is rather more like Herzog, whose passionate denunciations of industry, technology and civilisation are voiced, impossibly, in the most industrial and technological of media, cinema; a contradiction which can only ever impel the endless return to zero, and the building up and tearing down of each new work as it is created. On every level of production and marketing, Cox’s films are suffused with this type of self-deconstructive impossibility or contradiction. They denounce commodification, but are themselves market commodities. They decry popular culture, but are hyped with an auteur’s personal media image. They reach out to the paradisal moment of effusive, undocumentable personal bliss when fetishising, reified art-objects like films won’t ever be needed by anyone for their alienated cathexes ... but, as García Düttmann rightly observed, his fans, who “tend to await his next film eagerly”, will line up yet again for the ritual go-round of the scenario of alienation (as they do, equally, and again with renewed vigour in the 21st century, for Woody Allen). The back cover of the Australian VHS release of Vincent splashes a quote from van Gogh: “The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more artistic than to love people”. Such lines reappear quite obsessively in films like Innocence, which concludes with the bald exhortation to “love the world”! Did Paul Cox, too, wish for his own blessed, evanescent escape route from the public contradictions of his art? This auteur may have dreamed, with his soul brother van Gogh, of renouncing art for the simple love of a Good Woman. But if he did, he would have had to face up to a brutal cultural fact: away from the public sphere, few could care less about his inexpressible happiness. It just would not have been a media event anymore.
NOTES 2. Marek Haltof, “‘A European Heart’: Exile, Isolation and Interiority in the Life and Films of Paul Cox”, in Catherine Simpson, Renata Murawska & Anthony Lambert (eds.), Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2009), pp. 128, 135. back 3. Marek Haltof, Autor I kino artystyczne. Przypadek Paula Coxa (Kraków: Rabid, 2001). back 4. Roger Ebert, “Paul Cox: An Appreciation”, Senses of Cinema, no. 53 (December 2009). back 5. David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990), p. 127. Stratton’s retrospective account of Cox’s post-1990 films – not always as favourable to them as he was on their initial commercial release – can be found scattered throughout his final book, Australia at the Movies: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Australian Cinema (Allen & Unwin, 2024). back 6. Richard Brown, “Vincent”, Cinema Papers, no. 65 (September 1987), pp. 45-46. back 7. Scott Murray, “Australian Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s”, in Murray (ed.), Australian Cinema (NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1994), p. 135. back 8. Cox quoted in Maria Stratford, “The Persistent Maverick”, Senses of Cinema, no. 53 (December 2009). back 9. Stephanie Bunbury, “Sacrificing the Artist”, The Age Tempo Magazine, 13/3/91, p. 4. back 10. Tom O’Regan, “The Enchantment with Cinema”, in O’Regan and Albert Moran (eds.), The Australian Screen (Melbourne: Penguin, 1989), p. 131. back 11. Pauline Kael, “Airhead’s Delight”, The New Yorker, 23 September 1985, p. 102; reprinted in her 1989 collection Hooked. back 12. Janine Burke, Company of Images (Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications, 1989). back 13. John O’Brien, “But Is It Art?”, Editions, no. 1 (August 1989), p. 21. back 14. Brian McFarlane, Australian Cinema 1970-1985 (William Heinemann Australia, 1987), p. 126. back 15. David Bordwell [1947-2024], Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 373. Bordwell’s more extensive discussion of art cinema is contained in his Narration in the Fiction Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), and his later statement on the subject appears in Poetics of Cinema (London: Routledge, 2007). For alternatives and critiques to this model see Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution”, Screen, Vol. 22 No. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 11-39; and Eleftheria Thanouli, “‘Art Cinema’ Narration: Breaking Down a Wayward Paradigm”, Scope, no. 14 (June). back 16. For a key journalistic example, see Janet Hawley, “The Wizard of Odd”, The Age Good Weekend, 4 November 2000, pp. 10-13. For an autobiographical angle on this discourse, see Paul Cox, Reflections: An Autobiographical Journey (Sydney: Currency Press, 1998). back 17. Michel Ciment [1938-2023], “Je vous salue Godard," in Positif, no. 324 (February 1988), pp. 32-33 (my translation). back 18. Anonymous, “Director Complains”, The Age, 24 May 1991, p. 4. back 19. Victoria Duckett, “Reworking Romanticism: Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers”, Senses of Cinema, no. 53 (December 2009). back 20. