I've never seen a work by Pina Bausch. As with those of us who come too late, who miss the boat, who weren't there, my knowledge of her work with Wuppertal Tanztheater has been limited to the scraps you gather together - critical books, photographs, videos, reviews, the descriptions of friends, even the traces of her influence in the work of others. I have built a patchwork Bausch, intuiting the language of this choreographer, whose work galvanised modern dance and theatre, from the traces left behind. It's never as good as being there. It never will be.


Wim Wenders knows this. His beautiful documentary film Pina is all about absence: most signally, the absence of Bausch herself, after her sudden death in 2009, five days after being diagnosed with cancer, and just as she and Wenders were planning to make a film about her work. It is not a biography of Bausch, so much as an invocation of her work and her company. Among improvisations made for the film by the different dancers, we are shown some of her most famous dances, including three iconic pieces from the 1970s - Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, and Café Müller - and a more recent work, Vollmond.

Wenders opens with an evocation of a virtual theatre, in which 3D technology permits him to open up illusory spaces and perspectives to give the spectator something like the shape of Bausch's choregraphy. As he begins, with scenes from Kontakthof, the 3D illusion is heightened, emphasising its artifice to a degree that I found discomforting. The powerful illusion of depth, of the rounded presence of dancers, made clear what was missing: the bodies of the dancers themselves.

These dancers were creatures of light, phantoms who are exact in every visual degree: but in watching dance, I suddenly realised, other senses are also employed, subliminal animal senses that track physical weight, the smell of sweat, disturbances in the air, perhaps even changes in heat. The lack of these other stimuli was at first alienating, then strangely revelatory: the absence of the dancers' bodies was sometimes as strong a feeling as the loss of Bausch. This is, in a real sense, a posthumous film: it's a tribute to a choreographer who is dead, recording performances that have long vanished from the air.

What's beautiful is how conscious Wenders is of these limitations. He knows very well that he can't reproduce the experience of performance, so he doesn't attempt to: from the beginning, his framing of the documentary makes this very clear. He subtly highlights what is missing, and then translates dance into the language of film, the language of light and shadow and illusion. Sometimes this is stunning; there's a particular moment when, as audience members, we standing between curtains at the edge of the stage, looking in at the dancers. He films dances on stage (without too many close-ups, a particular bugbear of mine in filmed performance), and places them also in different contexts - the industrial streets of Wuppertal, a quarry, a modern building that appears to be a glass gallery in the middle of a spring forest.

Wenders uses minimal documentary footage of Bausch herself; the major sequence is a moving black and white film of her role in Café Müller, which she danced with her eyes shut. He is, quite rightly, more interested in her work than her life. Her work, you feel, left her naked enough: and her recondite presence in the fleeting glimpses we are offered radiates a powerful sense of privacy. She is mainly remembered through her dancers, who are filmed in front of the camera, their faces mobile with thought, as a voice-over of their reminiscences plays against their silence. (In a couple of cases, the dancer remains speechless).

The film is not merely a tribute to Pina: it is also, with an increasing freight of emotion, a tribute to the company she made, the dancers who worked with her, in some cases for decades, attempting to realise her vision. They were, as becomes increasingly clear through the film, her collaborators, offering their ideas and feelings and wit as well as their skilled bodies to her work. As much as anything, this is a film about relationship: it permits us an insight into the profound relationships between these artists, and how these emerged into some of the most influential dance works of the past 30 years.


What I wasn't prepared for was the overwhelming emotional power of Bausch's dance. For all the difficulties of performance on film, this is where Wenders triumphs. All her dancers speak about the feeling of Bausch's work, of her scrupulous, pained search to create a language that could express and embody the inexpressible. "Words can only invoke," said Bausch. "That's where dance comes in..." A dancer said of Bausch: "She danced as if she had been risen from the dead... in her pain and loneliness..." In Pina, you can see that quality for yourself. I don't know how the precise gesture of a hand, the angle of a head, a leap, a step, can so surgically open the latent grief and love in your own psyche, but this is what Bausch's choreography does. I was floored by the immediacy and beauty of her language, the fluency and toughness of its emotional economy.

It's not surprising to learn that Wenders was a close friend of Bausch's. Without resorting to the vulgarity of declaring it, this film is made with a great deal of love. It's a lament and celebration, an invocation and farewell. Wenders never intrudes: he stands modestly behind the scenes, enabling us to see what he so admired in his subject. Like Bausch, with the maximum of tact and the minimum of fuss, he manages the translation of feeling into his own medium. It's a marvellous film, and essential viewing for anyone with even the slightest interest in contemporary dance.

Pina by Wim Wenders opens nationwide on August 18. Check Hopscotch Films for details.

* I forgot yesterday to mention James Waites's continuing meditations on the Bacchanalian qualities in Barrie Kosky's work, including the recent production of Poppea. In the course of which he reveals that Kosky is unlikely to be working in Australia in the future, as his job with Berlin's Komische Oper looms closer. Which is sad news for us.

