Keeping Australia Safe (from film crews)

In early 2011 I was with two friends filming a documentary in Albany, a small town in southwest Australia. One morning we were collecting scenery shots a kilometre or so out of the town centre, near the port. We had a minimal setup: a camera and a tripod only. We were filming a shot of a food van parked on the roadside when a car pulled up and a man stepped out. He introduced himself as an AFP (Australian Federal Police) counter-terrorism officer and asked what we were doing. We fed him some vague information about the film – everything he could possibly need to know – and stressed that it was a 'legitimate' government-funded production, in the hope that he'd leave quickly. He told us that he was just checking in because somebody had reported that there were people hanging around with a camera, and the counter-terrorism squad was sensitive to activities occurring near the port.

He took our basic details, wished us luck for the rest of the shoot, and left us to it. We were amused that there was a counter-terrorism presence in Albany, and even more amused that the government had flattered themselves into thinking that Albany could be a potential terrorist target. Months later back in Perth, there was a card slipped under my door. It was from the counter-terrorism squad, asking me to call them. Not having made any recent plans to blow up shopping malls, I figured that it must have something to do with the Albany shoot. I called the other crew members and sure enough, they'd received the same card. Hugh, the cinematographer, had already called the police. An officer had told him that it was just a routine followup and had asked him the same things that the Albany cop had asked. Hugh must've handled the questions in a satisfactory manner because the other crew member and I never bothered to call the police, and they never called us either.

Last week I was with two other crew members (Hugh again on camera, Ben on sound) working on my PhD film project. Over the week we'd been visiting the new, outdoor public observation deck outside the Perth Airport, to get shots of planes taking off and landing at different times of the day. On this occasion we wanted to film planes as the sun was rising. We arrived at the observation deck just before 7am and saw that the gates wouldn't open until 7.30am. We drove a few hundred metres down the road and pulled over at a small grass clearing – the same place we'd previously stopped to get shots or have a smoke break. We set up the camera and tripod, hoping to get some glimpses of planes until the observation deck opened. We couldn't see any, so we grabbed instead a few shots of the surroundings – clouds, trees, birds resting on light poles. About five minutes in, an AFP car arrived. Two police officers – a man and woman, from the counter-terrorism squad. 

It was a classic good-cop / bad-cop pairing. The male officer was polite, apologetic, and later even suggested to us better spots in and around the airport to film planes taking off and landing. The female officer was everything you'd expect a Perth counter-terrorism cop to be: nasty, efficient, suspicious and mind-bogglingly stupid. You could tell she was craving conflict from the moment she jumped out of the car. They asked what we were doing and we told them what should've been obvious. I asked if it was a problem to be filming there; after all, we weren't inside the airport and the observation deck that we'd come for was open to the public – including, as we'd seen from our previous visits, people taking photos and videos. We'd also filmed on this very patch of grass before and police had driven by, with no questions asked. The man told us it was fine as long as we didn't get too close to the fences, which we had no intention of doing in any case. Meanwhile, the woman checked the license of the car I'd borrowed for the shoot. There was a problem: the registration had expired a couple of weeks ago. The man asked if I could pay this now, to avoid a fine and court summons, so I made a call and arranged it on the spot. The receipt popped up on his iPhone; he was satisfied and assured me nothing would come of it (given they were federal and not state police, I doubt they could've done much about it anyway). I thanked him. So far so good. But the expired registration had made the female officer's antennas prick up, prompting her to radio in a background check on us. While she waited for the information to be retrieved, she pulled Hugh aside.

‘Do you have a criminal record?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me now if you have a criminal record, or we'll quickly find out.’
‘I don't have a criminal record.’

Then she pulled Ben aside.

‘Have you been in trouble with the law before?’
‘No.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Shooting a film.’
‘Do you have any intention of doing anything illegal or related to terrorist activities?’
‘No.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Perth.’

