Immersion: Diving full-bodied into the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival

The 2024 edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) took steps to emerge from Covid-era regression, offering 210 features and 66 shorts across its, by international standards, generous 18-day window. In addition, the fest provided a compact, seven-title XR program, a myriad of talks, discussions and masterclasses, some fancy film-related “dining experiences” (of which I did not partake), and an online component which seemed slightly less heavily-marketed than has recently been the case. The numbers register an expansion on the 191 features of 2023 but remain significantly down on the bacchanalian pre-Covid days, when more than 250 features, and over 100 shorts, was the norm.

The quantity is important. Melbourne’s geographically isolated cinephiles can’t take a weekend jaunt to Toronto, or schedule a quick trip to Rotterdam to catch those edgier titles. Other festivals, in more densely populated catchments, may be able to carve out specific individual identities, adopting a curatorial practice that prioritises a particular aesthetic or political vision. MIFF, by necessity, has to be a bit more of a department store of a film festival, attempting to cater to a wide and diverse demographic and be a little bit of everything to everyone. Meanwhile, devoted attendees can (and do) tend toward cinematic gluttony, gorging on anything in sight as we try to cram in as much as possible over that brief period when the circus is in town.

MIFF is certainly not unique in this, it’s a common model for remaining viable in a global screen entertainment ecosystem of shrinking cinema attendance, financially competitive streaming options and the reluctance of governments to support cinemas the way they support galleries and opera houses. Yet it does tend to make the international film festival circuit a little like the international tennis circuit, a rolling show which hits town, whips otherwise regular people into frenzied analyses of tracking shots and montages, then leaves just as abruptly, to be more or less forgotten until the following winter. The comparison shouldn’t be misinterpreted as criticism – I’m as excited as anyone when it’s my city’s turn to watch Coralie Fargeat or Jane Schoenbrun announce themselves as contenders for the top rankings, or to enjoy canny veterans like Víctor Erice and Agnieszka Holland reminding us that experience and on-court smarts can often trump the passion and athleticism of younger, admittedly more agile, bodies. Still, it somewhat alters the remit of a festival report if the films playing are mostly the same ones playing every other festival. Of the 210 features screened at MIFF this year, 101 were stopping over on ongoing 2024 festival runs, which began at either Sundance, Berlin, Cannes or (in seven instances) Venice in 2023, while a further 20 were restorations or retrospectives also doing the rounds (including MoMA’s Yvonne Rainer and “Iran Before the Revolution” programs). I also have to own up to mostly avoiding the one program strand that most effectively delineates MIFF from other festivals – the Australian section, which boasted 30 features, including 11 world premieres. Alas, at the risk of labelling myself unpatriotic or self-hating, I must confess that I’ve been burned too many times by feeble local documentaries, low-budget horrors and well-meaning kids’ films at MIFF and, since those three categories made up more than 80 percent of the Australian offerings, I’ll be talking little of such things.

Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sarah Snook & Adam Elliot

Hence, this despatch, like the MIFF experience generally, is less about premieres, exclusives and hot takes and more about the specific experience of receiving so much of one’s annual allotment of cinema in such a concentrated dose. MIFF offers occasional screenings at selected suburban and provincial venues, and programs nightly blockbuster-type sessions – at the IMAX on the northside of town, and at The Astor, the Art Deco / Jazz Modern picture palace about 7km to the south. However, the core of the fest comprises eight screens, spread across five venues, concentrated into a five-block radius of the inner city. Among the most familiar of MIFF experiences is joining dozens of fellow festival-goers hoofing it up the Swanston Street hill to the next session and encountering a gaggle of familiar faces making the reverse journey, exchanging shouts like “How was the Cronenberg?” over gridlocked commuter traffic.