* The Malthouse production of Optimism finished its sell-out season at the Edinburgh Festival last week, garnering a swag of glowing reviews on the way. Mark Fisher (of Mark Fisher's Scottish Theatre Blog fame) described it as "the feelgood hit of the summer", while others, such as the Guardian's Lyn Gardner, suggested that it was too much fun to be serious. Ian Shuttleworth in the Financial Times, enjoyed the irreverence: "A decorous evening of high culture this wasn’t, but what the hell: surely we can take one night off from guarding the citadel." The Malthouse is crowing after Frank Woodley, who plays the terminally naive Candide, won a Herald Angel award for his performance in the show. Prost! Sydneysiders will get to Optimism at the Sydney Festival next year.


* Among the usual bloggish navel-gazing about whether critics are allowed to say what they think about a show or whether, especially in a recession, they ought just to be nice, George Hunka over at Superfluities has written a stimulating overview calling for a larger view of criticism in Theatre, Criticism and the Public Intellectual. Well worth a leisurely read.

* Another film festival, another censorship debate. Richard Wolstencroft, director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, is furious that the OFLC has banned MUFF's screening of Jennifer Lyon Bell’s Matinée, which was part of their Mini Muffs short season. In demanding that the OFLC repeal its decision, he says the ruling is "hypocritical, suppressive, and worryingly anti-women".

At issue is the depiction of real sex. Matinée is made by Blue Artichoke, a company which specialises in making female-centred erotica. Wolstencroft says the OFLC's decision negates the film's artistic merits: "Matinée is a picture which embodies many of the qualities which should be sought after in high quality artistic filmmaking", he says. It creates "a highly stylized, enigmatic and atmospheric world, the likes of which is often attempted in independent cinema but rarely so deftly achieved." Worse, he claims that an office which passes Lars Von Triers' controversial Antichrist, which featured high levels of sexual violence and mutilation, but bans a film that features frank sexuality but no violence, is displaying a worrying ease with misogyny. "Banning Matinée reveals a tendency in the OFLC to suppress films which strengthen female sexuality on screen and to allow films which encourage a view that female sexuality is damaged, fractured or violent."

He's also pointing to precedents where films depicting actual sex in complex situations (Shortbus, 9 Songs) have been passed for screening. Sounds like a case to me.

I feel remiss for not mentioning the Melbourne International Film Festival, which is now in full swing, with a good dose of political controversy to keep things interesting. However, a couple of other theatre bloggers are keeping well in touch - Carl Nilsson-Polias at Spark Online and Richard Watts at Man About Town are heroically logging reviews, and well worth checking out.

Although I'm not attending MIFF, I've seen a couple of the featured Australian films, which I mention here because they involve some names which will be familiar to Melbourne theatrenauts. And because they both, in very different ways, show how strong and uncompromising Australian work can be.

Balibo, Robert Connolly's film about the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, is as traumatising as everybody claims. It starts slowly, but gradually builds up power until it becomes a shattering experience. It's one of those rare films that absolutely impresses with its ethical commitment, its careful attention to the story it is telling. For example, Connolly carefully frames the story of the deaths of the six Australian journalists murdered by the Indonesian military as part of the larger massacre - 200,000 East Timorese - that took place when the island was invaded. It's a devastating indictment of many things, but perhaps most of all of the political pragmatism, exemplified by Whitlam's diplomat Richard Wollcott, that permitted these things to happen without a squeak of protest.

It's impeccably researched and, tellingly, is one of the few films I've seen about journalists that resists the impulse to romanticise them. It features a brilliant performance by Anthony LaPaglia as Roger East, with roles also by stalwarts of the Melbourne indie theatre scene - Mark Winter and Thomas Wright, known to us as the boys from Black Lung, and Simon Stone of Hayloft fame. If you missed it at MIFF, Balibo will be on general release from August 13.

The other is Jonathan Auf Der Heide's haunting, brutal and beautiful Van Dieman's Land. It features remarkable performances from some notable Melbourne theatre actors, including (again) Thomas Wright and Mark Winter, Oscar Redding, John Francis Howard and Greg Stone, and the music is by theatre composer Jethro Woodward. I saw this at the Adelaide Film Festival (review here) and loved it.

As I said at the time: "For all the savagery of its story, the visual beauty of this film harks back to the haunting poetry of some classic Australian films of the 1970s - Picnic at Hanging Rock, for instance, or Peter Weir's The Last Wave. And like those films, it is driven by an urgent sense of self-definition, a desire to grapple with the received ideas of what it means to be Australian."

PS: If you missed the sell-out MIFF screening, Van Diemen's Land is on general release from September 24.

I first encountered the story of Alexander Pearce around 15 years ago in Robert Hughes's indispensible history, The Fatal Shore. It's a narrative notable for its brutal mathematics: eight men escaped from the notorious punishment camp of Port Macquarie, established on the far side of Tasmania, and entered what is still some of the harshest wilderness in Australia. One man, Alexander Pearce, survived.

Pearce gave a statement to authorities after his eventual capture in which he confessed to killing and eating his companions. It was so outlandishly grotesque that they refused to believe it, thinking that he was covering for his fellow escapees. But after Pearce escaped again and was caught with human flesh in his pockets, they hanged him. When Marcus Clark based an episode in For The Term of His Natural Life on Pearce's story, he was assured notoriety as the "cannibal convict".