I was making small talk with the male cop when I heard ‘Albany’ mentioned on his partner's radio. I immediately realised what it referred to. ‘Something's come up,’ she said, and turned to me. ‘Do you have anything you shouldn't have in the car?’ I told her I didn't. She told me to open the boot, and I asked her if she was aware that the Albany thing was nothing more than a routine check. Too bad; Hugh and I were on record. Expecting her to have only a quick glance inside, and eager to get rid of the moron as soon as possible, I opened the boot. The two of them then proceeded to check everything: every case, every zip pocket on every bag, every compartment in the car, even the bag full of bananas and cashew nuts that was to be our breakfast. A name was written in White-Out on one of the Pelican cases for the camera lenses – a name belonging to the previous owner of the case. She made a note and demanded to know who it was. She then turned to Ben and asked what he did for work; he replied that he taught at a university.

‘So when I asked you before where you were from, why didn't you mention that?’
‘I didn't realise that's what you meant, sorry. I've only had four hours' sleep.’
‘So, I've only had a few hours' sleep.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said: 'I've only had a few hours' sleep myself.’
‘Okay.’
‘Why were you awake at four in the morning?’

When she was done with Ben, she turned to me and continued her fine detective work.

‘Judging by the [hairs in the] back seat, I take it the owner of the car has a dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where do you work?’

I told her.

‘Why didn't you tell me that earlier?’
‘I did. I told your partner.’

She gave her partner a glare and continued rummaging through the equipment.

‘If you haven't done this before, I wouldn't need to do this. What am I to think when I look in your car and you have a boot full of weird shit that looks like...’
‘Film equipment?’
‘Listen, I'm just doing my job, just like you're doing yours. Step back and let us do our job.’

During the search, I had to make another call to confirm some details about the aforementioned vehicle registration, so I walked a few metres away from the scene to do so. When I turned around, the woman was standing right behind me, holding a camera a couple of feet away from my face. She took a photo. I shielded my face and asked her why this was necessary. ‘You don't need to know why we're doing what we're doing,’ she replied. ‘You just need to do what we ask you to do.’ I turned my back to her and she told me to turn around so she could see my face. She snuck in a few snaps as I shielded my face, then she and her partner returned to their car and drove off. Strangely, after all of this, we were free to continue filming on that very spot. If the five-minute conversation with the cop in Albany was the impetus for the invasive bullshit that we’d just experienced – the excuse they'd used to search the vehicle, interrogate us like criminals, and take photos of us without our consent – it's scary to think of the precedent that's set each time some hack from the counter-terrorism squad decides to harass somebody for pointing a camera at the sky. Needless to say, this ‘incident’ will also pop up on our records next time, and the police confirmed as much when we filed a complaint several weeks later. And not only that – these records can’t ever be removed.

I'm bewildered as to why police take such keen interest in people filming. Logic would suggest that those intent on committing crimes – terrorism or otherwise – wouldn't disguise as filmmakers and parade themselves on a busy street next to an airport, with bulky equipment, in full view of anyone who cared to look. The irony here is that in each and every pants pocket of the people who drove by as we were searched, as well as in our own pockets and in the cops' pockets, were devices capable of doing exactly what we were doing, but in a much more discreet fashion. Using a phone or small camera to take a shot of a plane or a bird sitting on a power line wouldn't attract a second glance. But as it currently stands, as soon as you stick a camera on a tripod, it becomes something to fear and become paranoid about, regardless of how small or large the camera may be (we were using a Sony F3 in Perth and a Canon 5D in Albany; the latter is a small, ubiquitous DSLR camera that's popular amongst filmmakers and photographers). Maybe it's because a tripod, with the right combination of paranoid imagination and stupidity, can look like a grenade launcher? Who the fuck knows. All we know is that two cops drove away that morning, probably thinking that they’d done their job well – that they’ll continue to Keep Australia Safe.

