2006 ARTICLE:

ILLUSIONS MAGAZINE, Number 38, Winter 2006.


2004 ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

Real Groove Magazine Scanner JAN/FEB 2004

New Zealand Herald, Federico Monsalve 11.02.2004

Woodenhead Feb/March 2004 Rip it up Magazine

GUEST James Littlewood in the culture -film review.

Roogulator Fantasy Film Review by Richard Scheib.

Otago Daily Times April 3rd, 2004:
"Breaking all the rules to delight" by Christine Powley

www.senseofcinema.com Review By Philip Matthews

New York Times Review

Soundtrack Reviews

2003 ARTICLES AND REVIEWS

Peter Odonoghue, Gritsalute.com

Onfilm Magazine May 2003

Bravo Digital Magazine May 2003

NZ Listener Magazine July 2003

Craccum Magazine Film Review July 2003

Melbourne International Film Festival

New Zealand International Film Festival

The Age, Melbourne August, 2003

NZOOM.COM. August 2003

Wairarapa News 19 July 2003 By SEAN HOSKINS

Larry Jenkins Film Review - Northern News July 2003

Sitges Film Festival, Spain.

Little Nina Magazine, Portugal

Melbourne International Film Festival review by Aaron Catling

Feisty Noodle Melbourne Review

Woodenhead...

If you've ever wondered what was really going through the Grimm Brother's minds when they wrote all those tales of woods and wolves and lost little girls, well here's your chance to find out. Welcome to Woodenhead, a film in which the subterranean perversions inherent in any good fairy tale have been brought rumbling and gushing to the surface.

There aren't any big bad wolves, but there are cows, sheep, a donkey named Gerhard and and a kid goat that's been trained to lick the soles of people's feet. There's no Snow White or Cinderella, instead a mute princess called Plum, and an 'innocent' dump-hand named Gert, who believes he is 'the luckiest man under the sun.'

Photo by Chris Pryor

Woodenhead is a genuinely committed look at the notion of the fairy tale, made modern not so much by a change of setting or period as by the confusion of good and evil and the perversion of right and wrong. The characters' profiles are anything but black and white, and the characters them selves are all (even the 'good' ones) more than a little creepy.

What is black and white is the photography, the absence of colour beautifully transforming those majestic New Zealand landscapes into a brooding world of enchanted woods and treacherous hillscapes. You've seen Lord of the Rings, well here's the dark side, and a much more subversive attempt to exploit the inherently pornographic potential of New Zealand's natural settings. And you can bet your last bag of magic beans Woodenhead will be attracting a very different brand of tourist to New Zealand shores.

Woodenhead's most striking feature is that the entire dialogue and 'location' sound is pre-recorded. The visuals were shot posthumously to the soundtrack, reversing the usual priority that is given to pictures. Enabling an extra-ordinary combination of actors, musicians and real personalities that would otherwise not be possible, and creating an oddball magical fairytale world.

So if all that's not enough to make you want to see Woodenhead, you might also like to know that it includes a frothing tramp in dirty underwear, one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard in a movie, and a final battle scene that looks like Highlander gone very, very wrong. And if that's still not enough, there are a couple of sex scenes that'll put a wry and dirty smirk on your face the next time you see a baby's bottle.

-Peter Odonoghue, Gritsalute.com

Indescribable monochrome fairy tale unique in our cinema history...

It ain't the holiday season in Florian Habicht's Woodenhead, a decidedly different kettle of angst. There is, however, a circus threatening to erupt at any given moment...happily, it never does.

Woodenhead was filmed up North, in this case all over the place, Kaikohe, Ngawha, anywhere that looked good in a dark and glowering Don McCullin Northern England photo kinda way.

Habicht uses glorious monochrome, makes no attempt to recreate reality, celebrates the wild outdoors rather than the half-tamed interior, deploys music in the manner of a P.T. Anderson or David Lynch (ie; as an equal to the pictures) and has two people play almost every role.

The first thing you notice in Woodenhead is the faces, great characterful fizzogs in the late silent cinema tradition, then the mouths which don't move in relation to the dialogue, if they move at all... This should be disconcerting and, I will confess, I initially suspected the man of godawful pretension. Such is not the case for, within a very few minutes, the lack of sync between face and voice becomes a non-issue.