Covid cancellation aside, 2024 marked my thirtieth consecutive year attending MIFF, and my 26th as part of the peculiar cohort of Festival Passport holders. The passport allows – for a substantial, though not unreasonable, upfront price – entry to every session, which generally means around 85 films, or whatever percentage thereof that one’s personal circumstances and stamina can tolerate. I typically arrive for the day’s first session before 10.30am, and exit the last of the day at about 11.00 that evening, shuffling home to fitful sleep and intensely visual dreams before fronting up the next morning to do it all again. The intricacy of the scheduling and the size of the program produce some odd exchanges: I run into a friend at a traffic light and they ask me what I’m seeing next. I have no idea. I know I must be at the Forum in 23 minutes, but what will be waiting for me when I get there is a complete mystery. It’s one of the rare joys of the MIFF passport experience – to enter a film with absolutely no expectations. A month earlier, when the program was first announced, I had made a choice for that day and time, and all I can do is trust that whatever reasoning led me to that choice at the time was sound. It’s a process which demands love of the medium over and above loving any particular iteration of the medium. I sometimes joke, when someone asks me what my favourite film is, that it’s the next one. But it’s not entirely a joke.

It’s an ordeal, both physically – the lower back and knees feel it first, usually by Day 4 or 5, but it’s my proto-arthritic ankles that eventually protest the loudest about such prolonged periods of stasis – and mentally, with the sleep deprivation, meals-on-the-run and constant negotiation of slow- moving crowds adding to the energy-sapping stupor produced by over-cranked heating units and non-functioning ventilation systems. The result is that, barely a few days in, one begins to feel flayed, emotionally and spiritually, stripped of all memory of what life had been in the “outside world”, lacking the self-protecting stability we normally bring to film screenings about the plight of refugees, or the trauma inflicted by abusive parents, or the impact of global capitalism upon rural communities, or just, you know, patriarchy. I cry a lot during MIFF.

Admittedly, that’s not for everyone. We like – in these pages as much as anywhere else – to maintain a critical distance, to analyse, debate, deconstruct and explain, and there’s no shortage of that in my festival experience (even if the best theoretical diatribes were shouted at me at laneway dumpling stalls rather than soberly articulated in the pages of prestigious journals). But what’s made uniquely possible by a full festival-binge, at least in the way that MIFF is structured, is the opportunity to dive into cinematic surf so tumultuous that the next wave hits you before you’ve regained your footing from the last one. That kind of buffeting is exhilarating and disorienting, at times almost ego-extinguishing, and it opens you up in a specific manner to which nothing else I’ve ever found is comparable. I’ve admired countless films in my life, and fallen in love with many of them, but I never fall for a film quite like the way I do the ones I’ve seen at this festival, when – exhausted, or impatient, or slightly unhinged from caffeine overdose, or simply distracted by racing thoughts about the film I’ve just seen – something hits me out of nowhere, invading my psyche and taking up residence forever.

*

Memoir of a Snail

MIFF opens, as festivals do, with a red carpet event – the Australian premiere of homegrown Claymation Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot). It plays in multiple adjacent auditoria simultaneously, presumably to both accommodate numbers and to comfortably separate the “Film- only” ticketholders from the “Film-and-party” crowd of VIPs. As with last year, the afterparty is at The State Library, a strange experience as we mill about the great domed Reading Room with our snail-themed finger food, hoping to spot voice cast celebrities Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee, who have most likely gone home. The evening doesn’t feel like it’s about cinema at all, a throng of corporate types and minor local TV celebrities jostling for photographs and always looking frantically around for someone to network with. Or network to. (Network at? Network upon? Whatever the appropriate preposition would be). It seems everyone liked the film, but I can find no one who loved it. It’s probably the ideal result, since nothing upsets sponsors and funding bodies like the idea that even one person might have had a bad time. The film boasts its fair share of dark themes – death and dementia, traumatic childhoods, homophobia and religious zealotry – but they all look so durn cute, with their pliable little faces and cloying Sesame Street voices, that anything confronting is able to remain abstracted and conceptual. We all agree that such things are just awful and we’re grateful that Adam – everyone seems to refer to Adam by his first name – has been able to voice that for us in such a pleasantly whimsical way. I’m mainly just glad to have got it out of the way on Opening Night, so that it frees up a session later in the program – when the heavy- hitters are coming out on court.