Discussing Pearce's statement, Hughes comments that it "might have come from an Elizabethan revenge tragedy..." And it's not surprising that this tale should be the subject of a film. What is a little surprising is that last year no fewer than three movies drew on Alexander Pearce's story for their premise: The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce, directed by Michael James Rowland, which ran on ABC-TV a couple of weeks ago; a cannibal horror-fest called Dying Breed; and a modestly brilliant short film by VCA graduate Jonathan Auf Der Heide, called Hell's Gates. Clearly something is in the zeitgeist; of which more in a moment.

Hell's Gates won Auf Der Heide the Melbourne Airport Emerging Filmmaker and Best Student Film awards at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival. He then announced that he planned to raise a laughably miniscule budget from private sources and make a feature-length version in the wilds of Tasmania; a quixotic adventure indeed, the kind of thing that warms the cockles of Ms TN's heart, as long as she isn't out there freezing her tender bits off in the snow. And against all probability the result, Van Diemen's Land, premiered last week at the Adelaide Film Festival.

Anyone familiar with Melbourne theatre will recognise a few names in the production listings. Oscar Redding, who co-wrote the film with Auf Der Heide as well as playing Alexander Pearce, was the director of The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, a Dogme-style gem filmed in the streets of night-time Melbourne that started off life as a remarkable theatre production. Thomas Michael Wright and Mark Leonard Winter have been making names for themselves as members of the anarchic Black Lung collective. Greg Stone is a fixture on Melbourne's main stages and deservedly regarded as one of our finest theatre actors, and John Francis Howard has been a stalwart of experimental Melbourne theatre for decades. The film's music is by Jethro Woodward, who is a well-known theatre composer. Auf Der Heide himself is no stranger to independent stages: I first saw him as a very young actor in the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project.


Van Diemen's Land emerges, in fact, from Melbourne's independent theatre culture, which explains my personal interest as well as, I think, its romanticism. For all the savagery of its story, the visual beauty of this film harks back to the haunting poetry of some classic Australian films of the 1970s - Picnic at Hanging Rock, for instance, or Peter Weir's The Last Wave. And like those films, it is driven by an urgent sense of self-definition, a desire to grapple with the received ideas of what it means to be Australian. From its opening moments, which quote a 19th century newspaper article that compares Australia's founding with the equally bloody birth of Rome, Pearce's story is presented as a foundational myth of nationhood.

I suspect the recent fascination with Pearce might be, consciously or not, a corrective to the nationalism which came to the fore under the Howard Government, which fetishised the bronzed Aussie heroes of Gallipoli as the noble sacrificial emblems of nationhood. This story is earlier and uglier, and is a brutal reminder of the predatory and violent act of colonisation. Notably, in this story the colonial predation is, quite literally, on the colonists themselves.

Van Diemen's Land makes a fascinating contrast with Terrence Malick's film The New World, which also looks at an early moment of colonisation, this time of America. Both films share a fascination with landscape, and in fact feature almost identical shots of rivers opening lyrically through forested hills and dizzying silhoettes of trees against sky. But the differences are striking. The New World was a projection of Renaissance Europe, a fantasy of savage splendour and fertility. Two centuries later, Australia was its dystopian answer: a penal colony, the creation of Georgian bureaucracy, which became synonymous with authoritarian brutality. Its initial promise of fertility turned out to be a mirage, its landscape and Indigenous people indifferent, even hostile, to European notions of wealth.

Where Malick forges a myth of innocence betrayed, Auf Der Heide's film dramatises the Australia whose intellectual patrons were, as Hughes says, Hobbes and De Sade. There is the merest glimpse of innocence in this film, and the beauty of the landscape - emphasised by the wintry bluish light of the cinematography - is the beauty of indifference, primeval and impenetrable and inhuman. Van Diemen's Land is, just as the New World was, a European projection, and here its foreignness - and reflexively, the foreignness of the people moving through it - is at once awe-inspiring and terrifying. Like the penal colonies, the environment is closed and claustrophobic; the landscape the convicts see is, as the colonists claimed it was, a Terra Nullius.

Against this indifferent landscape, which is filmed with the tenderness of a Tarkovsky, Auf Der Heide places the human rhythms of his characters. The story is reduced to its simplest form: it begins with the convicts' escape, and ends when Pearce is finally alone, before his capture and return to (comparative) civilisation. It's partly narrated with a poetic (and very beautiful) voiceover spoken in Irish, the fictional inner voice of Pearce which rubs hard against the tough dialogue. The action moves inexorably through day and night, from meal to meal, charting the degradation of its characters as they face the realities of starvation and murder, the stark choice between living and dying.


Just as much as it's a story about Australia, this is a story about men: there are no women, just as there are no Aboriginals. And what makes this film, besides Ellery Ryan's stunning cinematography, is the strength of the performances. They open subtle spaces in this most inhuman of stories, admitting the textures of humour, friendship, loyalty, even innocence and love.

