Art Smitten

If you had to conduct a TED talk RIGHT NOW, what would it be on? What is your specialist/niche knowledge area? Well for host Erin, her TED talk would be about K-Pop from 2009 - 2013! Erin even teaches Lauren some handy Korean phrases. 

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Hosts Lauren and Erin were joined in the studio with former SYNner DECLAN GREENE – the director and dramaturg of the world premiere show CONVICTION, “a caustically funny examination of contemporary feminism and self-authorship”. Declan is also the 2016 Resident Artist at the Malthouse Theatre.

CONVICTION is being performed at the Northcote Town Hall, Main Hall 189 High Street Northcote starting the 21st July to 6th August.

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Christian and Andrew review The Wheeler Centre’s one night only event Revolting and Ridiculous: A Roald Dahl Retrospective. The event took place at the Athenaeum Theatre on July 7th. 

"This year marks the 100th anniversary of Roald Dahl’s birth – so the Wheeler Centre will get revolting and ridiculous on stage with guests including Andy Griffiths, Jess McGuire, Kate McLennan, Tim Rogers, Anna Burke and more. They’ll wax nostalgic, perform extracts from Dahl’s vast body of work, delve into the recurring themes of his stories and discuss the life of this incomparable, sometimes controversial, author." - The Wheeler Centre website.

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The 1966 book Hitchcock/Truffaut was as intriguing and exciting a read as its title suggested. Based on Francois Truffaut's 8-day interview with Alfred Hitchcock, it offered readers the chance to feel like a fly on the wall for the meeting of two of the most avant-garde film directors of the decade. At the time of their meeting at Hitchcock's Universal Studios office in 1962, the British auteur had recently released his fortieth feature, the hugely successful Psycho, while the young man from across the chanel had completed his directorial debut, The 400 blows, only 3 years ago. Hitchcock was arguably more open and generous with Truffaut than he was with any of his press interviewers, which was surely a testament to the depth of their shared love and understanding of the art form they were both dedicating their lives to.

Present day filmmaker Kent Jones is evidently on this same level of cinematic appreciation. His documentary, which shares the same title as Truffaut's book, is much more than just a companion piece. This is partly because it is one thing to read a transcript of this mysterious conversation, but it is quite another thing to hear a recording of the exchange, to absorb the nuances of the interaction that took place through a French-English interpreter. This coupled with the pictures that were taken from the meeting almost make you feel that you are in that office with them.

More importantly though, Jones has invited some of the most interesting, influential working filmmakers of the day to discuss how the “Master of Suspense" has inspired them and what they have admired most about his work. Bringing on board the likes of David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Martin Scorsese is no small feat. It is unfortunately a very homogeneous group, an all-white, all-male ensemble cast, sometimes saying very similar things. The lack of diversity is certainly felt strongly towards the end, when the conversation turns towards Psycho and Vertigo. As interesting and insightful as these men are, there are some perspectives they simply don't have. French director Olivier Assayas has plenty to say about the New Wave cinema of Truffaut's time, Scorsese is the ideal person to comment on on the history of the crime genre and on the nature of a directing career that spans several decades, but no one seems very well equipped to discuss the characters played by Janet Leigh or Kim Novak. It feels very strange for there to be no thorough discussion of the director's trademark casting of blonde actresses in roles that were much more femme fatale than ingenue. When it comes to Vertigo, the interviewees excel at describing how it harks back to the pure cinema of the silent era and how its impact extends far beyond its mediocre opening weekend, but their examination of the lead female is very a much a male perspective on Hitchcock's male perspective on the Jimmy Stewart character's male perspective of her character. An informed critique of the Hitchcockian blondes should really be sitting alongside this documentary's great sections on the man's famous fear of police and his often quoted belief that "actors are cattle." This documentary is excellent at providing the context surrounding this statement and the background to that very recurrent theme of false criminal suspicion.