*

The first weekend feels like stretching and warm-ups – it’s mostly user-friendly fare, such as the gently reproving allegory of Crossing (Levan Akin), which portrays the porousness of borders – national, generational and gendered – through the scornful gaze of a retired Georgian schoolteacher scouring Istanbul’s transgender sex worker community for her missing niece. Mzia Arabuli, a stalwart of Georgian theatre who counts Sergei Parajanov’s Ambavi Suramis tsikhitsa (The Legend of Suram Fortress, 1985) among her sadly sparse cinema credits, brings the intensity of a melancholic Anna Magnani to the binge-drinking, Orphic-tinged heroine and, in the process, elevates a programmatic arthouse ballad into something more immediate and abrasive. The Edward Yang-styled melodrama of House of the Seasons (Oh Jung-Min, 2023) lacks that kind of transcendent element but is, otherwise, an expertly executed, smoothly nourishing epic chronicling the multi-generational travails of a family of Korean tofu-makers. The pleasures of these two are interspersed with the homework of the amateurish, self-consciously conceptual ramblings of Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, 1972), and the desperate vaudeville of Timestalker (Alice Lowe), a film which structures itself so thoroughly around the primacy of the gag that cinematic elements – framing, editing rhythms, narrative coherence, performative nuance – seem to have been intentionally foregone. And, suddenly, Day One is already in the rear view mirror.

My Old Ass

The highlight of the weekend comes with My Old Ass (Megan Park). It’s being sold as an acerbic feminist comedy – teen Elliott (Maisy Stella) imbibes some mushrooms and is visited by the advice-dispensing 39-year-old version of herself (Aubrey Plaza) – and it delivers effectively on that front. 

The bulk of it, though, is a delicate, precisely conjured portrait of adolescent love. Park’s unfairly neglected debut, The Fallout (2021), introduced a filmmaker both able to establish an atmosphere of presentness and moment-to-moment authenticity, and also sensitive to the requirements of sustaining that mood cinematically. She develops and extends her style second time out, drawing a performance from Stella as confidently vulnerable as any cinematic debut I can recall, and charting its every nuance and inflection with lingering close-ups and deft cutting that transforms familiar rom-com exchanges into profound ruminations on time, ephemerality and the ramifications of allowing an other to affect you. For the first time this MIFF, I feel like I’m in the film instead of just watching it from my seat. A wide, commercial release, and the attendant one- dimensional marketing campaign, might discourage discerning audiences from seeking it out, but for anyone still doubting, Park inks her auteurist credentials.

*

Comme le feu (Who By Fire, Philippe Lesage) confirms for me that its director is among the most thrilling to emerge on the scene in the last 10 years. An epic chamber piece – the description isn’t oxymoronic if you can stretch the idea of a chamber film to encompass white-water rafting and deer hunting – it appears to have stumped curators with its resistance to easy classification. Programmed in Berlin in the “Generation 14plus” strand typically reserved for teen- focused films, this unquestionably adult, intricately composed contemplation played at MIFF to a half-empty cinema at 10am on a Monday morning – odd placement for something which, to these eyes, is the grandest, most accomplished film of the 2020s so far. (A second MIFF screening was, according to a couple of friends who hastily detoured into it, even more sparsely attended). I can only hope that the approaching North American festival season will be more receptive – as of writing, its New York Film Festival premiere is still a fortnight away.

