Between mashups and soldiers

"Anybody up to join me tonight for the 'Ultimate Movie Orgy'?"

By Young Film Critic Pablo Staricco

The Movie Orgy - Ultimate Version, a film released by Dante in 1968, is one of the many highlights that is part of the Laboratory of Unseen Beauty program of the festival. The perspective compiles features and shorts, both legendary and modern, under a treatment that sees cinema as "a laboratory of constant reinvention". It shows how the art and the medium had been both challenged and improved by technology across the decades and how also, sometimes, the arduous process of finishing a film can completely transform it.

Most specifically, the Laboratory is one of those sections at the 48th IFFR that motivates viewers to do a simple yet now increasingly rare task: go to the cinema.

The statement can sound a bit confusing in the context of a film festival, an instance where one would think all eyes are focused on the big screen of a dark room. Yet, with the rise of new types of experimental filmmaking, the avalanche of social media content, and the availability of a video library that works as a dangerous commodity, a festival like the IFFR has a lot to offer beyond the comfort of the movie theatre. In that sense, pieces like Dante’s work or They Shall Not Grow Old —the latest documentary by Peter Jackson, which is also part of the Laboratory— make the most of the moviegoing experience in different ways.

The Movie Orgy is a compilation of film clips, advertisements, cartoons and other pieces of audiovisual media that Dante put together with his colleague and producer Jon Davison as their senior thesis, while they were both students at the Philadelphia College of Art. An ode to the possibilities of found footage, The Movie Orgy has everything and more: morning cartoons, western serials, educational filmstrips, game shows and even religious marketing clips that are blended together in an ever-changing lengthy piece. There are three, five and seven hours versions and each one of them not only provides a premonition for many of the American future vices in popular culture, but also as a stand for the addictive charm of mash-ups, TV-binging, and Instagram stories hypnosis that would appear later.

Not only proving the proficiency in humour that the director of Matinee and Gremlins would later master, but the film's most surprising factor is also how it tears down some of the conventional cinema narrative devices. For one, Dante is able to brilliantly realize how audiences used to take the words "The End" for granted, thus creating one of the many recurring gags in The Movie Orgy. Not only that, but there’s some extremely witty fourth-wall-breaking that it goes deeper into the process of editing and broadcasting, while also playing with there movie format itself.

Only seen in public in rare occasions due to its copyrights infringement, The Movie Orgy plays also as a communal experience that does not care for the constrictions of moviegoing etiquettes, such as the unspoken rule about sitting quite. In my screening at the Cinerama theatre, this was not going to be a typical screening —the constant popping of the beer bottles. Due to the gigantic duration of the movie and its nature, freedom in the theatre was allowed. If you had to go out and came in minutes later, you could. The movie would be still playing, as if Dante built a live metaphor for cinema, showing how it will outlive us all.

While The Movie Orgy does provide a laugh-out-loud cinematic experience, They Shall Not Grow Old, —another invitation by Anton— is more of a contemplative one.

For the 100th anniversary of the First World War, Jackson was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum of London and the BCC to make a documentary about the British Army’s involvement in the armed conflict. As the mind responsible for helming the Middle Earth, one of the most imaginative landscapes of modern cinema, Jackson took this assignment one step beyond. Instead of conjuring up a traditional retelling of an already explored chapter of history (although not much as the Second World War), Jackson has colorized and turned into 3D original footage taken from the First World War. REVISED The film, narrated by interviews with servicemen who fought in the conflict, retells how the soldiers lived, fought, died and survived on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918.

There’s one truly unique moment in They Shall Not Grow Old where the screen and the movie change completely, leaving the audience mesmerized. After seeing original and black and white footage from those times, colour appears into every detail (faces, nature, objects) and people start moving in a more normal way, without that "awkward speed" that old film has because of it lucks of frames. An enchantment unravels and a connection almost immediately happens with the footage, as if these strange creatures of the old times are now real and young smiling guys that were ahead to one of the most relevant episodes of their life. We see the First World War not as it was captured, but as it was lived.

Screened at the Pathé Cinema in an Imax screen proved not only excellent to appreciate Jackson and his team care for detail, but also for experiencing the work that went into the sound design of the documentary. As the canon blasters go off, the floor of the cinema trembled. Even when we are watching the soldiers at their most relaxed time, having a laugh and talking to the camera, conversations (that were recreated by lip-reading experts) surround the cinema from every angle, make once again the past one step closer to the present.

They Shall Not Grow Old pays homage to those who didn’t have a voice heard in these artistic terms before. mostly, Jackson’s movie is proof of how there’s is still possibilities for using modern cinematic tools to preserve history.

And although Jackson's documentary and Dante's thesis are two extremely different movies, they do have one important aspect in common, as Anton told me both times we went out in the theatre after the credits rolled. "It had to be seen in the cinema", he said confidently. He was right.