Habicht wanted these faces but not all of them belonged to actors so he shot silent, having pre-recorded the dialogue with the right voice talents. Certainly part of this decision was financial (he only had $30,000 to play with and sound operators can take up a big chunk of that) but the ability to completely control his audio environment was a decided plus. No passing cars disturb his beautifully conjured alternate Aotearoa, all sounds are carefully, artfully contrived.

The tension between this artificiality and the grainy heightened reality of the visual performances achieves exactly what the writer/director/co-cameraman/co-sound designer wanted. It's a sorta blend of Svankmayer's world of puppet surreality and the Eastern European gargantua of Bela Tarr. Throw in the inevitable Lynch and a dash of the bolexbrothers and you're getting there. Definitely not your average kiwi feature.

Nicholas Butler and Teresa Peters (faces), Steve Abel and Mardi Potter (voices) as the romantic leads, are perfect, the rest of the Brueghelesque cast are no less appropriate, even dear old Warwick Broadhead (who does his own voice...of course). Peters also art directs magnificently and mention must be made of Marc Chesterman and Christopher Pryor for their major contributions to sound and sight respectively.

CHRIS KNOX - REAL GROOVE MAGAZINE

Knocking on wood...

Woodenhead, "a grimm musical fairytale" that takes a "Hansel-and-Gretel-like journey through New Zealand's towns, bush and forests", has been accepted to screen at this year's Film Festivals in Auckland and Wellington, as well as the Melbourne International Film Festival. The black and white digital feature is a collaboration between director-sound designer Florian Habicht (a 2002 SPADA New Filmmaker finalist) and composer-sound designer Marc Chesterman, it was funded - like Habicht's other digi features (Liebesträume and upcoming Kaikohe Demolition) - by the Screen Innovation Fund. Woodenhead is the tale of Gert, a naive dump-hand who believes he is the luckiest man under the sun.

Interestingly, the filmmakers were interested in "pushing the synergistic qualities of audio and picture." To this end, the entire dialogue/soundtrack for Woodenhead was pre-recorded, with the visuals then shot to fit the soundtrack, reversing the usual priority. (Music and dialogue were recorded late 2001, while the five week shoot in the Bay of Islands and Far North kicked off in March 2002).

Says Habicht, "This technique allowed us to first focus purely on sound and then - during shooting - focus entirely on the visual performances. It also enabled us to use untrained-actors in lead roles. The type of people I chose to cast were real people with peculiar, odd and/or unique personalities. People with an 'X factor' who would conventionally be more suited for documentaries than fiction. An extra-ordinary combination of real personalities, actors and musicians would otherwise not have been possible, and contributed to Woodenhead's oddball magical fairytale world."

"Separate auditions were held for visual performers and for voices. Some of the visual performers speak/sing the voices of their characters or have 'voice cameos' for other characters, while the main characters - played by Teresa Peters and Nicholas Butler - have their dialogue and singing supplied by Auckland musicians and singers Mardi Potter and Steve Abel (reminiscent of '80s pop duo Milli Vanilli!).

According to Habicht, recording the dialogue and soundtrack first didn't inhibit the visual performances. "Actually," he says, "approaches to performance were often decided after the soundtrack was completed. This was because I encouraged the visuals to often contradict the sound. The soundtrack is innocent, like a radio play for children, and yet the visuals are sometimes grotesque, violent or subversive. For example, during the first sex scene, the narrator sweetly tells us that "Plum and Gert had kissed for the first time..."

Despite the film's success thus far in being selected for film festivals, "I wouldn't say we have perfected the approach by any means," says Habicht. "Woodenhead is experimental and we could make another film this way to capitalise on what we've learnt."

Onfilm Magazine May 2003

New Zealand Musical Fairytale premieres at this years International Film Festival.

Early last year I had the unique opportunity to work as Production Manager on the set of Woodenhead, a New Zealand feature film driven by a twisted, Brothers Grimm-style plot, imbued with fantastical atmosphere, and featuring an eccentric array of fairytale characters.