Cinema Nova will be screening Hitchcock/Truffaut from July 14, a week before the beginning of their upcoming festival featuring most of the highlights from Hitchcock's filmography. It will be opening with the 1954 drawing room thriller Dial M For Murder, in 3D funnily enough. When this little tidbit was announced at the critics screening I attended, the fellow next to me cried "oh Fuck off!" I wonder if that was Hitchcock's response when Warner Brothers told him to shoot it in 3D, or when he found out that they actually released it that way, or even when they asked him to make it. This wasn't a project he chose, he was under contract, and indeed, it is difficult to imagine him choosing this one for himself, despite it having the word "murder" in the title. Hitchcock/Truffaut purported that you could watch any Hitchcock film with the sound on mute and still understand 90% of what was happening. This film might just be the exception to that rule. It's definitely one of the most dialogue-heavy and dialogue-driven films that he made, with suitable theatrical performances from every member of the cast. It was quite obviously an adaptation of a play, in this case written by Frederick Knott. It follows the diabolical plot of a jealous husband (Ray Milland) to murder his wealthy adulterous wife (Grace Kelly) in order to get her money, a plan that of course goes terribly wrong. As tends to happen with plays, this one takes place almost entirely in one room, inside the couple's apartment. However, rather than being restricted creatively by the setting, Hitchcock of course knew how to work with this claustrophobia rather than against it in this very different medium.

This film is also a prime example of another of his great skills that the documentary points out, his knowledge of when to draw out a moment that would normally fly by an instant, and when to contract an event we are used to seeing being played long. A devastating murder trial is one such moment, naturally because it is this film's centrepiece of the staple false conviction theme, the perfect opportunity to fully demonise the character of Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams), before it is shown that me might not actually be all that bad as far as policemen in Hitchcock films go. The conviction scene appears more like a psychedelic dream than a reality. As such it is one of the few dated parts of this now 62 year old film. As is also observed in the documentary, his films really haven't dated at all since they're very much human stories that aren't focused on any particular time period. Meanwhile, the scene of the pivotal telephone call of the title is markedly extended, to the point where we even see the lines being connected in the control room. The murder scene that immediately follows is naturally of the high standard that you would expect from this director, and was clearly the scene that was most important to him. However, the rest of the film is also well-paced and absolutely engrossing, even as Knott's writing becomes more gleefully convoluted by the second.

This detailed documentary and uproarious crime thriller are both perfect for whetting your appetite before seeing North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and all the others on the big screen.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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La Mama Theatre is an ideal place to host the Australian premiere production of Lars Noren’s Courage to Kill. This tense two-hander, sometimes three-hander, from Sweden’s most celebrated playwright definitely works best in an intimate venue. It is one of those many plays that take place entirely in a domestic setting, in this case inside a young man’s apartment that he is forced to share with his father. While in some plays this makes the home seem like a bigger, grander place for having been the site of so much drama, Noren, and indeed set designer Charlotte Lane make it feel as though the walls are closing in on its inhabitants, largely because those walls are covered in sticky-taped newspaper clippings that keep being added to. As the audience takes their seats, director Richard Murphet places the son, Eric (Luke Mulquiney) at his desk and has him sort through the clippings while smoking a cigarette, in the manner of the classic film noir detective. He might have the jaded look, the unhealthy lifestyle and the rotating roster of young female lovers, but he’s a self-confessed coward, and a waiter, though a very attentive one apparently. However, none of this hospitality is afforded to his new housemate. His usually absent father, Ernst (Stephen House) has fallen on hard times. With nowhere else to go, Eric takes him in, more as his prisoner than anything else. While Ernst tries to make up for lost time, Eric tries to heal himself by punishing his father for what those years of parental neglect have done to him. Much of the play is a dance between pointing fingers and self-blame, between hurling insults and self-loathing, as the pair of them are sickened by the weakness they see in each other, and even more so when they see that same weakness in themselves.