It's a truly ensemble cast, and their commitment means that there are no false notes. And you also have to admire their physical courage. As with Werner Herzog's crazy adventures in the South American jungle - Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre - you can't but be aware of the literal reality behind the story: there's a verisimilitude in the performances that goes beyond acting. Among other things, this is a film that makes you acutely aware of the vulnerability of the human body, and there are scenes here - aside from the horrors of the very convincing butchery - that make you wince: Oscar Redding as Pearce walking barefoot through freezing primeval forest, for instance, or the ragged cast shivering on the top of a bare mountain in flurries of snow, or Adrian Mulrany, as a hapless guard, trussed naked and tied to a tree.

I'm certain that Van Diemen's Land will attract notice on the festival circuit, and equally certain it will be watched years hence. It's unlikely to be a box office winner - the grim story will see to that - but its uncompromising poetic means that it's one of the few Australian films that genuinely deserves the appellation of "art". If it comes your way, don't miss it.

Ms TN flew to Adelaide as a guest of Madman Entertainment.

Van Diemen's Land website

Last Friday, irretrievably sealing her reputation as Frivolous Arts Wanker, Ms TN flew to Adelaide to see a movie. The idea was that I would have a leisurely and solitary dinner - one of life's more underrated pleasures - and then take in the arty fillum at the Adelaide Film Festival (to wit, Van Dieman's Land, which features some of Melbourne's premier theatrical talent) that was the excuse for my visit.

I was, naturally, the only person in Adelaide who didn't realise it was the opening night of the Adelaide Fringe Festival. So much for my dinner plans, or for my status as arts pundit. It took me all night just to fight my way up Rundle St to the Palace Cinema. By the time I arrived, my sophisticated Melbourne persona had reverted to neolithic savagery and my elbows were behaving like the spikes on Boudicaa's chariot. It was tougher than the Boxing Day sales in Myers, and twice as crowded.

Perhaps this is why I have barely been able to write a sentence since I returned. There will be a detailed report on Van Dieman's Land once I manage to evolve my thoughts out of the Stone Age and into something resembling coherence; in the meantime, I'll leave you with my Australian review of the MTC's production of Moonlight and Magnolias, which is published in today's newspaper. A play by Ron Hutchinson directed by Bruce Beresford, it's a comic homage to classic Hollywood. It didn't quite hit the mark for me. Previewing the MTC's 2009 season late last year, I thought it smelt "a bit dodgy": and, you know, I was right.

But does Australian film know this? Lately, TN - lynx-eyed in all things theatrical - has noticed that a number of theatre artists are quietly invading the hallowed realms of cinema. But they're not jumping up and down at the edge of the crowd shouting "Me! Me! Pick me!" like Donkey in Shrek. No, these theatrical types - used perhaps to the unglamorous task of getting the job done with almost no money - are just getting out there and doing it. Instead of blinking in the headlights of an industry that wants to turn Australian films into a low-rent version of Hollywood, or buckling under a bureaucracy that panics at any sign of artistic seriousness or originality, they are making their own rules.



It's traditional for film types to scoff at the theatre, but these people are winning prizes and plaudits. There's Chunky Move's utterly charming 10-minute documentary, Dance Like Your Old Man, directed by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, which has so far taken home three "best documentary" prizes, beginning with the Melbourne International Film Festival gong. There's Mark Constable, a fine theatre actor and director, who took the second prize at Tropfest recently with his self-written, self-acted, self-directed (and self-funded) short film Uncle Jonny.

And there is local Dogme-style auteur Oscar Redding, whose astonishing version of Hamlet, shot at night in the mean streets of Melbourne, opens next week at the CUB Malthouse. I hope that you've booked your tickets: this will be a rare chance to see this film, which evolved from an equally astonishing Poor Theatre production performed in a Northcote shop front in 2004. It premiered at last year's MIFF, creating a lot of excitement - at least among theatre types - but you can be sure that, given the nervousness of Australian film distribution, it won't be coming to a cinema near you. Fortunately for those who like their Shakespeare hot, the Malthouse is briefly turning the Tower Theatre into a boutique cinema and giving it a season. If you missed it first time around, now is your chance.

And now, via Oscar Redding again, I've encountered Hell's Gates. Redding's involvement this time is as an actor and script adviser; the film is actually the brainchild of Jonathan Auf Der Heide, who took time out of a career as an actor - I first saw him, as a very young actor, in the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project - to study film directing at the Victorian College of the Arts. Hell's Gates is his graduating film, and - wholly deservedly - scored the three top prizes for his year.

It's fair to say it's brilliant. It's based on a very grim true story: an escape from the notorious penal colony of Port Arthur by eight convicts, who struck out with limited food supplies across the wilds of Tasmania and, unable to feed themselves off the land, ended up eating each other. I first read this story in Robert Hughes's history of convicts, The Fatal Shore, and at the time I wondered why no novelist or playwright or artist had tackled it. It's as dramatically intense as anything out of Dostoevsky, it has the murderous absurdity of Kafka and the bloody logic of a Webster revenge tragedy, and it's wholly our own. (Bizarrely enough, ABC-TV is making a documentary re-enactment of this story as well: it must have struck its time.)