The film was shot in Northland, the childhood stomping ground of (Berlin born) director / writer / producer Florian Habicht. The rugged sublimity of the featured landscapes, coupled with unmistakably kiwi twangs in voices of the principal characters, root this Germanic fable firmly in Aotearoa.This culturally skewed aesthetic is further made manifest in the art direction of Teresa Peters (who also plays the lead female role), which blends a European carnival flavour with kiwi kitsch. The sets comprise memorabilia of mixed cultural heritage and from wide-ranging eras; turn-of last century circus timepieces sitting alongside crumbling retro relics of the 1960s.

Despite the disparate periods and localities contributing to the film's "look", a seamless and timeless world is created which is an amalgam of these differing styles. Captured in black and white by the photography of Chris Pryor, this is the stage in which the yarn unravels.

The plot of Woodenhead centres around Gert, played by newcomer Nicholas Butler, a hard working dump-hand with the naive notion that he is the "luckiest man under the sun". In typical fairytale style he is sent on a journey to deliver his boss' daughter, the beautiful Plum (Peters), safely to her wedding.

The well-meaning chaperone sets off with all the best intentions, but inevitable obstacles present themselves at every leg of the journey. These are exacerbated by the interference of an evil gimp-like manservant who has been sent to dupe the pair (Tony Bishop) and an escaped circus strongman (Matthew Sunderland), who both seem slightly deranged.

The film features appearances from a range of decidedly quirky characters, which function within the narrative as "mythic" archetypes and yet exude weirdly unique personalities. These include the incomparable Warrick Broadhead as Hugo, Gert's boss; a lunatic tramp, played by David Hornblow; and Mr Henry Lee as the circus ringmaster.

Additional members of the cast largely remain invisible to the audience, although they play principal parts. In a reversal of the conventional order of film production, the entire soundtrack (music, dialogue & 'location sound') was recorded before the visuals were shot, with a separate ensemble of voice-actors (although a few play both visual and vocal roles).

The result is a continual tension between the on-screen action and soundtrack, which at times almost merge into synthesis, and at others times are unabashedly out-of-sync. This audio-visual dynamic infuses the film with an eerily disjointed, dreamlike quality, the world of the narrative hovering mirage-like between two distinct but supplementary sensory experiences.

The voices of Gert and Plum are spoken by Auckland based musicians Steve Abel and Mardi Potter, and their vocals feature on several musical numbers arranged mainly by Marc Chesterman, with additional tracks composed by the singers themselves. Another prominent feature of the soundtrack is a narration by Margaret-Mary Hollins, whose motherly intonations become increasingly disturbing with each deviant twist of the tale.

Woodenhead will debut in July at the New Zealand International Film Festival, with screenings in Auckland and Wellington. The film has also been accepted for exhibition in the Melbourne International Film Festival in July / August.

Shot on DVcam on a budget of NZ$30,000, Woodenhead is a production that was made possible by the blood, sweat, tears, and passionate commitment of many, and a project that I feel honoured to have been a part of.

Prue Cunningham - Bravo Digital Magazine May 2003

Fairy-tale beginning

Inside the odd and distinctly German world of local
film-maker Florian Habicht.

Florian Habicht was born in Berlin but raised in the Bay of Islands - his German family emigrated when he was seven - and that shift might account for the bizarre sensations of his film Woodenhead. Here, the New Zealand landscape is the setting for a dark and surreal fairy-tale - there are circuses, magic beans, accordions, a cottage hidden in the woods - rendered in black and white at a dream-like trance speed. The German magic realism of The Tin Drum was a big influence - Habicht remembers seeing that video a lot as a kid. "Having a European aesthetic in a New Zealand film is something that came about quite naturally," he explains.

Shy, funny and enthusiastic - "Yeah, yeah, super," he says, grinning and nodding when complimented - 27-year-old Habicht is about to spring his strange movie on an unsuspecting world. Woodenhead has its premiere in the Auckland International Film Festival this week - bookings are so heavy that two more dates have been added to the original two. Habicht must have a lot of friends. "Everyone's known about this film because ."

" . We've been making it for such a long time," says Habicht's partner and collaborator, Teresa Peters. "We've definitely been rarking people up to come."

Besides playing the New Zealand festivals, Woodenhead has - along with their friend Gregory King's low-budget feature, Christmas - been accepted into this month's Melbourne International Film Festival. Habicht expects that a Woodenhead posse of about five or six may go to Melbourne with the film.