After the interval, Eric’s new exotic young lover, Radka (Tamara Natt), comes to have dinner with them, an event that Ernst has long been looking forward to. With fresh eyes, she witnesses how harsh Eric is with his father, and how manipulative Ernst is with his son. She hears how quickly calm words turn into snarls, which then turn into barking shouts, which then turn into a silence that is finally broken by more calm but wounded words. Their similarities are what strikes Radka the most. In the heat of the moment, Eric struggles to muster the courage, or the nerve, to do the right thing, while Ernst often can’t, or won’t, control his urge to do the wrong thing. Eric couldn’t save a woman he saw being violated because he hesitated before delivering that punch to the head to the man who was attacking her. On the other hand, Ernst, as Radka finds out, would have more likely been the violator. Either way, the same damage is done. She ultimately realises that she is not safe with either of the two sides of this terrible coin.

All three cast members do an outstanding job. House is perfect as the ageing failure of a parent who invites both pity and scorn. Natt gives an entertainingly exaggerated performance as the siren-like voice of reason who drives the true selves of these two men right out of their self-righteous exteriors. Malquiney seems also a few steps removed from realism in his portrayal of the unhinged son tormented by the need to make his father proud, even one as flawed and wretched as Ernst is.

However, despite the efforts of these fine actors, and the ominous sound design by Adam Casey, this production is inbuilt with a highly melodramatic ending that runs more on poetic logic than character believability, unlike the rest of the play, which is largely realistic. Perhaps it is a fault in Marita Lindholm Gochman’s otherwise solid translation of the original Swedish text, but this play’s abrupt conclusion just doesn’t feel earned. However, if Noren hadn’t forcibly accelerated the proceedings at the end there this production may well have outstayed its welcome. Courage to Kill finishes more or less after it’s said everything it has to say, which is a hell of a lot, and all of it is richly engrossing.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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Cut The Sky is a dance theatre work by Marrugeku Theatre. It is in interdisciplinary work combining dance, video, poetry and song. Cut The Sky is part of the ‘Performing Climates’ for the Performance Studies International Conference or PSI hosted by Arts House. This year PSI is in Melbourne and it focus is on making conversations and exploring climate change though the lens of performance.

Cut The Sky is an intercultural exploration of how climate change is affecting the earth. It explores what climate change means for the indigenous Australians and its impact on traditional stories and customs, and it also explores what it means to be a ‘climate change refugee’. The structure of this piece is abstract and chaotic - it flings us forward and back in time. It opens with an apocalyptic version of Australia in the future ravaged by climate change and sends us into a cyclone imagined by the dancers wearing makeshift clothes of plastic and storage bags.

Cut The Sky is highly provocative and emotional. It screams and weeps over the earth and how we are damaging it and asks us "What are we going to about it?!". It’s a beautiful, complex exploration over something all Australians should be concerned about.

Marrugeku have toured this work all over the world, performing in outdoor and indoor venues. It has played at the Sydney opera house and remote communities in rural Australia, as well as being shown in multiple venues across Europe.

Cut The Sky is showing at Arts House Meat Market from Wednesday 6th till the 10th of July. It runs for 75 minutes with no internal. It is part of Performing Climates, an arts program designed and curated for the public by Arts House for the 2016 Performance Studies International Conference.

Review written by Ebony Beaton

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Come Away with Me to the End of the World by Ranters theatre was a series of conversations between nameless characters on stage. The actors seemed to be playing nobody or themselves - they talked of seemingly random things like their trip to Japan or the Italian dance classes they were taking, or meeting someone while going for a morning jog. Some of these conversations were mundane or even boring, some were absurd and surreal, some were long and winding, some were very short, and some conversations ended in song. These conversations were spoken over a soft backing track of ambient instruments and sometimes bird noises, which I found calming and it made the conversations easier to listen to. To my understanding, Come Away with Me to the End of the World was at least partly an one dimensional exploration of culture and/or travel seen though a white lens, most conversations centered around travel and experiences with other cultures while abroad, or experiences with other cultures that happened locally. Of course I felt like that was only one element of the piece, since there was many other conversations centered around things that did not involve travel and other cultures.

