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THE ANARCHIC NARRATOR
FILMINK was invited to preview GEORGE GITTOES’ new work THE MISCREANTS ahead of its Sydney Underground Film Festival premiere.
With his eyes cast down to the floor, studying the leather on his boots, George Gittoes can walk into a room, wolfish grey locks flowing, without turning a head. But when his head rotates up, hitting you with the most limpid and examining pair of blue eyes under the Southern Cross, you feel like you’re the only one in the room, possibly the postcode. Gittoes hardly rates a mention as he tramps into his newly re-furnished Surry Hills loft, all polished wooden floors and rambling arches, which tonight is set up as a screening room for his new opus. But when Gittoes enters the circle of chatting drinkers, his lupine presence causes conversations to grind to a halt.
In the course of ten minutes, Gittoes locks his otherworldly blue eyes on each of the assembled guests, and has them simply riveted as he complains of his latest battles with the studio (no names mentioned here), as well as his three weeks of total blindness upon contracting cholera (to make matters worse, he spent that time in a middle eastern prison after getting on the wrong side of the local authorities). Pouring drinks, but also eavesdropping cautiously, is Gittoes’ producing partner Gabrielle Dalton, who fleetly saddles up to the filmmaker’s hip – beers in hand – to do damage control, (“He’s tired, and this is when you just don’t know what he’s going to say”). Dalton knows Gittoes better than anyone, and it is with weariness but also respect that she says, “When George has to jump through these hoops to please people that he’s working with, normally those who are getting his film out there, he can be a bit of a loose canon. But as George says, ‘I’d rather shoot myself in the foot than bow to kiss theirs.’”
While those accustomed to Gittoes’ sometimes Pilger-esque war journalism will expect plenty of heart-stopping moments and watch-through-your-fingers reportage, few will anticipate the playful structure, consistent lambent touch and even the abundant laughs of his new film. As FILMINK settles in front of a giant plasma to take in the show, it is shocking how the ninety minutes zips by with such indecent haste. The Miscreants – far from carrying a whiff of the highbrow – is one of the most rollicking and rip-roaring big-screen documentaries in years. Immersing us deep in the right-wing heart of Pakistan, where snuff movies are pedaled on the streets but music and art are routinely committed to bonfire, Gittoes marshals a range of unforgettable characters towards the making of the ‘last tele movie’, an actioner in which Gittoes takes centre stage. With its propulsive plot allied to eye-opening and ultimately heart-rending content, The Miscreants is simply a masterpiece.
Few could be prouder of it than Sydney Underground Film Festival director Stephen Popescu, still impossibly boyish at 32. “The only way I can describe The Miscreants is as a hyper-real documentary that would make Jean Baudrillard proud. This is documentary film making at the cutting edge – George fearlessly immerses himself in Pakistan, is influenced by the aesthetic forms, media and politics of the time and responds to that situation in the most honest form - by not only becoming a central character, but by making two fictional action dramas and incorporating them into the film.”
With an inspired, circuitous magic, The Miscreants completes the circle of Gittoes’ recent work, extending the thesis begun in Soundtrack To War (whose best moments were later looted by Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11 – “I had a stringer over there,” the galumphing filmmaker said of Gittoes explosive footage of American soldiers nursing themselves through the war on a diet of hip hop and rock). If Soundtrack looked at the insidious creep of American pop-culture in the time of war, and Rampage examined the blood flowing in the culverts of America’s own hoods, than The Miscreants completes the jigsaw puzzle by taking unequivocal aim at the war on culture that Islam wages. As Gittoes said in his pre-screening chat, “America is not the only bad guy.”
For Popescu it won’t be long before critics and audiences are heralding this new film as a breakthrough work. “It’s entertaining, informative, heart-wrenching and puts the spectator in the midst of the madness. As part of a trilogy it pushes the boundaries of documentary film making and signifies the expansion of the form.” Popescu’s best take on Gittoes is the term “art warrior”.
After the screening, Gittoes emerges red-eyed from an ad hoc editing room, deflates into a leather chair and chats one-on-one with FILMINK long into the night over black tea. In the space of one conversation (under the watchful eye of a bronze Saddam Hussein head – which Gittoes plucked from one of the toppled statues in Iraq), the artist-come-filmmaker traverses everything from his amicable coffee sessions with a senior Al Qaeda figure to his potentially fatal exposure to depleted uranium in Iraq. He refers to a deep scar on his ankle - a wolf attacked him not long ago in the wilderness, locking bear trap-like teeth around his leg for several hours. There’s a gentle braggadocio to all this – Gittoes is soon reminiscing about how Andy Warhol begged him to do a photographic shoot of his privates at the age of nineteen. But you believe him when he tells you that war veterans feel his work taps deeper into the madness of war than any official UN document ever could.
As natural a raconteur as Robert Hughes (who knows embellishment is the best friend of a storyteller), you take Gittoes’ wide-ranging discourse with a grain of salt. But there’s no doubting the purity of his artistry when he begins talking up an interactive multimedia work in the pipelines called Nightvisions, a piece with a spine-like schematic structure, allowing you to pull out individual years from Gittoes’ life like vertebrae and examine the media of that period. It will elegantly reduce Gittoes’ lifetime of produce to a single, evolving piece of art.
“George is one of the few ‘film artists’ in Australia,” Popescu explains. “Now you have to differentiate between filmmakers in Australia that are ‘craftsmen’. I use this term because we seem to despise film auteurship in this country, rather we embrace a bureaucratic, systematic approach to filmmaking. This is ok for the technical side, but creativity is not systematic and neat... We have somehow forgotten this in Australia and though George Gittoes has guns cocked and pointed at the camera more times than you can count, somehow I think the bravest thing he will have to face is a bureaucratic industry.”
After the darkened Surry Hills studio is shut down, and Gittoes trundles off to bed, the image that lingers the longest comes not from the filmmaker’s mouth, but from one impeccably telling image dropped into casual conversation by his partner Dalton. She was referring to the roof of the new studio, where Gittoes was – the day before - nailing in a large plastic sheet to keep the rain out. She had sung out to him, “George, the Council will never let you get away with putting that up yourself.” And Gittoes, setting down his tools heavily, sang back: “I fucking hate rules!”
The Miscreants premieres at the Sydney Underground Film Festival on September 11th. For details and screening sessions see www.suff.com.au