Most of the film's core group are, like Habicht and Peters, products of Elam Art School. Even, they note, the eccentric busker, masked jazz singer and cult figure Killer Ray, who appears in the opening credits and was the subject of an earlier Habicht film. "Killer Ray did drawing and painting. In his lunch hours, he used to visit jazz bars on Queen St. He didn't graduate."

Habicht studied intermedia, which incorporates video and performance. "It has a strong experimental emphasis," he says. "It's not film school, it's art school where you learn through your mistakes." Peters studied painting and besides being the film's co-star, she is its art director. At Elam, Habicht began making experimental short films, including one in which his cast - friends, artists and performers rather than actors - had their voices post-dubbed. "It had that feel of a foreign, badly dubbed film, which had a humorous effect as well. I think [disgraced lip-synchers] Milli Vanilli were an inspiration! Remember how the world was so angry at Milli Vanilli?"

After that, some people told Habicht that he ought to use proper actors next time. Naturally, he did something else: he recorded Woodenhead's soundtrack before shooting the film. He wanted to use Peters and his friend Nicholas Butler as the film's central, Hansel-and-Gretel-like couple, Gert and Plum, but neither had voice training. So the film was recorded with different performers - singers Steve Abel and Mardi Potter - and then shot with the finished soundtrack as a guide, much like other directors might use a storyboard.

To say that this is an unusual approach is an understatement - animated films aside, Habicht knows of no previous examples in which the soundtrack was made first (a possible exception is Derek Jarman's Blue, which had a full soundtrack and a blue screen, but no filmed images). This innovation enabled Habicht to cast for faces and there are some memorable ones in the film. Tony Bishop, an Elam graduate and trained clown, plays a barnyard maniac called Geordel - he has the look of Quasimodo from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "I wish Lord of the Rings had more people like him, more interesting faces," Habicht says.

"Florian likes to celebrate the quirks of humanity," Peters says. "So many people don't read that as a language, but his films are full of that. Documenting craziness or idiosyncrasies ."

"And they're all my friends, the people in the film," he adds.

"WE'RE LUCKY," Peters says, "because we're partners and we also share, not quite the same aesthetic, but we understand each other on that level. Reality and fantasy are part of our being for both of us - we love a gritty raw reality and a contrived one at the same time. That's what Woodenhead was trying to achieve." "Is achieving!" interjects Habicht, laughing. "Is achieving," continues Peters, "in, hopefully, an unpretentious way."

Ask what other films have achieved this mix, and the answer is immediate: Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, a musical suffused with dread. "We were both affected really deeply by that," Habicht says. Woodenhead has songs, too - Gert's one, sung by Abel, is about being "the luckiest man under the sun".

As Gert works in a garbage dump, audiences might take this as ironic, but, like Bjork's character in Dancer, it's about innocence not delusion. Eccentricity is celebrated in Habicht's films; he loves private worlds, fabricated personae (it seems right that flamboyant theatre actor and director Warwick Broadhead should also have a part in Woodenhead). Liebestraume, Habicht's film about Killer Ray, threw many with its blend of fantasy and documentary. Even as New Zealand has produced some great fantasy film-makers - Peter Jackson, Vincent Ward - we like truth and fiction to be discrete categories. Incorporating fiction into documentary is a trademark of German film-maker Werner Herzog. "Totally," agrees Habicht, noting the influence.

Documentary is a debased form here - television is largely to blame for that - and it could do with the more intuitive associations that someone such as Habicht would bring. That should make his next film - a nearly completed documentary on the Kaikohe demolition derby - a fascinating prospect. It captures what he sees as "the innocence and harmony" of that event. He and Christopher Pryor, Woodenhead's cinematographer, have shot for three years, getting demolition footage and interviews with drivers, some of which were conducted in the Ngawha hot pools. "It's really beautiful, just them, no clothes, the bubbles and nature. It's really peaceful, then there's the mud, the loud car noise, the odd Guns N' Roses track."

Like Woodenhead, it has been made on small grants from Creative New Zealand's Screen Innovation Production Fund. Habicht would like it known that "they rock!" The SIPF contributed $25,000 to Woodenhead's final, tiny budget of $30,000 - and that grant is at the top end of that body's capacity. "I've been lucky, but it would be nice if they had more money," he says. Like many in the low-budget industry, Habicht has hopes about a potential digital-video fund under the auspices of the New Zealand Film Commission. The NZFC did come to the Woodenhead party with money for marketing and publicity, which has allowed Habicht to produce a website and Peters to design the striking posters and flyers.