Separating the voice from the face

Toward the start of our trip through Russia in 2009, my girlfriend and I watched more TV than we would've liked. We'd just arrived in St. Petersburg by train from Finland. As we settled into our apartment, I turned the TV on and flicked through the channels. I couldn't understand a single word but it was trashiest shit I'd ever seen; this much I could understand. A couple of days later, I was woken in the early morning by a call from Australia, and was told that there had been a ‘terrorist attack’ on a train heading from Moscow to St. Petersburg; we were due to catch the same train route the next evening, in the opposite direction. I turned on the TV but there was nothing about the incident on its dozens of channels. I jumped on the computer and for the next few hours, while the TV remained on in the background, I alt-tabbed through Russian blogs and foreign news sites as they drip fed information. It wasn't until later that afternoon that the Russian news channels started reporting the incident proper (it seems this kind of media silence is common in Russia; see this BBC article about Russians angered after state TV failed to inform its citizens during the wake of a bomb attack in Moscow). By this stage I already knew what had happened – Chechen separatists had bombed and derailed a passenger train, killing twenty-six people and injuring dozens.

We didn't know what to do: catch the train the next day as planned, or stay put? We were already a little on edge, Russia being an intimidating place for first-time visitors (a friend had warned me a couple of days before I left about the frequent race bashings in St. Petersburg). In the evening, the apartment owner popped around to drop off some linen. ‘You'll be fine, fine, fine,’ she assured us when we asked if it was safe to catch the train as planned. ‘These things happen every now and then. They [the separatists] will go into hiding for awhile.’ She was completely nonplussed, and just as jovial and lovely as when we first met her. The city seemed just the same too, that day and the next. I expected fewer people on the streets, more police, more suspicious eyes, but we didn't notice any change of pace. And true to the lady's word, we were fine, fine, fine. We had an unforgettable trip, far away from those mangled piles of bodies and steel. Contrary to what TV and the movies have taught us in scientific fashion over many decades, Russia was a truly beautiful place, full of ordinary, resilient and hospitable people. Sadly, the lady was also correct in that ‘these things’ happened again soon after we left: in March 2010, two suicide bombings in the Moscow subway killed forty people and injured a hundred.

What I learned from watching a lot of TV in those couple of days in St. Petersburg is that in Russia, they love to dub dialogue. Everything – absolutely everything – on TV is dubbed into Russian: movies, sitcoms, documentaries, cartoons, interviews. You might be familiar with the segments in news stories where there would be a soundbite from a non-English speaker, but rather than using subtitles, their voice is faded out after a few words and replaced with a patronisingly enthusiastic voiceover translation, while the original speech continues semi-muted in the background (this is necessary on radio, unnecessary and lazy on TV). On Russian TV, such dubbed footage is often syndicated from other media outlets, but then dubbed once again, into Russian. This means you often hear three voices simultaneously, a cacophony of languages at different volumes that often forms a ghoulish contrast between what you see and hear. The child on screen may be talking about how it would be nice to not have her village bombed once in a while, but the louder English voiceover on top sounds like they’re reading a children's book to a half-deaf toddler, while the even-louder Russian voice over the top of theirs sounds like they’re trying to sell off her stocks before an imminent crash. Assuming that Russian TV dubs the already-dubbed footage and not the original, it would be interesting to see how much meaning is gained or lost in this twofold translation process, whether through added inflections or simple mistranslation. 

When we traveled into Mongolia weeks later, we shared a train carriage with a Mongolian youth ice hockey team and an American student. There was only one person onboard who could speak both English and Russian (the student), and one person who could speak Russian and Mongolian (one of the players). Whenever we wanted to communicate something to the Mongolians, we would say something in English, the American would translate this into Russian, then the one Mongolian player who spoke Russian would translate it into Mongolian for his teammates – and the reverse process applied if one of the players wanted to say something to us. Often a straightforward question or remark would unexpectedly draw laughs or confused stares, on both ends. Who fucked up? Usually it was far more effective to communicate when one of the middle-men were absent, by resorting to frantic Charades-like gesticulations or scribbling drawings on a notepad. Any communication involving translation is an approximation, but this way we could find common ground through our shared failure to understand each other, and search for similarities outside language, which only pronounced our differences. A laugh, a gesture, a shared cigarette: these were the order of the day.