I'm told the short film was made for a grand total of $13,000. I don't know how Auf Der Heide and his crew conjured such breathtakingly lush cinematography out of their minimal budget - the film includes panoramically brooding landscape shots worthy of Planet Earth, and has a visual depth and clarity that you associate with infinitely more expensive productions.

It's also beautifully acted (the cast features some notable theatre actors, including Greg Stone, Oscar Redding and John Francis Howard), beautifully scripted and beautifully edited, and features a haunting score by theatre composer Jethro Woodward. It's not hyperbole to say that this genuinely poetic film recalls Werner Herzog (it bears affinities with Aguirre: The Wrath of God, but lacks Herzog's Eurocentric shonkiness), or that in its poetic rhythms, particularly in how it makes landscape a character in the film, it has qualities you see in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick.

And it consciously reaches towards Senecan tragedy - the film opens with a startling and blackly ironic quote from a 1786 edition of the London Morning Post: "This thief colony might hereafter become a great empire, whose nobles will probably, like the nobles of Rome, boast of their blood". With neither false drama nor rhetorical bombast, but rather a poetically-inflected, unflinching realism, it unfolds a bleak fable about the self-devouring nature of colonialism. In short, it's the kind of thing that makes TN's heart beat fast with excitement.

However, in the space of 20 minutes Auf Der Heide can only tell part of the story. So cast and crew are off to the wilds of Tasmania in July, in a quest which seems to this soft-skinned urbanite to be of almost Quixotic difficulty, to shoot the feature-length version on a laughably tiny budget. I wish them luck; if the resulting feature bears out the promise of the short, this will be a film to watch out for. Whether such a film can make any purchase in the current context of the Australian film industry remains to be seen. I don't doubt I'm partial, but I think that the local film industry has largely forgotten that film can also be an art. Maybe these theatre types will jog its memory.

Video: Trailer for Hell's Gates

Yesterday we co-ordinated the family's complex social schedules and entrained to our favourite cinema, the Sun Theatre in Yarraville (cheap tickets, a bar, superb pseudo art deco theatres - one with actual squishy leather armchairs - and no ads: why would you go anywhere else?) And there we saw Tim Burton's fantastic - in all senses of the word - film adaptation of Sweeney Todd.


As everyone knows, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter star in this cinematic adaptation of what is generally thought to be Stephen Sondheim's greatest musical, and possibly the best post-war musical of them all. And I'm a confirmed Tim Burton fan. I went with high expectations; and I came out with those expectations satisfyingly fulfilled. I loved it.

There's been much discussion about the singing voices of Depp and Bonham Carter (surprisingly respectable, actually - more like theatre voices, drawing their power from actorly expressiveness rather than technical bravura) and Burton's liberal use of CGI. Some have quibbled with the film's lack of realism. Pish posh. Asking for realism in Sweeney Todd is somewhat akin to wanting King Lear to be a comedy. Mind you, Trevor Nunn came close with his operetta production of Lear, so the world is always stranger than you think.

The tale of Sweeney Todd started life as a penny dreadful, a gory thriller series by freelance journalist George Dibden-Pitt. It was so successful that Dibden-Pitt adapted it as a melodrama, and it played in the London "Blood Tubs", theatres that hosted the sensational X-rated entertainment of the time. In the late 1960s, playwright Christopher Bond re-adapted the story as a play, with some success. This was when Stephen Sondheim encountered Sweeney Todd and decided it would make a ripping musical; and the rest, as they say, is history.

Burton's cinematic adaptation is brilliant. Screenwriter John Logan has cut songs, conflated characters and simplified the plot to make a fast-flowing narrative that moves seamlessly from scene to scene. From the moment the organ music swells up behind the credits, its conventions are clear, its artifice apparent. There is absolutely no dislocation when characters break into song. It's maybe the most successful integration of music and dialogue I've seen on screen. And it demonstrates, by the bye, how much Sondheim owes to Brecht.

Burton has brought it to the screen without compromising the dark, melodramatic heart of the original. This last point is where I think the film is spectacularly successful: his gift for creating fantastic worlds that exist at an oblique angle to our own here makes an imaginary London - a city of narrow, dank lanes, dripping, rat-infested sewers and sombre shadows, in which the only living colour is that of blood. It's populated by a grotesque cast of characters whose compelling truth exists in their extremity. Sweeney Todd is pure melodrama.

The advent of realism in the 20th century meant that melodrama fell into disrepute and is now used more often as perjorative description; but it has its place in art, and it's not a dishonourable one. Its power exists in its heightened emotional life, a garish and vivid energy forged from its blatant artifice. Its artifice was picked up and transformed most influentially by Brecht, but it's an energy you can also see in Dostoevsky (in Crime and Punishment, for instance, the image of the weeping Marmaladov children dancing in the streets, while their demented and dying mother screams in the background, is total melodrama).