Alas, money is always tight for the experimental film-maker. Habicht has worked as a wedding photographer to pay the billls - that was actually useful in scouting Woodenhead locations, he says - and was once inspired to write to Jenny Gibbs about possible sponsorship. "She said she doesn't support films, only the visual arts." For Peters, though, this kind of DIY-ism can seem preferable to the divisions of labour on a normal film set. "I'm a painter and that's much more of a solo pursuit. Florian's done pretty much every job on Woodenhead. To a painter, that seems to make sense - he can bring the individual touch to all parts of it."

Habicht wrote, directed, produced, co-edited, did some camera operating, found the locations . as they say, he did everything but be in it.

"Oh, I'm in it, too! I'm the guy playing the accordion."

Philip Matthews - NZ LISTENER MAGAZINE JULY 2003

Woodenhead

Woodenhead is one of five New Zealand films playing at this years' Auckland International Film Festival, and it was the first of all the films, including the International ones playing this year, to sell out completely for the first screening last Tuesday 15th July. Woodenhead is directed by Florian Habicht, a Fine Arts graduate who studied Intermedia at Elam. It was made by recording the sound first, using voice artists and singers. As Habicht stated in his speech at the world premiere in Auckland, he made a 'kind of radio play', following which he filmed the black and white visuals to arrive at the brilliantly original and often funny end product. Woodenhead is the story of a dump hand named Gert, played by the subtlety brilliant Nicholas Butler; Gert is a simple man who is contented by the smallest of pleasures, such as clean clothes and a warm bed. His adventure begins when he must leave the dump, his home, in order to take his boss' daughter Plum, played by Habicht's girlfriend and the film's art director, Teresa Peters, to her wedding.

At times when Habicht has the opportunity to shock, the innocence of the narrative and of the storybook- like characters works to counteract the possibility of disgust. The fairy-tale nature of the narrative is in turn detached from anything childlike or mystical by the raw humanity depicted, where people snort and chortle like animals, and the rawness of the Northland landscapes. Mud and dust play a part in this movie, overshadowed by the leading star, the foreboding clouds. Innocence remains even after a raw sex scene, when the narrator begins the next scene with 'Plum and Gert had kissed for the first time'.

The characters whom Gert and Plum meet on their journey are desolate outcasts who communicate with animal-like sounds and actions. Like the donkey, an animal that can be seen to symbolise outcasts in general, and one that plays a part in the narrative as well as in the media representation of this film, Habicht's characters are unusual and interesting to watch. Each shot is composed for visual satisfaction resulting in an aesthetically dark and beautiful film. His humour, which breaks up the darkness of the visuals, is in turn dark and ironic; sometimes you have to listen carefully to catch the jokes.

This is a film that is shady both visually and in terms of subject, but one that alludes to the beauty of simplicity and calls for acceptance of all characters and all situations. Even half-dressed men sleeping in the middle of the forest are not portrayed as evil, despite their animal intentions with Plum. They simply exist and must be lived with.

As satisfying as a fairytale, but pointing to the vast realities of being human and a general notion towards acceptance of those who seem to be from, in the case of this film, an entirely different plane, Woodenhead presents a simple story that leaves a viewer smiling.

There are two screenings remaining on Thursday 24th July at 11am and Friday 25th July at 8.15pm at Village Cinemas on Queen Street.

Review by Camille - CRACCUM MAGAZINE July 2003

A truly unsettling, visually inventive, stylistically thrilling and quite marvellous diamond in the rough. Woodenhead takes the traditional fairy tale and re-processes it through the minds of filmmakers like Canadian master of the peculiar Guy Maddin and animators of the arcane, the Quay Brothers. Incredibly, all of the dialogue and location sound for Woodenhead was completed first and the images shot to fit a crazed reversal of accepted practice.

