M/Other

[GavinRees at aol.com]

In a message dated 24/2/00 5:07:54 am, you wrote:

<<
Saw M/other last year, thought it was way too long and little ado about not 
much.  Very realistic performances, believable situations on the plus side, 
but for me that was also its downfall.  A bit like watching some 
fly-on-the-wall reality telly, where very little actually happens.  A 
significant percentage walked out at last year's Auckland Film Festival in 
NZ, which is unforgiveable, but I could sympathise in this case.  Not a bad 
movie, just a rather long-winded and empty one, I thought.
>>

I don"t think that walking out of the movie is unforgivable as you think. 
M/Other is a movie with a walk-out factor of around 15 percent, (perhaps that 
could rises to as much as 25 percent at a festival. Too many press and 
distributers there you see, most of them have intention spans shorter than 
teenagers and way too many movies to see.  ) 

I personally think there are people who can take introspective movies, which 
play with time and explore emotion in ways that unsetles and disconcerts 
them; and others who  just aren"t interested in that kind of thing. They 
expect to be entertained, and not just stretched. They want to go away with a 
feeling of catharsis, or a warm glow that things turned out well, or at least 
a chance to pat themselves on the back for unravelling all those references 
and intellectual allusions. And that is absolutely fine. I"d rather that 
people who don"t watch a movie like M/Other quietly leave the cinema early 
on, rather than gripe about how boring it was. 

I think M/Other is a very important movie. It is kind of Ken Loach"s Ladybird 
Ladybird collides into Alexander Sokurov"s Mother and Sun in domestic Tokyo. 
If you are in tune with other peoples hidden frustrations, and dare I say it, 
in tune with your own, then there is lots to experience in the movie. It is 
far from empty, although you may leave the cinema feeling so, if you really 
surrender yourself to it. 

I think the analogy with Russian cinema might be more appropriate than Cassave
tes, at least in terms of "walk-out" quotient. There people who hail 
Tarkovsky as the greatest cinema artist yet, and others who have never felt 
more bored in their lives. And the two groups of people are absolutely not 
mappable onto the distinction between cultured and uncultured, or high-brow 
or low brow.  

The problem with M/Other is that it while it looks like it will be 
distributed in France, it is not likely to end up in cinemas elsehwere. I did 
an interview with the director at Rotterdam, and I am having trouble to find 
anywhere I can publish it. Hopefully the internet will make the distribution 
of introspective movies easier. I hope so, because there are separate 
communities of "arthouse" cinema goers, both of whom need to be catered for. 

Best wishes, 

Gavin 

PS Could anybody give me a couple of top book references for the culture of 
film making during the Occupation.?  A few days ago I asked about Ikuno 
Michiko and Osaka shiro, but I would be grateful for a more general steer.