The film chronicles the reunion of putzy screenwriter Albert (Paul Ahmarani) with his one- time professional partner, award-winning, aggressively alpha film director Blake (Arieh Worthalter). Blake has retreated, for reasons never clearly explicated, from his acclaimed fiction career, and has spent the last decade putting out little-seen documentaries from his isolated base in the forests of Quebec. Albert arrives for an extended weekend visit, accompanied by his two college-age children Aliocha (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré) and Max (Antoine Marchand Gagnon), as well as Max’s best friend Jeff (Noah Parker), an aspiring filmmaker who holds Blake on an artistic pedestal and Aliocha on a romantic one. Both infatuations are unrequited. There is little plot, as such, but a glorious excess of subplot as the film consists of the complex, shifting relational dynamics among the richly conceived lead quartet (the ever-present, but notably sidelined, Max eventually opines to Jeff that “It’s like you don’t even notice that I’m here,”) and the wider ensemble, comprised of fellow guests and Blake’s employees, who make up the 10-person cast.

Who By Fire

Punctuated by a trio of single-take dinner scenes in which Lesage’s camera, in signature style, almost imperceptibly pans, tracks, zooms and hovers around the assembled characters while their various emotional dependencies are exposed, the evocation of Sven Nykvist’s indelible work with the creeping zoom is undeniable. Not for nothing is Blake’s pet dog called Bergman. It’s not the only embedded reference, of course. Aliocha is explicitly named for one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (the saintly one, who witnesses all around him), and the film’s English title deliberately recalls Leonard Cohen’s 1974 song “Who by Fire”, a riff on the Hebrew prayer “U’netaneh Tokef”. Emily Dickinson’s poem They shut me up in Prose (1862) is quoted extensively to conclude the film. The highbrow homages sit beside more populist intertextuality, with Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), the B-52s’ song “Rock Lobster” (1978) and John Grant’s “Marz” (2010, itself prominently featured in Andrew Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend) all utilised at important moments.

Ultimately, the film is about death, in its various iterations. The death of relationships, the death of careers, the death of illusions romantic, political, and also – most pointedly – filial. Major spoiler ahead, but it’s no coincidence that Lesage casts Laurent Lucas – who had played the fictional surrogate of the director’s father in his two previous, autobiographically infused films Les Démons (2015) and Genese (Genesis, 2018) – as the character who dramatically perishes, only to be miraculously resuscitated. Lesage confesses in interviews¹ that contemplating his own impending fatherhood was a significant driver of his scripting process, that the film, in effect, collates a multiplicity of examples of bad fatherhood – many of which Lesage knew from personal experience – as a reminder of what he should strain to avoid in raising his real-life Aliocha. In this light, the act of killing off – before generously reviving – his own cinematic “father” takes on resonance far beyond its mere chronicling of plot development. It’s a prerequisite for Aliocha’s subsequent wordless reckoning – forgiveness is too strong a word – with Jeff over his litany of toxic behaviours. Accomplished through yet another virtuosic single-take, the pair warming themselves in front of a fire before Aliocha unexpectedly joins in with the thundering soundtrack rendition of “Marz”. The film reaches its emotional crescendo with this song about longing for a simpler time, an era which can never be returned to, before they were forced to put away childish things and see through a glass darkly.

Bergman again. And the fate of Bergman the dog is what passes so perfectly for resolution of this unresolvable masterpiece. Lesage claims “For me, the atmosphere is the film. The mood is more important than the story. I am marked by films where I have the fantasy to live in those films.”² It’s this aspect which perhaps explains what many find perplexing or off-putting in his work. Mood and atmosphere are slippery, unsemiotic terms, holistic and all-encompassing, and defiantly resistant to deconstruction and rational explanation. Philosopher and Professor Robert Sinnerbrink captures the mystery well when he writes of “mood”, “It is not simply a subjective experience or a private state of mind; it describes, rather, how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world.”³ The attunement part is where the trouble arises, because it demands a pliability of the spectator, a willingness to let the film position you where it wants you that has been, at least since the time of French philosopher Louis Althusser, a long way from de rigeur in critical and scholarly circles. It’s a form of cinematic masochism, of watching films as a game of surrender – about which critic and Professor Gaylyn Studlar writes so eloquently⁴ – that is not only encouraged and facilitated by MIFF but reaches an apotheosis during the frenetic period when I’m in its grasp.

