Blog #8. Witness. But Samuel, there's never only one way. Remember that. Would you kill another man?

You have no right to keep us here.
Oh, yes I do. Your son's a material witness to a homicide.
You don't understand. We want nothing to do with your laws.
Doesn't surprise me. A lot of people I meet are like that. 

Witness can be considered Weir's first American film (where he has continued to work since), though he made use of fellow Aussie John Seals as his cinematographer (rather than Russell Boyd, another Australian, who did DP duty on all the other films of Weir that we've watched). In the way that Weir showed the natural beauty of Australia in Gallipoli, he shows us an America that looks like something out of a Currier and Ives calender, with rippling fields of wheat and rustic farms. He also shows us an America that looks like something out of Cops. It is, we can all probably agree, the most accessible film of his we've watched yet. It was also a huge success, making over $68 million on a $12 million budget. And it helped make Harrison Ford an actor to be considered for serious dramatic roles, and not just Han Solo or Indiana Jones. It also put Kelly McGillis in the minds of filmgoers, leading to her role in the blockbuster Tom Cruise flick Top Gun. Witness is an iconic 80's Hollywood film, one you can catch on television often—unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock or Last Wave.

1. So what do you think? Like? Dislike? And what moment or image stayed with you? Why?

2. We've seen this before in Weir: a stranger themself in a strange land. Often we are the stranger, the viewer that is, seeing something strange and alien to us. Sailors on a warship; aborigines; a girl's school; the Amish. Clark asks this question: what's Weir saying about the Amish? How are we supposed to see them and their life so far in the movie?

3. The movie begins with Samuel Lapp (Lukas Haas), maybe one of the most appealing children in a major motion picture ever, seeing a new world; and we get to see our world too through his innocent eyes. We're probably thinking the movie's going to be about him. But Weir does something...tricky? surprising? He turns this into a movie about city cop John Book seeing a new world; and we get to see this world through his eyes. And pretty clearly the conflict is being set-up: should Book stay in Amish country? Should he trade in his "gun of the hand" for a plain Amish suit with no buttons? Should he leave his life "whacking" people? What do you think? If at this point in the film, you could pull a Woody Allen ala Purple Rose of Cairo and enter into the world on the screen, what would you tell John Book to do—and why?

We'll finish the movie tomorrow. And sometime next week we'll start Year of Living Dangerously again.

Here's a clip from today's portion of the movie. It's a truly funny moment.

Blog #7. Gallipoli.

Here are a couple of clips from today's viewing to help remind you of what we watched.

Then later, the haunting landing on the Gallipoli peninsula itself:

As I said in class today, the events Weir dramatizes here is a historical reality. If you read the Wikipedia article, you will find out that the campaign is still recognized in both New Zealand and Australia (the two countries lost almost 26,000 men killed and wounded in the campaign) as Anzac Day. In his film, Weir doesn't hide at all his feelings about what happened back in 1915, making Gallipoli his most didactic work. It also is a pretty straightforward narrative, a very traditional commercial film in many ways, a break from his prior two films.

1. So what is your response to this movie so far?  Like? Dislike? Why? And what image stays with you from this first almost two hours?

2. As we embed with Frank and Archie in the hillside of Gallipoli, waiting for the attack soon to come, it's easy to forget that the first half of the film took place in Australia. So why do you think Weir gave us so much time back in Australia? What thematic purpose do you see in his doing this?

3. What do you think this film is about? I know it's hard to say without having finished it, but give it a shot. Think of all its disparate parts—Australia, the friends, the running, the debate about the war, the war itself—and try to come up with a coherent commentary on what this film is trying to do.

We'll finish this tomorrow and do some talking. Gotta love that impossibly young Mel Gibson.

Blog #6. PIcnic at Hanging Rock. This we do for pleasure, so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants. How foolish can human creatures be.

"I have instructed Mademoiselle that the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves once the drag has passed through Wood End. We will partake a luncheon at the picnic grounds near the rock. Once again let me remind you the rock itself is extremely dangerous, you are therefore forbidden of any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lowest slopes."