When we were in Moscow a week after the train bombing, I wanted to watch a film. We were, after all, in one of the most important and historic film capitals in the world, and we wouldn't have another opportunity to see a film for about two months. I knew that it was going to be difficult to see a Russian film with English subtitles, but I thought it would be possible to at least see an English-language film with Russian subtitles. I asked a guy working at the hostel where we could see a film that hadn't been dubbed. He didn't know, so he asked some others, who also didn't know. Everything is dubbed in Russia, they told me. ‘We don't like reading subtitles.’ No shit – but being in Moscow, I knew that 'everything' couldn't possibly mean everything; there had to be some freaks in this city of twelve million who liked to see films in which they could hear what the actors actually sounded like. After some cumbersome Googling on an iPod, I finally managed to track down a cinema that was screening a few English-language films, with subtitles. One of these was Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the 'remake' of Abel Ferrara's classic of half the same name, starring Nicolas Cage. Perfect!

​We caught a train to a suburb and found the cinema, a neat little place with well-loved carpets. We bought tickets and sat in the back row of a half-filled theatre. I can't remember if there were trailers or not, but after the lights dimmed I remember the couple next to us chatting, seemingly unaware that the film had begun. In fact, a good dozen audience members continued talking throughout the opening scenes, at full volume.  A man sitting alone in the front row picked up his phone when it began to ring and greeted what must've been an old friend; a couple of others made calls. This was all very fascinating but also very frustrating, because we didn't come just to see Nicolas Cage's weird face – we came also to hear his weird voice; a voice that was drowned out by a cacophony of mumbling Russian voices, and became quickly, irritatingly, dubbed. It wasn't until Cage's character started getting up to some serious mischief, and Eva Mendes’s character sexed up the screen, that the conversations were halted and the place began resembling a cinema (guns and tits are part of a universal cinematic language capable of hushing children and adults alike). We enjoyed the film and went home satisfied. Above all, the film warmed us through its communal experience, and in the comfort one gets when hearing their native tongue – grating Australian accents notwithstanding – in a place where you rarely hear it. We didn't hear much English for the rest of the trip, and Cage's drawling, nasal voice stayed with me in the back of my mind, like a quiet, good friend.

A couple of years ago I had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur, a city I don’t like much for reasons I won’t go into now. I was walking around trying to kill time in the mall-dominated area of the city, when I looked up to see a huge image of Nicolas Cage floating above me on the surface of a building: an advertisement for Montblanc. I found it amusing because Cage had never struck me as billboard-advertising material (except maybe in Japan), and he seemed a particularly unusual choice to sell luxury watches. (I'm sure many yuppies would think twice about forking out for a Montblanc if they'd seen a lot of his films and realised how insane and un-Montblanc he actually is.) I stared at the giant, semitransparent portrait of this strange actor, who'd brought such joy and comfort to me and millions of others. Since the Moscow screening, every Cage film I'd seen had transported me temporarily back to that cosy cinema, full of Russians who just wouldn't shut the fuck up. Hoping for the same transcendental effect here, I concentrated on his lips, which were stretched to a goofy half-smile, and wished him to say something – just a simple ‘hurrrgh’ as he no doubt would've moaned when he had the photo taken – but nothing doing. He remained frozen and mute, and all I could hear was the soundtrack of the loud, sticky city behind me. The air suddenly got more humid, the cars honked louder, and the smell of exhaust fumes tickled my nostrils a bit more forcefully. I couldn't wait to be home.

Begins with three and ends with two

The following is a transcription, with added images, of a beautiful spoken-word scene appreciation by João Bènard da Costa. It's an excerpt from a longer piece that appears as an extra feature on Second Run's DVD release of Pedro Costa's O Sangue. I've never read or heard anyone talk about a film in this way. I know very little about da Costa except that he was the head of the Portuguese Cinémathèque until his death in 2009, his favourite film may have been Johnny Guitar, and that his writings seem not to have been translated into English. He also appears on Criterion's release of Pedro Costa's Ossos (part of the Letters from Fontainhas box set, a must own).