Is it simply enough, though, to surrender to a film? The artwork itself has to meet you half way, has to create the mood that’s acting upon you. Konstantin Stanislavsky, foremost articulator of what has come to be accepted as Orthodoxy in regard to acting since the invention of cinema – a varied collection of processes, practices, theories and techniques that academic Cynthia Baron groups under the umbrella label of Modern Acting⁵ – used the word perezhivanie to define what he would otherwise describe as “our kind of acting”.⁶ The term is frustratingly difficult to translate into English, but a common workaround is to talk about playing a scene with “lived experience”,⁷ or emphasising the “moment-to-moment”⁸ work of the actors. A filmmaker who allows and encourages their cast to prioritise perezhivanie, who relishes the improvisatory impulse and creates space for what Sanford Meisner termed “the reality of doing”⁹ creates opportunities for resonances within the film which operate beneath the ostensible content, enriching the entire experience and intensifying the connection with anyone willing to attune to it. Not quite a genre, it’s more a tradition which stretches from Jean Renoir and Hiroshi Shimizu, through Cassavetes, Elaine May and Maurice Pialat, to such accomplished contemporary exponents as Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Jasmila Zbanic. Lesage, with Who By Fire, takes his place alongside Monia Chokri, Sarah Polley and Xavier Dolan at the forefront of what seems to be some kind of Canadian renaissance of the approach.

*

What I like to call the cinema of perezhivanie is always on my mind at MIFF, but never so much as this year. Thursday morning, I open Twitter/X to find tributes to the passing of Gena Rowlands. I trained as an actor. Later I made two films that weren’t so much inspired by Cassavetes as infused with him. Now I’m completing a PhD thesis on the actor as auteur in the Hollywood Renaissance. I believe A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) to be the pinnacle of what the artform of cinema has so far achieved, although sometimes I think I might like Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977) even more. I keep watching films through the rest of the day but I can’t tune in to anything.

*

Close Your Eyes

Friday lunchtime brings Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice, 2023) and its epic inscrutability delivers a modicum of healing, reminding me that cinema includes, in its very essence, a reckoning with time and mortality that enigmatically suggests to me that scene in Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1998) when the shambolic hero vows to a gang of approaching muggers to take out one of their eyes. It’s a puny, ultimately fruitless, response to the inevitable, but doesn’t his stubborn resolve to do it anyway just make you feel better about everything?

I roll on into the second weekend where there’s plenty of cinematic sustenance, highlighted by the (much-belated) Australian premiere of The Stranger and the Fog (Bahram Beyzaie, 1974). I’m not sure how I’d managed to remain unaware of this singular title, but I was completely unprepared for a perplexing allegory which unfolded for 100 odd minutes like outtakes from Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974) directed by Kurosawa. Like the title says, a stranger emerges from the constant blanketing fog into a mediaeval seaside village, where he encounters a woman convinced that her missing-at-sea husband will one day return. Is the stranger an enemy? Or is something more metaphysical going on? I was bored to the point of senselessness and considered leaving at several junctures, the appeal of steaming Chinatown noodles and maybe even a quick nap somewhere calling me away from a film which seemed to boast a ratio of striking images to enervating nonsense as great as cinema has yet offered. Thankfully I stayed, because the last 25 minutes depicted the arrival of a Death Squad, both metaphorical and literal, and the entire film went berserk at a level that even Andrzej Żulawski might’ve found a bit much. An orgy of focused hysteria, unrestrained carnage, violent cutting, and images that seemed to howl at us from the screen, it pumped the audience into a frenzy of cheers and spontaneous applause at the sheer gratuitous cinematic excess of it all. I don’t know that it had any more meaning than your standard avoiding- the-Grim-Reaper symbolism but, once again, MIFF provided a cinematic experience that will stay with a great many of us who were in that space, at that moment, for the rest of our lives.

