BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: priming Rain of the Childen.

VINCENT WARD is probably the closest figure to an auteur in New Zealand, which means even his noble failures (such as River Queen) are worthy of consideration. His visual palettes and the understated yet complex moods are brilliantly constructed, and he was able to maintain these tropes even within his mixed American career. Given the release of Rain of the Children, the Film Society in a nice piece of foresight, screened two of Ward’s earlier films – A State of Siege based on a Janet Frame story, and In Spring One Plants Alone, the documentary that forms the basis of Rain of the Children.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: life through a lens.

ROSS MCELWEE’s particular brand of angst reaches its apogee in Time Indefinite. A mix of philosophical ruminations, self-deprecating humour, and personal filmmaking, Ross McElwee’s tragicomic documentary carries on the storylines he set up in his previous work. And while the film does drag at points near the end (you feel like you know him and his family really really well after seeing all these films), this is a poignant and wonderful piece of work.

An election on the horizon, Alister Barry’s documentary expose (from Nicky Hager’s book) gets a timely rerun at Wellington’s Paramount Theatre, from September 18.

“SURE WE COULD play the race card, but how would we run the country on Monday?” Jim Bolger wisely said. Yet under Brash-Key the party of Doug Graham centred their 2005 campaign on exploiting and encouraging racism and bigotry. Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country) skilfully adapts Nicky Hager’s dynamite book; like Orewa Speech author Peter Keenan’s email that he hates the race-based privilege line. Keenan described the slogan as ludicrous given Maori are at the bottom of the heap.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: brief encounters.

THE FILM SOCIETY’s playing of New Zealand short films this year has been a bonus. Too often, the short film has been marginalised as an art-form and within film criticism or exhibition (admittedly, I have neglected to cover the short films in my reviews). This also means short films are often neglected by the artists themselves – for many (and this seems especially true for New Zealand Film Commission funded shorts) it’s seen as a stepping stone for feature films. This means the shorts are merely an excuse to throw in as many ‘quirky’ camera angles as possible, or rely on clichéd or dull storytelling (perhaps the reason why Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night was so good was because it understood what a short film should be doing). It’s a shame as the short film can be just as poignant or thought-provoking as a feature. The Film Society presented six “classic” New Zealand short films, and each had varying degree of success in justifying this classic label.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Bergman, in passing.

Persona’s opening sequence would probably have had Film Society patrons wondering if the technical difficulties that beset previous weeks’ films had continued with this one. The famous montage shatters the notion of cinema, the idea that we’re comfortably going to suture ourselves into whatever film is playing. And he starts with light (not really in a biblical sense) and splices in clips from the ‘beginning’ of cinema. He moves onto animation, slapstick comedy, horror, pornography (Fight Club wasn’t so anarchic in that respect). Film is instead imaged as a violent art-form, something which tears, destroys, kills. Bergman adopts the idea that cinema captures death – what we see is no longer living, it stopped living the moment it was captured by a camera – and all we see are ghosts of the original trace. Throw in explorations of the tyrannical artist, charting the alienation of human contact, and an emphasis on the frailty/constructed nature of the visual image and you have one of the all-time masterpieces of world cinema.