Sondheim uses the conventions of melodrama to make what is surely the bleakest popular musical ever written. The world it portrays is truly Hobbesian - the law, taken here in its most literal sense, is to eat or be eaten. "The cruelty of men," says Todd, "is as wondrous as Peru..." Todd has escaped from the penal colony of Australia, a place of fabled sadism, after being unjustly condemned to lifelong transportation by the evil Judge Turpin (played by Alan Rickman with a gentle sense of corruption that is more disturbingly creepy than any histrionics). Turpin has removed Sweeney so he can seduce his wife, the beautiful Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly); when Lucy poisons herself, in her despair, he adopts instead Todd's beautiful daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), on whom he has equally evil designs.

There is the obligatory romantic couple, innocents caught in a world of base and murderous lusts. The appropriately named Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) falls in love with Johanna, and plots to rescue her, eventually dragging her out of a squalidly Hogarthian lunatic asylum. But even here, innocence is inevitably damaged by the violence of the world it inhabits; the happy ending already carries the seed of its own destruction. In this respect, the film is, if anything, even darker than the original musical. It's kind of amazing that they all got away with it, given the soft-sell of the Hollywood machine: and if the film or the musical had in fact been more realistic, they might not have.

But it's an open secret that if you're looking for incisive social commentary in contemporary popular culture, you're often better off searching through the pulp fictions: you'll find a much more uncompromising vision in Philip K. Dick (Bladerunner, Total Recall) than in the earnest political films of left-wing Hollywood, a more radical and complex politics in the world of China Mieville than in the ideological certainties of David Hare. The fantastic is perhaps the only place in popular culture where the real world can be truly imagined.

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is more like a poem than any film I know. I watch it every few years, and on each viewing it is more profoundly uneasy, more beautiful, more luminous with sorrow. There may be greater films than Stalker - although surely not many - but I know of none that touches me more personally; it lives beneath my skin and quickens my sense of what it means to be conscious and alive.


Tarkovsky's films often have a nimbus of prophecy, and Stalker is no exception. It is commonly pointed out that the landscape of the Zone, shot near an Estonian chemical plant in the late '70s, uncannily prefigures the abandoned homes and rusting tanks of post-catastrophe Chernobyl, but there is more to the film's haunting power than its glimpses of a post-human world littered with the detritus of civilisation.

The Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is a man whose dangerous vocation is to guide people to the Zone, an abandoned village under heavy military guard. Something strange happened some years before (the story is that a meteorite crashed, although the incident is never fully explained) which caused drastic changes in its substance. It is now a place of deserted ruins and luxuriant natural growth that is full of strange but fatal traps for the unwary. In its centre is a place called the Room. If you make it there, the Room will grant you your deepest desire.

The Stalker guides two men, known only by their own professions, Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) and Professor (Nikolai Grinko), who between them represent two major means - science and art - through which human beings seek knowledge and truth. The Writer is disillusioned and cynical; for him the world no longer holds any mystery, and his worldly success is meaningless. He claims, with a bitter flippancy, that he is seeking inspiration. The Professor is more inscrutable, but we find that he would rather destroy what he doesn't understand.

Next to these two, the Stalker is a naif. In the face of their open mockery, he prays for their belief; to answer their different despairs, he offers an ambiguous and possibly fatal hope. He can guide them to the door that will open on their deepest desires, but he cannot enter the room himself: that understanding is forbidden him.

It is tempting, although I think misleading, to think of the Stalker as a Christ figure: in a long single shot where the camera tenderly floats over a stream in which are submerged the discarded apparatus of civilisation - scrolls, icons, guns, syringes - he quotes the passage from the Gospels where Christ, returned from the dead, walks with two of his disciples, unrecognised by both of them. This recalls the passage in TS Eliot's great poem of modern spiritual desolation, The Wasteland:

Who is the third who walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.

In fact, the film is full of Christian iconography - the underwater scrolls and fish, the crown of thorns on an unforgiving Christ, prayers and Biblical quotations, allusions to Renaissance paintings of love and death. But it seems to me that these do not reconstruct religion so much as they mourn its ruins. Tarkovsky is rather expressing the faith that people attempt to explain by inventing God, the numinous desires that darkly inhabit us, and which we can neither explain nor wholly ignore. The film is so moving because Tarkovsky does no more than articulate this faith: its meaning and purpose are beyond the purview of the film, indeed, beyond the purview of our own vision.

The Stalker is a man haunted and obsessed by the possibility of belief, although he never explains what it is he believes in. He is an anachronism, a holy fool in an unbelieving world. He has nothing to offer but hope, and he doesn't even know what the hope is for, except that only the most wretched can reach for it. He is a guide through a landscape of corpses and ruins. It's a world that offers glimpses of an unsettling beauty that flourishes beyond human desires and yet can provide a home for the unsayable, unattainable longing that reaches beyond the confines of the self.

Stalker's beauty is woven out of its limitations, its finitudes. When I watch a Tarkovsky film, I am always aware of the literalness of his medium; he is never doing anything more than making a film. Out of his refusal to aggrandise his medium he forges a profound poetic. The effect is something like the Anselm Kiefer work in the NSW Art Gallery, Der Ordnung der Engel, (The Angelic Order) in which an enormous lead propellor sticks out of the canvas. On its three blades are written: faith, hope and love. This preposterous propellor will never fly, it is too heavy, and for a moment I want to laugh at its sardonic commentary on human virtues; yet somehow the words burn into me the fact of their existence, their persistence in the face of their manifest impossibility.


