“Class conquers digicam disease”
The Australian, 22-Dec-2004
by Russell Edwards

THE citizens of Taiwan know there is much more than Moore when it comes to documentary. Last week in the motor scooter-infested city of Taipei, the fourth biennial Taiwan International Documentary Festival began its eight-day run with an extensive collection of documentary films and videos from across the world. Bookended by Werner Herzog's The White Diamond as the opening night film on December 11, and Agnes Varda's Cinevardaphoto as the closing six days later, the festival exhibited 130 documentaries, long and brief, spread across four venues.

There were some concerns that opening night coincided with the eve of the controversial Taiwanese legislative assembly election. Organisers needn't have worried. The political section of the festival (with its heavy focus on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but also embracing Venezuela, Romania, the US, as well as the grassroots of Taiwan) proved to be one of the best attended.
Not all of the films had gravitas. Some were even fun. Ocean Fever, a documentary about a Taiwanese rock festival, was immensely popular. As well as an eye over the hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese music fans who attend the beachside event, the film examined the difficulties experienced by the Taiwanese rock groups that vie for the festival's prize of $NT200,000 ($8000).

Equally fascinating and even more likely to travel internationally was Viva Tonal, which traced the golden age of Taiwanese pop songs of the 1930s when the Japanese head of Columbia Records in occupied Taiwan gave permission for local songwriters to ply their craft. The film brimmed with quality footage from the era, as well as informative and amusing interviews from the ageing record company employees.

In the international sections, the opening night Herzog documentary showed the enigmatic director returning to form - and a return to his beloved Amazonian jungle. The White Diamond is simultaneously a meditation on humanity's efforts to fly and a character study of an aeronautics professor haunted by the death of a colleague on an expedition a decade before. Structured like a mystery, the film makes the most of its tragic elements. While Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was not part of the festival (it had a regular cinema release in Taipei in October), the film-maker's spectre seemed omnipresent, the documentary equivalent of an American action blockbuster which gets attention at the expense of local productions.

Asako Fujioka of Japan's Yamagata Documentary Film Festival (which runs as a biennial festival in the opposite years to Taiwan) took issue with his simplistic demonising of the US. She pointed out to a panel of Chinese, Indonesian, Taiwanese and Korean film-makers that, two decades ago, documentaries from their countries, if they existed at all, would have been propaganda for the governments of the day.

Other highlights of the festival included the cheekily titled Canadian film The Phantom of the Operator, which used found footage of yesteryear's telecommunications industries; and the visually deficient, but crowd-pleasing, Betacam feature Price of Letter, about the arduous life and generous spirit of a Bhutanese postman.

Not all of the low-budget films had subjects charming enough to transcend the limits of digital technology. The proliferation of video diaries can be summed up with a quote from Woody Allen's 1980 film Stardust Memories (uttered in parody of his own films): "I've seen it all before! They document their private suffering and fob it off as art."

The digital camera has helped create the myth that everyone who picks up a camera is a film-maker. Inexperienced film-makers, caught up in the excitement of getting something, anything, on tape, often neglect other important film-making skills - editing and sound quality - in the process. To be fair to Taipei, this digital disease has also attacked other festivals, including high status affairs such as Pusan and the Berlinale.

That said, all of the main prizewinners of the festival - in the international section, Justice, a depiction of the Brazilian court system; and in the Asian, Happy Berry, a portrait of the lifestyles of Bangkok youth - were not shot on film. Clearly, it's not the formats that are at fault but what inexperienced or untalented storytellers do with them.

The closing film, Varda's Cinevardaphoto, provided a superb masterclass. The triptych of short docos, thematically joined by an emphasis on photography - the earliest filmed in Cuba in 1963 and the latest completed earlier this year - was a joy to behold. A photographer who came to prominence as part of the French new wave, the 76-year-old Varda was endlessly charming as the festival's guest of honour and, despite the immensity of her talent, humble.

The Cuban piece Salut les Cubains, which synchronises photo stills with Latin music, remains a benchmark of editing excellence despite being 40 years old. There were many lessons for the digicam film-makers in the finale - if they can take their fingers off the record button long enough to absorb them.

- retour en haut -