An innocent rubbish tip assistant, Gert, is given the task of escorting a beautiful mute "princess", Plum, on a perilous journey to meet her prospective husband. As with all such mythical quests, their journey is fraught with danger, challenges, romance and discovery. The menagerie of characters and animals they encounter, the breath-taking landscape of far-flung corners of New Zealand and the surreal action that drives their trip is all tackled in unforgettable fashion. Mirroring the archetypes of the subconscious and demons from the id that stalk the best work of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, Woodenhead has a bright future ahead, frightening small children and leaving the grown-ups strangely troubled.

James Hewison MELBOURNE FILM FESTIVAL

Could this be New Zealand? Gert, 'an innocent dump hand', is ordered by the dump owner (an imperious Warwick Broadhead) to deliver his beautiful mute daughter, Princess Plum, to her wedding. Like a jaded, over-age Hansel and Gretel, the two trek through forest and glen coping with numerous bizarre characters who cross their path. Florian Habicht describes his gregariously eccentric feature as a 'celebration of the sad, strange and beautiful, and a cross-pollination of Kiwi and Germanic culture, echoing my experience as an immigrant to Aotearoa'. He's turned the ungainliness of transplantation into a personal style. Disjunction is accentuated by his method of first creating his final soundtrack and then directing the film to play against it, in synch and out. Kiwi-accented refugees from a kitsch European carnival world stutter, sing and lollop their way around a New Zealand landscape of almost ethereal, black and white beauty. There are moments Fellini might have envied when Habicht's carnival beings and his landscape coalesce in 'sad, strange and beautiful' florescence.

Bill Gosden - NZ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Jim Schembri The Age, Melbourne, August 1, 2003

Sounds, camera, action

The creator of experimental film Woodenhead, Florian Habicht, wanted to make a film like no other, writes Jim Schembri.

It was the climax to one of the greatest days in the young life of Florian Habicht. There he stood on Sunday night in front of a packed cinema at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, his face wearing a constant smile, his voice as excited and adrenalised, his legs splayed out behind the podium as though he was about to couple with it.

Habicht was introducing his experimental feature, Woodenhead, to its first audience outside his homeland, New Zealand, where it had already toured. It was the first time any of his films had screened beyond Kiwi shores. Everyone could tell he was excited.

He then told them about a dream, the inspiration behind Woodenhead. He'd first had this dream three years ago. He had it again the previous night. It went something like this:

"I was on a sports field and it was night. It was pouring down with rain really hard, and the whole field was empty and lit by really bright white neon lighting, like film-set lighting or stadium lighting. Two angels came down from the sky in the rain, and as they got closer I noticed they were Rastafarian angels with dreadlocks. As they came even closer into frame I realised - oh my God - it was Milli Vanilli, the pop duo. I'm a big fan.

"They came up to me and said, 'Hey, Florian, we have something to tell you. We didn't sing our songs on our records'. I said, 'I know. I'm aware'. The next thing they said was, 'Florian, on your next film we want you to pre-record the entire soundtrack for your film first. We want you to pre-record all the voices, all the dialogue and all the music'. Then the last thing they said was, 'Baby, don't forget my number'."

Habicht had tried this technique before with a short film. "It had the feeling of a badly dubbed foreign film, and it had a humorous effect, a bit like an old Fellini film. The experiment of Woodenhead was to take that concept to a real extreme and actually make a film in the reverse order that you conventionally do it. It's a little bit like what they do for animation, but there's a real strong reason why people don't do it for live action. Lots of people said, 'You know why people don't make films like that, don't you, Florian? You've thought about this, haven't you?'."

He certainly had. After laying down the soundscape for the film, Habicht listened to it over and over, composing visuals to match the sounds, which he shot with his dedicated cast and crew in stark monochrome in the ever-photogenic New Zealand landscape.

In a nutshell - which is not really the place you should try to put a film such as this - Woodenhead is, in Habicht's words, "a black-and-white musical Grimm fairytale about an innocent dump hand called Gert (Nicholas Butler, above) who believes he's the luckiest man under the sun, who has to deliver the beautiful mute Princess Plum, the dump boss's daughter, to her wedding".

In the super-heated confines of the ACMI cinema there were a few walkouts, but most of the 500-strong crowd stuck it out for the full 90 minutes. The feedback Habicht received that night and all the next day put him in a great frame of mind by the time we met to chat at 4.30pm at the Festival Club.