*

The following Tuesday evening found me at Julie zwijgt (Julie Keeps Quiet, Leonardo Van Dijl), a sober chronicle of sexual abuse in a Belgian tennis academy, one of those increasingly ubiquitous films which strives for authenticity by casting some version of a “real person” in the lead role. As if actors aren’t real people. In this case it’s real-life tennis junior, Tessa van den Broeck, whose presence ensures that the 11 minutes of tennis match footage looks natural, but that the other 89 minutes of teenager-dealing-with-trauma-and-abuse is an affectless, blank-faced, static slog.

Robert Bresson would be very proud.

*

A Traveller’s Needs

Perezhivanie returns at full intensity the following day with a stellar trilogy: Yeohaengjaui pilyo (A Traveller’s Needs, Hong Sang-Soo), followed by The Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt) and Sterben (Dying, Matthias Glasner). Seven hours of cinema in which alcohol featured prominently, albeit serving very different narrative functions; the three are also united by their thematic concern with characters attempting to articulate their personal truths.

In Hong’s reassuringly familiar diversion, Isabelle Huppert plays an impish French teacher who rigorously interrogates her bemused Korean students about their deepest feelings, assuring them that if they say something which they authentically feel then they will come to love the language that they’re saying it in. Which could well be interpreted as a claim that content pre-empts form, but seems to me more a suggestion that form and content are an inextricable dialectic which require us to have nimble feet if we want to keep up with the surgingly alive dynamic they produce. A foreign language, or a filmmaker’s aesthetic, will remain a dry and alien conceptual exercise if it isn’t infused with genuine human feeling – advice which might be intended for anyone still struggling with Hong’s deceptively casual oeuvre.

The Outrun charts the progress of Saoirse Ronan’s alcoholic Rona, retreating to the wind- battered Orkney Islands of her childhood to sort her shit out. The AA genre is as concerned as any with living moment-to-moment and Fingscheidt embeds her heroine in an environment of dynamic flux which foregrounds the importance of awareness and responsiveness, using weather to symbolise the alcoholic’s need for constant vigilance and adjustment to the shifting currents of their own organism. It is the improvisational metaphor par excellence, and it makes perfect sense that anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote so incisively about both AA¹⁰ and the underlying ontology of play.¹¹ And, why, when Ronan dials back on conceptual editorialising about her character and plight, she achieves levels of perezhivanie that feel almost overwhelming. Or perhaps it was just some genetic memory passed down through my grandfather, triggered by the bleak yet somehow eerily familiar island landscapes of my ancestors, that allowed me to sink into the film like I was climbing into a comfy bed.

Dying

Either way, the one-two punch of Hong’s disarming abstruseness followed by Fingscheidt’s unequivocal sincerity softened me up sufficiently for Dying to deliver the emotional coup de grace. Another Bergman homagist – in one pivotal scene, Lars Eidinger’s orchestra conductor is torn away from a Christmas rerun of Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman, 1982) to supervise the suicide of his composer bestie – Glasner details episodes from the gradual deterioration of an elderly couple (Corinna Harfouch and Hans-Uwe Bauer) and the impact, and more often the lack of impact, that their approaching demise has upon their children, the aforementioned Eidinger and his younger sister, an alcoholic dental assistant and unacknowledged chanteuse (Lilith Stangenberg). Meticulously, savagely scripted, yet played with an improvisational verve between the lines that might as well have been an aptly timed tribute to Gena Rowlands, Glasner’s film was dismissed as “overlong”, “self-indulgent” and “insufferably stilted”¹² in these very pages after its Berlin screening. I can understand the response – a 14 minute, shot-reverse-shot exchange between a dsyfunctional mother and son isn’t everyone’s idea of a spiritual centrepiece, especially when their respective truth-tellings rely on such quietly baroque emotional stylings. Yet the film repeatedly hits notes we rarely hear in cinema, and I couldn’t let it pass without offering a dissenting viewpoint. I carried its weight throughout the rest of the evening and experienced Feng liu yi dai (Caught By the Tides, Jia Zhangke) and Matt and Mara (Kazik Radwanski) as if someone had hit the mute button on them.