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism (New Academia Publishing, 2005). back 21. Pascal Bonitzer, “Les Images, le cinéma, l’audiovisuel”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 404 (February 1988), pp. 17-21; for further elaboration of this idea, see my 2014 book Mise en scène and Film Style (Palgrave). back 22. Duckett, “Reworking Romanticism”. back 23. Alexander García Düttmann, “Idiosyncrasy and Film”, Senses of Cinema, no. 53 (December 2009). This essay appears in revised form as the chapter “Idiosyncrasy” in García Düttmann, So What, or How to Make Films with Words (Northwestern University Press, 2023). back 24. McFarlane, Australian Cinema 1970-1985, pp. 127-8. back 25. García Düttmann, “Idiosyncrasy and Film”. back 26. Richard J. Thompson and William D. Routt, “‘Keep Young and Beautiful’: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals”, in Tom O’Regan & Brian Shoesmith (eds.), History on/and/in Film (Perth: History and Film Association of Australia, 1987), pp. 31-44. A later, revised version of this piece, under the same title, appears in Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 42 No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 17-35. back 27. Jan Epstein, “Golden Braid”, Cinema Papers, no. 82 (March 1991), pp. 51-52. back 28. Michael Dempsey, “The Fragility of Meaning: Three Films by Paul Cox”, Film Quarterly, Vol 39 No 3 (Spring 1986), p. 6. back 29. Haltof, “‘A European Heart’”. back 30. McFarlane, Australian Cinema 1970-1985, p. 127. back 31. Dempsey, “The Fragility of Meaning”, p. 6. back 32. McFarlane, Australian Cinema, p. 127; Dempsey, “The Fragility of Meaning”, p. 6; Gibson, “My First Wife”, p. 17; Stratton, The Avocado Plantation, p. 99. back 33. García Düttmann, “Idiosyncrasy and Film”. back 34. Ibid. back 35. Claude Chabrol, “Little Themes”, in Peter Graham & Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: Macmillan, 2009), pp. 149-154. back 36. But see García Düttmann, “Idiosyncrasy and Film”, for a defence of this “wandering” as a conscious or, at least, effective strategy in Cox. back 37. Liz Jacka, “Golden Braid”, Filmnews (February 1991), pp. 12-13. back 38. Chris Haywood, “To the Point on Point”, Senses of Cinema, no. 53 (December 2009). back 39. García Düttmann, “Idiosyncrasy and Film”. back 40. See Todd Berliner, “Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the ‘Real Realism’ of John Cassavetes”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 52 No. 3 (Spring 1999), pp. 2-16. back 41. Michel Marie, “The Art of the Film in France Since the ‘New Wave’”, Wide Angle, Vol. 4 No. 4 (1981), pp. 18-25. back 42. Don Ranvaud and Alberto Farassino, “An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard”, Framework, no. 21 (Summer 1983), p. 8. back 43. See Stuart Cunningham, “‘The Sentimental Age’: Chauvel, Melodrama, Nationality”, Framework, no. 30/31 (1986), pp. 40-59; William D. Routt, “On the Expression of Colonialism in Early Australian Film: Charles Chauvel and Naïve Cinema”, in Albert Moran & Tom O’Regan (eds.), An Australian Film Reader (Paddington: Currency Press, 1985), pp. 55-66; and Luc Moullet, Le Rebelle de King Vidor – Les arêtes vives (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2009), passable English translation accessible here. back 44. For more on this comparison, see my appallingly unfunded book project, Australian Cinema at 4am: A Critique, forthcoming on the 12th of Never (and that’s a long, long time). back 45. This is Rossellini’s self-description, quoted in Donald Ranvaud (ed.), BFI Dossier Number 8: Roberto Rossellini (London: British Film Institute, 1981), p. 72. back 46. Thomas Elsaesser, “An Anthropologist’s Eye: Where the Green Ants Dream”, in Timothy Corrigan (ed.), The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 154. See also the section on Herzog in his European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam University Press, 2005). back 47. See Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard), “The Image”, in The Rustle of Language (University of California Press, 1989), pp. 350-358. back 48. O’Regan, “The Enchantment with Cinema”, pp. 133-4. back 49. O’Regan, ibid., p. 133. back 50. Suzanne Kiernan, “The Unaccommodated Writer”, Editions, no. 10 (March/April 1990), p. 24. back
© Adrian Martin October 1991 / December 2009 / updated August 2025 |