The very crudity of Kiefer's work moves me, because its elements - the lead, the thick paint, the scrawled words - are poised with such delicacy. And unexpectedly I am filled with a very different impulse, a feeling that doesn't erase the initial mockery, but rather incorporates it into an acutely painful double awareness of human possibility and finitude. It's a recognition akin to, but not the same as, the joy you feel in first touching the child who embodies at once your vitality and your mortality.

I suppose it's no accident that the artists who most profoundly affect me are inspired by poetry: Kiefer, for example, has made many works inspired by the poetry of Paul Celan. Tarkovsky's films are full of poems, mostly written by his father, Arseny Tarkosvky: Stalker contains two, by Arseny Tarkovsky and Fyodor Tyutchev. Poetry influences the hypnotic rhythms of Tarkovsky's editing and the composition of his image-making, which draws from the imagism of Japanese poems. But these aesthetic decisions are merely symptoms of his real concern, which is to dare to risk the raw matter of poetry itself.

"After one has abandoned a belief in God," runs a famous aphorism of Wallace Stevens, "poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." Stevens expresses one of the tenets of secular modernity, that art might be a means of redemption, a place where, after the death of God, our desire for the sacred might be met.

Tarkovsky is not so sanguine; his vision is closer to the tragic existentialism of Anton Chekhov. In the polluted and degraded world the Stalker inhabits, faith promises neither redemption nor consolation. It offers something more precious and more elusive: the transitory experience of life itself. Faith is the means by which meaning might be wrought out of an existence which gives human beings no prior purpose. The Stalker - the "louse" who is mocked by the intellectuals for his awkward naivety - finds at the end of his quest only the bitter humility of failure. He cannot persuade those he guides to take the gift that he offers them: they are incapable of the final courage of acceptance.

The Stalker is not Christ, but an artist; perhaps specifically a poet. Although the crumbling, decayed splendour of his home is lined with books, he is not like the Writer, who writhes against his wordly disgust and self-loathing, his willed self-blindness. The Stalker's desires are at once more humble and ambitious than the public life of the Writer and the vanities of his concern with fame and posterity. Unlike the Professor, who seeks to control or destroy what he doesn't understand, he embraces otherness and uncertainty. He is a mystic, but this mysticism is located as much in the ordinary details of his domestic life - its material poverties and emotional richnesses - as it is in his quests to the Zone.

The German lyric poet Holderlin once asked: "What are poets for in a destitute time?" It is the same anguished question the Stalker asks at the end of the film. "The time is destitute," says the philosopher Martin Heidegger, "because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death and love." Heidegger says that the poet is a person who refuses self-will - which turns objects and people into "merchandise", objects for commercial exchange - and instead ventures his being in the most human of qualities, language. There, paradoxically, he discovers his "destiny" by embracing his mortality: "what is presumed to be eternal merely conceals a suspended transiency, suspended in the void of a durationless now".

Artists are more straightforward than this; they know that ideas cannot be abstracted out of the things and bodies that express them ("No ideas but in things!" admonished William Carlos Williams). This is why artists make bad philosophers. In his diaries, Time Within Time, Tarkovsky says brusquely: "Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free." And elsewhere: "To attain greatness within our own limits is to illustrate that we are merely human ... What an inspired idea is the notion of infinity in juxtaposition with the brief span of human life!" Our most ambitious strivings only reveal what we already are. Tarkovsky's point is that without these struggles, we can never discover even this.

The Stalker is doomed by his belief and his vocation: he brings his death home with him, in the shape of a gentle black dog he finds in the Zone. "Nobody believes," he says despairingly at the end of the film. "What's most awful is that no one needs it. No one needs that room. And all my efforts are just in vain."

In the face of the Stalker's despair, his wife names her love for him. It is this love - not only hers for the Stalker, but their love for each other, the “dull flame of desire” of the poem that their daughter Monkey reads in the final scene - that is the luminous core of this film. "It's better to have a bitter happiness than a dull, grey life," she says. "We had a lot of sorrow, a lot of fear, a lot of shame. But I never regretted it, and I never envied anyone. It's just our fate, our life. And if we hadn't had our misfortunes, we wouldn't have been better off. It would have been worse. Because in that case, there wouldn't have been any happiness. And there wouldn't have been any hope."


In his diary, Tarkovsky recalls a university debate about another of his films, Andrey Rublyov. "God, what a level [of debate]!" he says. "Abysmal, pathetic!" He quotes a mathematician called Manin, who answered some of the criticisms:

Almost every speaker asks why they have to be made to suffer all through the three hours of this film. ...It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in the papers that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of a hockey team winning a match... The channels of our perceptions have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don't want to preach about this. It may be that without it, life would be impossible. Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them.

A sense of the "true measure of things"... that is what Tarkovsky gives me, with a grave simplicity that illuminates the mysteries of being alive. He is indeed a poet for a destitute time, and I am thankful for his restless struggle.

