Catholic Religious Australia

pathways, October 2009

book

Making Sense of Place: Exploring Concepts and Expressions of Place Through Different Senses and Lenses

films

Mao's Last Dancer
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Making Sense of Place

When we fail to understand the real nature of our connection to place and refuse to understand that connection other than in terms of ownership and control, then not only have we misunderstood ourselves, but we have also lost any real sense of place as such. To have a sense of place is not to own but rather to be owned by the places we inhabit: it is to own up to the complexity and mutuality of both place and human being.

Making Sense of Place, p 331

The National Museum of Australia was a partner in The Senses of Place held in Hobart in 2006. In 2008 the National Museum of Australia press published Making Sense of Place based on conference presentations. The editors Frank Vanclay, Matthew Higgins and Adam Blackshaw are keenly aware that individuals, societies and cultures are shaped by their environment and place and that place is shaped by them.

Making Sense of Place explores place from myriad perspectives and through evocative encounters. The Great Barrier Reef is experienced through the sense of touch, Lake Mungo is encountered through sound and 'listening', and light is shed on the meaning of place for deaf people.

Case studies include the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, Inuit hunting grounds in Northern Canada, and the song-lines of the Anangu people in Central Australia. Iconic landscapes, lookouts, buildings, gardens, suburbs, grieving places, the car as place all provide contexts for experiencing and understanding 'place' and our 'sense of place'.

ISBN 978 1 87694 451 3
paperback, 340 pages, 235mm x 172mm, colour
published May 2008
$29.95
how to order

source: Earthsong's enotes, 18

MAO'S LAST DANCER

starring: Chi Cao, Joan Chen, Wang Shuang Bao, Amanda Schull, Camilla Vergotis, Chengwu Guo, and Huang Wen Bin
directed by Bruce Beresford
rated PG (infrequent mild violence and coarse language); 117 min
Roadshow Hopscotch Films: out now

reviewed by Peter Sheehan

The distinguished Australian director, Bruce Beresford, who gave us "Breaker Morant" (1980), "Driving Miss Daisy" (voted Best Picture in 1989) and "Tender Mercies" (1983), brings Li Cunxin's prize-winning autobiography compellingly to the screen.

The film tells an inspirational and true story of the discovery of a prodigious talent in an 11-year-old-boy, Li (played as a child by Huang Wen Bin), destined to become one of the great dancers of the world.

Almost by chance, and upon a seemingly casual gesture of a sympathetic teacher, Li is selected from a village school in the Shandong Province of China by recruiters from Madame Mao's ballet academy in Beijing. Later, Li's passion for freedom led him to dramatically defect to the West in 1981 while performing on a short-term cultural scholarship with the Houston Ballet in the US. Li - brilliantly played in the film as an adult by Chi Cao - danced with the Houston Ballet for many years, before joining other ballet companies for a time, including the Australian Ballet.

The film, which follows the book reasonably closely, portrays the story of Li at three levels.

The first is an expose of the poverty that characterized the existence of Li and his family in rural China.

The second is the dramatic development of Li's will and determination to succeed, and his choice to push his body to the limit to become one of the best dancers China has ever produced.

The third is the psychological and ideological capture of the conflicts that beset Li, as he struggled with his passions for dance and freedom against loyalty to his family back home.

The film is a powerful and personal statement of how far a person can go when a decision to realize one's potentialities in life is made. Yet, the real force of the film comes more from the magic of dance than from Li's journey from poverty to fame.

The dance sequences choreographed by Australia's Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon, and involving members of the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company, are superb.

They are captured beautifully by the film's cinematographer, Peter Jones, who makes excellent use of slow motion in his camera work, and Beresford powerfully uses audience-reaction to Chi Cao's dancing to capture the artistry that unfolds.

The performances of Cao, who is Principal Dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, manage to achieve extraordinary emotional impact.

Ballet fans will love this film. Wider audience response, however, is virtually guaranteed by the fact that Li's dramatic story is well told.

Chenwung Guo, who plays the teenage Li in the film, now dances with the Australian Ballet.

Li himself works as a stockbroker and motivational speaker in Australia, and lives in Melbourne with his wife, Mary, and their three children. Mary gave up her dance career to look after one of their children, who was born profoundly deaf.