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We have reached what I like the most and what hurts most. Vicente, in his argyle sweater from when he was small; Clara, with her knit jacket over a white dress, sitting, her legs almost completely uncovered; and Nino, who has already changed his expression to one of surprise. Nino has fallen asleep on Vicente's lap, but with his legs touching Clara's.

Once, a long time ago, I saw Nicholas Ray's film Rebel Without a Cause, in which a boy, a girl and a child – James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo – were sitting or lying down, just like this, almost in the same position. Sal Mineo might have said, ‘Let's put up a tent here, a tent like a triangle, and abandon ourselves to transfiguration.’

Except that the children, when they're very happy and when it's very dark outside, and they're very tired, fall asleep. Especially if it's Christmas Eve. And the boys and girls, when they're alone in places like this, in the dark, they don't go to sleep, rather their bodies come alive.

Little by little, notice the scale of the shots and the movement of the camera. The child disappears from the frame, and only the girl and the boy remain. ‘Ask me things,’ says Clara, and she says it once again. She says it once again to Vicente while her hand rests on his chest, where his heart beats. ‘Ask me things.’

In Casa de Lava there is also a woman who asks a man to ask her things. In his film Ossos as well, ‘Ask me things, caresses, more.’

When Vicente's hand touches Clara's face, Nino has already disappeared from the shot.

They can teach you a thousand lessons about what a medium shot is, about what a close-up shot is, and you still wouldn't understand what happens in this magical sequence which begins with three and ends with two.

In such a close-up, so near, so close.

So close that the only thing left for her to do is to leave.

After that shot, in which she appears out of the blackness, an apparition, like flowing water…

‘You'll never have another night like this again.’

But much later, Nino asks her, ‘Why are you leaving? Why is it that you left me in the clutches of Uncle, that old ogre?’

Like Nick Ray's film… That other film begins when Sal Mineo wakes up alone and sees the chains and the black jackets, and can't find either Jimmy or Judy.

Love, all love always implies a kind of betrayal, because in the moments that really matter, you have to look out for yourself. 

The shots with Nino, the shots without Nino.

Noble Men in a Cock Forest

The last film I saw in 2012, on New Year's Eve, was Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. Eleven of those men are pictured below. Who are they staring at? That would be the twelfth and angriest man in the jury room, the last to switch his vote to 'not guilty' and save a kid from the chair. An hour or so before this scenario, there were eleven men looking at Henry Fonda, though not with quite the same eyes. Most of them were angry at him for being an enigmatic loner and a party pooper, having refused to vote 'guilty' in what appeared to be a cut-and-dried murder case. But being Henry Fonda, he managed to change their minds pretty quick.

The first film I saw in 2013, on New Year's Day, was Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. In the shot below, three French soldiers are being tried in a kangaroo court. They've been placed there as scapegoats by the generals, who have trumped up some charges to camouflage their own murderous mistakes. Kirk Douglas, who is as big a superstar as Henry Fonda, does his best to defend the soldiers, but it's no good. The court officials are more barbaric than any enemy soldier, and the court itself has one purpose, which is to kill. Douglas isn’t able to change a single mind, despite delivering some very moving words.

Both films are set in strange worlds with no women, with the sole exception being the famous final scene in Paths of Glory. Men rule, and are ruled by other men. (In Australia, we call these settings 'sausage fests' or 'cock forests'.) The films are vastly different, but the unifying aspect is that they both feature noble men fighting for noble causes in ignoble environments. In other words, they're the ultimate recruiting tools for the legal profession. It's no coincidence that I saw these films back-to-back: seeing one made me want to see the other; I wanted to be inspired by more noble men fighting for noble causes in ignoble environments.

12 Angry Men ends with an innocent man saved from execution, and Paths of Glory ends with three innocent men unable to be saved from execution. I wonder which scenario has been more inspiring for would-be lawyers over the years – the justice of the former or the injustice of the latter? I wonder how many lawyers have experienced the glory of their onscreen counterparts? The movies have promised them so much.