I asked Peter Weir if he'd been hesitant about filming a mystery without a solution. "My only worry was whether an audience would accept such an outrageous idea. Personally, I always found it the most satisfying and fascinating aspect of the film. I usually find endings disappointing: they're totally unnatural. You are creating life on the screen, and life doesn't have endings. It's always moving on to something else and there are always unexplained elements. 
"What I attempted, somewhere towards the middle of the film, was gently to shift emphasis off the mystery element which had been building in the first half and to develop the oppressive atmosphere of something which has no solution: to bring out a tension and claustrophobia in the locations and the relationships. We worked very hard at creating an hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotise the audience away from the possibility of solutions... There are, after all, things within our own minds about which we know far less than about disappearances at Hanging Rock. And it's within a lot of those silences that I tell my side of the story."
—Interview with Peter Weir

Not the easiest film to watch, Picnic at Hanging Rock, but I meant it when I said "Wow" afterwards. For me, it is a beautifully composed and filmed film. It harkens to The Last Wave in its exploration of a dream world, but where the later film arguably gets bogged down in its need to explain itself, this film makes little effort to explain the obvious mystery, what happened to the girls. In life, dare we say, there are often very few answers: where those socks went that were in the washing machine; what happened to those children that used to be on the sides of milk cartons. Life is a mystery, and Weir does not back down from that in this film, to its credit, I think.

So, as we started to do in class today, make sense of this film. How do you make it coherent? Give it a shot—think about what was said in class and what you think. Picnic at Hanging Rock is about—...what? Finish the sentence and explain why you think this. What in the film, image, moment, action, conflict, best supports your idea. Write a couple hundred words.

Tomorrow we look at Weir's first real hit, Gallipoli, a 1981 film based on a factual event in World War I, the invasion of what was then the Ottoman Empire, now Turkey, by a combined British/New Zealand/Australian force in 1915. It stars an incredibly young Mel Gibson, who would appear in Weir's (and our) next film, The Year of Living Dangerously, and would soon become an international star. Gallipoli cost $2 million in Australian currency and grossed over $11 million. It made Weir a bankable director outside Australia.

That's enough. See you all tomorrow.

Blog #5. Picnic at Hanging Rock.

As we said in class, this 1975 film was the world cinema's introduction to Peter Weir. And as Gabe noted on his earlier post to Last Wave, Picnic at Hanging Rock was firmly in the mode of cinema of its time. Remember, this was before superhero films and big budget remakes of television shows and sequels to superhero films and big budget television remakes. There was such a thing as the art house cinema in 1975 that played films like this and Last Wave. Kinda like Midtown Art Cinemas but without the chi-chi: craft beer, hamburgers, ten dollar bags of popcorn. But I digress...

1. My first question, as always: reaction to the film? Like? Dislike? Why?

2. Clark's question: Will Aubrey find and overtake the Acheron?  Will David discover and comprehend Dream Time?  Will Michael find the girls (especially Miranda!) at Hanging Rock?  These might be the questions posed by the commercial trailers for the three films we've watched, but we know Weir is pursuing other ideas.  So, what do you think he's chasing behind the superficial action of Picnic at Hanging Rock? This can't just be about a field trip gone wrong, can it?  What's going on at Appleyard College for Girls?  What do we know about the students' lives?  And why in the world does Albert Crundall have a tatoo of Botticelli's Venus on his forearm?! Those darn Aussies are just full of surprises and mystery.

Have fun. See y'all tomorrow.

Blog #4. The Last Wave. We've lost our dreams. Then they come back and we don't know what they mean.

"But you ... I think you may be mukuru. You different tribe ... from another world ... across the sea ... from sunrise." Charlie to David.

Richard Chamberlain learns of a previous civilization that was destroyed by a great wave. He was part of that civilization. Are we meant to believe that he was an aborigine in a previous life, or that he is psychically in tune with the aborigines and that's why he's chosen to be their lawyer?
 Here we have two men: one white, one black; one tribal aboriginal, one highly sophisticated Western civilized man. Both fine men. One of them has material wealth; one has spiritual wealth. I wanted my lawyer, with his material wealth, with his humanitarian principles, to, firstly, glimpse with his mind that there was another lost dream, or spiritual life, and then to touch it. I thought, How can he touch it? I'll have him go back down, go back down - that's what I kept saying in my mind. How can he go back down? I thought, Go back down underneath the city, down through the sewer, through the filth, down to the dirt, down to his own lost spiritual life - treated with some logic, some realistic elements. It's not a fantasy. I wanted to represent it that way. So he goes back down, and there, within the ground below - we've mentioned in the film that his background is South American, he came from South America as a child - and there he touches his own lost spiritual life, his own dreaming. In a sense he's given a gift by the aborigines. There are symbols and signs from some other life, or South American history - who knows what? He can't cope with it. He can't handle that kind of knowledge. I don't think he could.
—Peter Weir in an interview 

This may be cheating a little, but I thought that hearing Peter Weir himself talk about this film might help with our figuring it out. Remember: even the artist isn't always clear and truthful about his own work. So use what Weir says, if you want, as a stepping stone for your own observations, and not as facts to be restated.