This is a film that will hugely entertain. Its philosophical and cultural underpinnings provide edifying moral messages, and the movie is a welcome return of Bruce Beresford to Australian cinema.

Peter W. Sheehan is associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

starring Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law and Christopher Plummer
directed, produced and written by Terry Gilliam
rated PG (menacing themes, violence and coarse language); 122 min
Hoyts: out October 29

reviewed by Jan Epstein

Few filmmakers have a richer, more anarchic visual imagination than Terry Gilliam. Schooled in the BBC television series Monty Python's Flying Circus, which broke all boundaries in spinning non-narrative stream-of-consciousness stories in the early 1970s, Gilliam went on to make Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Jabberwocky, before coming uniquely into his own with the subterranean fantasies Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen.

Imaginatively lush and rich, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is in similar vein, with a storyline that makes sense on a number of levels if you dig hard enough to find them.

Drawn partly from Goethe's Faust, eastern philosophy, and Lewis Carol's Through the Looking-Glass, Gilliam's latest fantasy begins with the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) being trundled at night into modern-day London on the back of a horse-drawn gypsy wagon.

Driven by the midget Percy (Verne Troyer) and the Doctor's young, personable assistant Anton (Andrew Garfield), who is secretly in love with his daughter Valentina, (Lily Cole), the Imaginarium is a travelling theatre which offers Londoners the chance of exploring their fantasies by passing through the Doctor's mirror on stage, which catapults them into the phantasmagoria of their own imaginations.

This is only possible because of the Doctor's secret powers, which are rooted in the pact he made with the devil, Mr Nick (Tom Waits), a thousand years ago. Hundreds of years later, Doctor Parnassus, an inveterate gambler, made another pact with Mr Nick in which he traded his immortality for youth. But this comes at a cost, and time is running out for Doctor Parnassus as Mr Nick returns in the new century to claim his dues.

Such an account belies the baroque, kaleidoscopic beauty of Gilliam's imagery, and the baffling complexity of his seemingly simple plot.

What begins as a Faustian pact (Parnassus is in danger of not only losing his soul to the devil but his daughter Valentina as well) is really more complex. For while Mr Nick has all the trappings of Satan, Parnassus, despite his name, is clearly no god. Rather he is all too human, an exemplar perhaps of humankind after the fall.

At a fundamental level, all the characters are in some sense a reflection of Parnassus and Nick, who can be seen in Gilliam's universe as primordial forces within human nature split into two.

Thus Anton, who is motivated chiefly by good (which means saving Valentina from Mr Nick's clutches) is in both name and character the reverse of the charismatic newcomer to the troupe, Tony (Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law), who is devious, multi-faced, and untrustworthy.

Also shown as a mirror-image is Percy, and how he appears in the world. Despite being a midget, Percy, who is full of pragmatism and good sense, is not a little man at all but large in character.

Gilliam's 'looking-glass' then is akin in some ways to the Hindu notion of the world as maya or illusion. Whether his characters when they step through Doctor Parnassus' mirror are experiencing exhilaration or fear, they are all (as are we) to some extent lost in the landscapes of their own minds.

Whether the viewer is driven or not to make rational sense of Gilliam's fable, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is immensely enjoyable.

Much of the reason for this is Gilliam's original production design and hallucinogenic special effects, brought to magnificent realisation by cinematographer Nicola Pecorini and others. London by night has never looked so strangely familiar and dangerously beautiful.

But it is the performances, all of them finely calibrated, that give the surreal fantasy believability and depth. Christopher Plummer is perfectly cast as Parnassus, the inscrutable, somewhat bumbling demiurge/circus-master who plays dice with the universe, as is singer-songwriter Tom Waits as Mr Nick. But the stroke of genius is Gilliam's solution to the tragic death of Heath Ledger as Tony half-way through filming.

Ledger's Tony is a hair's-breadth away from 'The Joker', his swansong. But the decision to multifacet this character and allow the role to be played consecutively by Depp, Farrell and Law, all icons of male screen beauty and acting ability, increases the sense of illusion and gives added power and mystery to the story.

Jan Epstein is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.

more current film reviews

including

films, books