The set was confusing and abstract, it began de-constructed and bare – it was made of a purposefully small and simple back drop of a forest, and card board cut outs of something that was indistinguishable and other objects and set pieces on the perimeters of the stage. The set was then built by the performers during a conversation, the cardboard cut outs were small mountains and they scattered the stage, the set design was interesting but I found myself struggling to find meaning from it, I felt similarly to the whole play, although it was entertaining and a lot of the time amusing and funny, I found myself a points bored and my mind wondering off thinking about other things. I did not find a clear or strong message or meaning within the play and I found myself constantly having to fight for it in the beginning. In the end, I just sat back and let it be what it was and had a fun time laughing along with the performers telling their kooky stories.

Come Away with Me to the End of the World by Ranters Theatre is showing from the 5th to the 24th of July at The Malthouse Theatre, Southbank.

Review written by Ebony Beaton

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Our Kind of Traitor may well be the least confusing film adaptation of a John le Carré novel that we are ever going to see. If you enjoy political thrillers but don't exactly the have the head for real, convoluted espionage, Susanna White's film is sure to be the thing for you. Unlike the rather cold and brittle Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this story of a man about to inform on the Russian mafia has a much stronger human element, one that often even takes precedence over the political machinations, which are explored in unusually sparse detail. Dima (the always brilliant Stellan Skarsgard) wants to defect to Britain, using the central intelligence he has been privy to in order to gain safe passage from the British Secret service for himself, but also, more importantly, his family, whose lives have been threatened by the vengeful new mafia boss, "The Prince" (Grigoriy Dobrygin). MI6 won't officially go anywhere near Dima, but an agent named Hector (a perfectly British Damien Lewis) reaches out to him without official sanction and offers to get him sanctuary, provided the man can give him enough information to bargain with. Dima doesn't want to give the secret service everything he has, everything they need in order to take down The Prince and the treacherous Aubrey Longrigg (Jeremy Northam), only to be left for dead. Hector won't be able to put a strong enough case to the service unless Dima gives him everything he has.

To get things past this standstill, Dima reaches out to the holidaying English couple Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomie Harris), who he's only just met but who have already shown themselves to be trustworthy, principled people. He asks them to be present for all the negotiations, to put their safety on the line to ensure the safety of Dima's family.

Dima's wife and children, and the thorny question of who should be responsible for their survival, is ultimately the heart of this story. The family themselves all look to Dima, who is not just the self-proclaimed patriarch but also the instigator of all this, to protect them all, and put him down whenever he looks to be failing to fulfil this duty. Dima, and indeed Hector, look to the secret service to fulfil their duty to those who are giving them information at great personal risk, to be better than the criminal organisations they are working to bring down and the oppressive political regimes that they fight against. On the other hand, the service, embodied here by the character of Billy Matlock (Mark Gatiss) is looking to Dima and Hector to give them enough to go on that will ensure that this operation doesn't ruin them. Meanwhile, all of these parties are looking to Perry and Gail to offer the independent assistance they so desperately need. At first the couple echoes the words of the service, that they are not the ones who put Dima's family in this dangerous situation and that it is not their responsiblity to get them out of it, until Hector shows them photos of The Prince's terrible handiwork and cunningly triggers their empathy. The lowly agent is certainly very well versed in the power of personal motivation. Much of his determination to finally bring down Longrigg is personal vendetta after his last attempt to expose the big shark saw his son imprisoned.