*

The films of the Zürcher brothers – Ramon and Silvan – generate a sense of dread quite unlike anything else in cinema, so I was awaiting Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney, Ramon Zürcher) with an anticipation mixed with trepidation. By now, a full fortnight into the festival, would I have enough left in me to stay with it? It’s a virtuosic orchestration of micro-gestures, infinitesimal adjustments of tone and timbre, steely regard of impenetrable motivations, with just the right note of straight-faced farce, that it feels like every single one of the film’s frames is conspiring to conceal a universe which exists wholly in the interstices between them. I feel like French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would love the Zürchers, as much as Lacan might have been capable of love. Because the jouissance is palpable, but also completely unattainable – the entire film exists in a state of becoming, on the verge of revealing itself, its essence, and is pitched at us like it absolutely is going to reveal itself. But it doesn’t. Which makes it sound like a cynical manipulation, like the filmmakers are trying to play dirty with us. Yet I never doubted the sincerity, that the film desperately wants to throw off the yoke of the Symbolic and Imaginary and that, when it does, it will allow access to something ineffable and paradigm-shifting about existence. Whether that would be as catastrophic as we sort of suspect, whether it might even be the end of cinema itself, is something we aren’t allowed to know. Which is maddeningly, deliriously thrilling.

Of course, I wonder whether the film would play the same if I saw it in circumstances outside of the increasingly fevered state of MIFF, 63 films in. But I am going to resist finding an answer to that question for as many years as I can.

*

MIFF’s VR/XR selection wound back a little in terms of quantity – just seven titles, as opposed to 12 in 2023 – but a significant leap in terms of quality demonstrated the exponential advances that the medium is making on an annual basis (full disclosure – as a member of MIFF’s VR preview panel, I have quite a privileged position to be able to track such development). It’s fascinating to note the parallels between the early days of cinema and the current state of VR, particularly the time it takes to transition from a period when the pure novelty of the technology is paramount to a time when artists begin exploring what is possible within the medium.

Emperor

The animated Empereur (Emperor, Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen, 2023) feels like a small piece of history on that front. It clocks in at 40 minutes (more or less – the interactive elements of many VR films mean that they can often run longer or shorter depending on how long the spectator chooses to spend in particular scenes), which is still unusually long for a VR film that largely remains straight cinema as opposed to gamified material, even if two-hour VR films are out there and increasing in number. It was, after all, only six years ago that a VR filmmaker – teaching a course in VR, no less – confidently assured me that there would never be VR features made because it was physically impossible to spend so long in the headset. The things that pass for received wisdom…

Empereur comprises a heartfelt depiction of, and reflection upon, Burger’s relationship to her ailing father, now suffering from aphasia and unable to communicate. Impressionistic scenes from his life are presented, memories of tales told to Burger in her childhood, and the fragments gradually accumulate to give a picture of a man, unremarkable in many ways but also, from the viewpoint of his heartbroken daughter, worthy of the titular appellation. The work takes its time to build an atmosphere – that pesky term again! – and connection with you, and allows you to just sit in the immersive space to contemplate the ramifications of the narrative events. Small interactive gimmicks are utilised – at one point we’re asked to pick up a virtual pen and write a word, but the program sabotages the pen so that no matter how hard we try, the words come out as gibberish. It’s an ingenious method for bringing home the frustration of aphasia, for immediately capturing the feeling of isolation which incommunicability inflicts. But, unlike the bulk of primitive-era VR works, we’re not situated in that headspace for the entire film – it’s just one element, which is used to construct a complex, layered experience which doesn’t fetishise identification but instead allows us to remain spectators. Immersed spectators, but an audience nonetheless, an important distinction which VR has so far mostly struggled to comprehend. Hopefully, as the medium continues to generate more cinematically conceived works, such considerations will become more sophisticated. And someone will come up with a solution to the problem of how to cry inside a VR headset without fogging up the lenses.

Melbourne International Film Festival
8 – 25 August 2024
https://miff.com.au

Endnotes