I suppose revisiting certain works is a way of registering the passing of time. It is the same work, but you are not the same person. Each time you are a little closer to death: perhaps a little more knowledgeable; certainly, a little more sad. As the prophet says darkly in Ecclesiastes: "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow".

Stalker reveals that sadness is the inevitable texture of our joys. And yet Tarkovsky discovers a rich beauty in this apparent impoverishment, a strength in this fragility, a fleeting grandeur in our limited and human mortality. Yes, the possibility of immortality exists for as long as we keep breathing, as long as we do not believe in our own death; but all the time the black dog is trotting towards us, across the glittering waters where we dream.

As I left the Melbourne International Film Festival premiere of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, it occurred to me that I will probably not be able to watch Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet again without wanting to laugh. First-time director Oscar Redding has achieved something spectacular: he’s created a new Hamlet, an interpretation so radical and emotionally searing that it redefines the role.

This is possibly the most tormented Hamlet committed to film: a man so isolated that his only friend, Horatio, is a hand-puppet; a Hamlet who is mad from the start, driven to despair and paranoia by the dishonesty and venality that surrounds him in the corrupt court of Elsinore.


It’s definitely not Shakespeare for the costume-drama set. Redding treats the play with bold disrespect that reveals a deeper concern with its living meaning, giving us a Hamlet that digs deep into the psychoses of our age. He’s made a demanding, relentless film that invites you into the drama and then hurts you. The emotional realism of some scenes is so painful to watch that you want to turn away. But you keep watching, because you can’t help it.

The great Shakespearean critic Jan Kott says Hamlet is a play that absorbs its times. And there is certainly a dizzying variety of Hamlets: the wan melancholic poet of the 19th century, or the mid-20th century Hamlet, who was the personification of modern self-consciousness in collision with the brutal machine of history.

Peter Brook suggested another take in his beautiful 2001 film La Tragédie d’Hamlet, which features Adrian Lester in the title role. Brook fillets out a claustrophobic family drama of individuals trapped in remorseless passions, and Lester’s Hamlet, lushly framed in luxurious crimson fabrics, smoulders with sensuous loathing and corrosive wit. In Brook’s film, the easy adage that the personal is political is illuminated with new meaning.

It’s hard to imagine anything further from Brook’s exquisite aesthetic than Redding’s grim settings, where Elsinore becomes the Flinders St Station subway, or Gertrude’s bedroom a shabby bathroom. But there are similarities, all the same, in the approach of these two films. Both cut the play heavily, dropping the introductory ghost scene and stripping out all of its complicated political machinations. And both expose the emotional nakedness of the text, depending on brilliant performances to convey the complexity and depth of its passions.

Redding’s cuts are much more radical than Brook’s – Ophelia, for example, says scarcely anything at all, although the pitiable image of her suicidal madness is at the centre of this film. He hasn’t attempted to contemporise the script: the play is performed straight, so that Hamlet, filmed in familiar places like the Bourke St Mall or Melbourne laneways, becomes a nightmare that lurks under the skin of urban Melbourne. And in truth, it’s a little unsettling to walk out into those same streets after watching the film.

Drawing from the Dogme school of minimalist film-making, each scene is filmed in a single take using one hand-held camera. The action takes place over a single night, beginning at 12.15am and ending at dawn. The camera is a character in itself, peeking around corners or through curtains, or zooming up on faces in unbearable close-up.

And as Hamlet’s psyche disintegrates, so does the cinematography, which as the tragedy reaches its climax has something of the quality of live war footage. The screen goes jarringly black, or we are running in a panic, or the sound continues over a sudden still, as if the screen is arrested in shock.

Redding's film began life on stage in 2004, when he directed Hamlet with most of the same cast in a shabby shopfront in Northcote. Drawing on the poor theatre aesthetic, which is the theatrical equivalent of Dogme, the actors rehearsed for months in public spaces around Melbourne. What resulted was one of the most exciting Hamlets I have seen anywhere.

This background accounts for the remarkable performances in the film. With the exception of Steve Mouzakis, whose thuggish Claudius lacks the subtleties of the other performances, they give the lie to the claim that Australian actors lack the skills to deal with classical dramatic language.

This cast features the cream of Melbourne theatre actors, with stand-out performances from Brian Lipson as a comically naïve, bumbling Polonius, Adrian Mulrany as the Player King and John F. Howard as the Gravedigger. But crucially, Redding has a brilliant Hamlet in Richard Pyros. There are times when his performance lifts the hair on the back of your neck: this Hamlet might be mad, but the method in it has a profound legibility, and his corrosive intelligence shines through every gesture.

As Aristotle said, tragedy is a dramatic means of calling up within an audience cathartic feelings of pity and terror. That this is difficult to achieve is beyond question: to explore the extremities of the human psyche without descending into Grand Guignol or self-parody requires not only a passionate honesty, but acute intelligence and skill. Redding’s micro-budget achievement is astounding.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, adapted and directed by Oscar Redding. A Poor Theatre Film. Melbourne International Film Festival, screening 5pm Thursday, August 9, Capitol Cinema, Melbourne. Picture: Richard Pyros as Hamlet.

This review was printed in today's Australian.