At least in this adaptation, that particular element of backstory feels a little haphazardly thrown in to humanise his character at the last minute. It's talked about but never really felt. On the other hand, the conflict between Perry and Gail, while very clichéd, is evident visually as well as verbally. White places her two best directed scenes in the first ten minutes of the film. The first is of a grizzly, politically motivated murder by The Prince that perfectly sets up the impetus for the rest of the story, the terrible danger that Dima is fleeing from. The second is a painfully poetic scene of intimacy interrupted by an old wound that Gail is still healing from. It is later revealed that Perry slept with one of his students, and that this trip to Russia was meant to help repair their marriage. There's no denying that this is an overused plot line, but it works because, as with the cruelty of The Prince, we can see it as well as hear about it, and seeing is believing.

Hector's grief might not have the space to be shown, but his rage is palpable, both politically and personally. His only scene with the nefarious Longrigg managed to do the most with the least, and his rant to his peers about the world's complacency in running on black market economies is the flm's great dialogue centrepiece.

Fans of the more cerebral le Carré adaptations will probably be put off by this one's more emotional bent, but ultimately it makes for a stronger and more memorable cinematic experience.

Review written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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This season Art Smitten asked each guest to contribute a sentence to an ongoing story. Guests were only read the previous contributed line of the story. The end product was read aloud by producer Lauren on the last show of season 1, Sunday April 10th. 

STARTING SENTENCE: Sarah didn't know what to expect when she walked in...

Gemma Flack: She glanced around the room and noticed a strange triangular mound in the corner.

Erkki Veltheim: In this mound there is a very small door with a very small keyhole through which a light could be seen, flickering.

Louisa Rankin: Did she dare see what was on the other side or did she stay in the safety of her surroundings

Belinda Campbell & Jennifer Piper: As she heard the door begin to creak, she knew at once she only had one choice. And swiftly - she drew her glowing blue khatana, holding it aloft akin to Shira and cried ---!

Julia Mihai: GET THE PINEAPPLES!

Rachel Dyson-McGregor: And suddenly, the ceiling opened and pineapples fell from the sky - pre-cut, whole, spikey bits that were poking her in the eyes, and she became covered in fruit, and it rose and rose and rose until she was right up to her neck in pineapples

Josh Wright: Luckily her incredibly well equipped suit started to function and giant razor blades came out from around her body and started to spin wildly - as the pineapples disintegrated and juiced themselves into a sweet liquid which she gathered up ready to drink.

Tom Middletitch: Having now acquired a certain amount of pineapple juice, the customers that had come in asking for said martinis were pleased. However, her razor suit was still in action, and unfortunately the movement of the blades prevented her from getting to the emergency stop button. She was a flailing pencil case of weaponry - and there were no pineapples to help.

Margaret Kernich: She thought “Mmmmm, that’s another way to reinvent the nutri-bullet concept. I’ll just whip up a pineapple and mint smoothie right here right now”.

Kate Dehnert: And then I picked up the tennis racquet and started batting tennis balls at the dog

Tom Oliver, Teyha Nicholson, Jacob Dibb: The dog went into her mother’s arms and cried heavily until her legs fell off

Jennifer Byrne & Vicky Falconer-Pritchard: Then one morning, things got pretty naked

Laura Davis: On the way to the shops

Daniel Sloss: She stumbled and broke her ankle

Sarah Gaul: She fell onto a patch of freshly mown grass - when she looked up, she saw the person she least expected to see

Stuart Bowden: He had a sinister grin, he was holding the biggest pumpkin she had ever seen

Wil Greenway: It was amazing that the pumpkin mattered so much considering that her hair was burning, hotly

Tessa Waters: Oh he poured the bucket of water on his head and said to the pumpkin, “Come on old friend, let’s go home”.

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Inspired by The Wheeler Centre's event, the Gala Night of Storytelling: The Booked That Changed Me, hosts Andrew and Ebony, and producer Lauren, discussed the books that influenced them.

Ebony: 'Men Who Explain Things to Me' by Rebecca Solnit

Andrew: 'Jasper Jones' by Craig Silvey

Lauren: 'The Witches' by Roald Dahl 

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