1. So what did you think of this film? Several of you spoke today in class—but more of you didn't. So let's have everyone speak here. What image or moment stays with you from the film—and why?

2. How would you describe this film to a friend who asked you about it? How would you categorize it?

3. The big question: what do you think it's about? What is Weir getting at in this film, do you think?

4. Okay, we know that this film shares a preoccupation with water in relation to Master and Commander. What do you see as the biggest or most apparent thematic connection it shares with the later film?

That's more than enough for now. Take some time answering these questions. Tomorrow we watch a movie all about girls—there's a surprise—called Picnic at Hanging Rock. See you then.

Blog #3. The Last Wave.

Well, this is different. We're a long way from the Napoleonic Wars and ships-of-the-line and little boys without arms and flightless fowls...or are we?

The fact that many of you walked out utterly perplexed after the first 35 minutes of this 1977 made-in-Australia film, Weir's third feature (a disappointing box office following the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which we will watch next), is not surprising. I'm perplexed as well. But I would argue that this is exactly the state of mind Peter Weir wants us to be in as we watch this strange film. David Burton, its lawyer protagonist, is perplexed too. Who wouldn't be with the massive rainstorms buffeting usual dry Australian and with the dreams he's having? I don't know about you, but I'm perplexed in the way that I want to know what the heck is going on in the world of this film.

1. Your reaction to this film so far? And—please answer this—what image or moment in the first part of this movie jumped out at you? How so?

2. What echoes of Master and Commander do you see in this film made 26 years earlier? Imagery? Theme? I know I felt as though this was a film made by the same director, different as the two movies are. What here reminded you of, brought you back to, the more recent film?

Write a couple hundred words. We'll see you tomorrow and—I hope—find out what the heck is going on in this movie.

Blog #2. Master and Commander. "...And though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England."

What would you have me do, Stephen?
Tip the ship's grog over the side.
Stop their grog?
Nagle was drunk when he insulted Hollom. Did you know that?
Stop 30 years of privilege and tradition. I'd rather have them three sheets to the wind than face a mutiny.
You see I'm rather understanding of mutinies. Men pressed from their homes, confined for months aboard a wooden prison...

As you got to quickly in class today, there is much more to this movie than its fitting into a simple genre, be it action or epic or war. Perhaps this is why it proved to be a relative failure at the box office. Peter Weir asks a lot of his audience. To get to the stirring battle at the end, one has to first stop at the Galapagos Islands. There is no doubt that this is a Russell Crowe vehicle, with him at his most macho; yet his Lucky Jack Aubrey is a much thornier character than his signature role as Maximus in Gladiator, filmed 3 years earlier. You said it in class today. This is a film about tradition and its place in our life. It critiques manhood itself in the guise of a film that seems to offer little judgement but only observation. It is a lot more than a grand sea adventure, though it is that too. As Avik said at one point, it raises the same questions that Dead Poets Society does. How the heck does that happen?

1. What is your reaction to the film as a whole, now you've seen it in its entirety? Like? Dislike? Why? And like or dislike, what moment in the whole movie stayed with you (a different moment, though, than the one you might have written about yesterday)?

2. Avik, Jenny, Sara, Virginia, Gabe, Kira, Emily, Emi, Mary Emma, Brooks, answer the following: What do you think the film is saying about tradition through both Jack and Stephen? What side do you think the film takes? Is there even a side to take—do both Jack and Stephen ultimately agree on the place of tradition?

3. Katherine, Katherine, Katie, Coles, Sohail, Sam, Carolyn, Molly, Jack, Madeleine, answer the following: If the film is a critique of manhood—we think it is—what do you think is the critique?

4. Why the Galapagos? Why have the ship stop at this crazy place? To what thematic purpose do you see this serving in the film?

Write 200-300 words. We'll talk about these questions for about 30 minutes, then begin The Last Wave.

Finally, here's a clip from the film, the truly beautifully directed assault on the Acheron. Imagine filming all this on a set as claustrophobic and tight as the ships the film takes place on? No blue screen here.

"For England, for home, and for the prize." Doesn't quite have the same ring as "I only have one life to give for my country" does it?