"People totally got into the film," he said. "We've had so much amazing feedback, just bumping into people here and (they're) going, 'Oh man, we loved it so much! It's the most original film we've seen in the festival'."

This is what he wanted. "These days, everything's been done before, and the people that have loved the film have said, 'Wow, it's incredible to see something so fresh and that hasn't been done'. Generally, when you show people a film, they always say it's a mixture between this and that, but Woodenhead is definitely a totally unique recipe."

And an acquired taste. Were it not for the call of duty, this viewer would have probably joined those who left the screening mid-spool. The touches of humour in Woodenhead seem too few, the point of the exercise laboured too long. Perhaps 20 minutes would have been plenty. For 90 minutes, dare one say, an idea such as this might have benefited from a bit more narrative.

Habicht, who invited the frank appraisal, takes the comments with good grace. He knows the risks experimental films run.

"I definitely want my next film to be very different. I don't want to make the same film twice. My main concern is I'd rather try and make something different and fail, but at least it'll build to my personal development as a filmmaker rather than try to make a film based on a conventional formula that I know works.

"I'd rather take the challenge to do something that hasn't been done. The film I made before, Liebestraume (2000), mixed fiction and documentary. Lots of people in New Zealand found that quite hard to deal with, because it wasn't a documentary and it wasn't a fiction film with a story. They found it quite confusing."

Habicht recently completed Kaikohe Demolition, a documentary about a demolition derby in small-town Kaikohe.

"Demolition derbies are generally violent spectator sports, whereas in Kaikohe it's not about anger or getting revenge on people or about money," he says. "It's purely a family event. People love it; it's where the community gets together".

At 28, Berlin-born but a Kiwi since he was eight, his film tastes are broad and not at all anti-Hollywood - "I love to watch a bad Hollywood movie and laugh at it and with it, (but) I'm against the money they put into Hollywood films" - although he cites films such as The Tin Drum (1979) and Dancer In the Dark (2000) as key influences. "That film really f---ed me up and moved me and turned me on. It had that real humanness about it."

As the writer, director and producer of Woodenhead, Habicht is still looking for a local distributor. Made for $NZ30,000 ($A26,600), the film was supported by the Screen Innovation Production Fund of Creative New Zealand, the brief of which is to encourage cinematic experimentation. A change of tack for his next film, however, will require a new source of funding.

"My next film I want to hopefully do through the film commission, so on a technical level it can't be that experimental, like Woodenhead, for them to fund it, but that suits me really well, because I want to concentrate next time more on a really interesting story and do experimental things more with the characters and the story rather than the technique."

Woodenhead "Being able to mix photography, music, humour, soft pornography, storytelling and experimentation into one form of expression is what drew me to filmmaking," says New Zealand director Florian Habicht, and that mix creates a strongly original aesthetic voice in his second feature-length film, Woodenhead .

It's a fairytale about Gert the dumphand, who has to safely courier his boss' daughter Plum to her wedding on the other side of the forest or else face a terrible punishment. Habicht has created a surreal, melancholic, grimy-beautiful world and peopled it with grotesque, lonely figures. The film's black-and-white otherworldliness is enhanced by a soundtrack that was recorded before shooting, meaning characters talk without moving their lips.

The only gripe would be that it's slightly overlong for a deliberately linear plot. But as Habicht can work magic with $30,000, we can't wait to see what he'd do with real money to play with on screen.

Janet McAllistar, August 2003, NZOOM.COM.

Big Say In Film Success

THE voice of former Martinborough school girl Mardi Potter is wowing International film festival audiences in the dark fairy tale Woodenhead, which premiered in Auckland this week.

Woodenhead is the story of Gert, a rubbish dump hand who considers him self to be the "luckiest man under the sun". Potter, who attended Martinborough Primary School and then Kuranui College, stars vocally as the voice of the female lead character Plum. The beautiful Plum is the daugh ter of the dump boss who has entrusted Gert with the task of escorting her to her wedding. Woodenhead is described as a dark Germanic style fairytale with a New Zealand backdrop, reflecting the background of film maker Florian Habicht who was born in Berlin and raised in the Bay of Islands. The film's premiere in Auckland was a sell-out.

Habicht reversed the usual movie-making process, recording the soundtrack first with trained musicians, including Potter, then shooting the film with the actors. Potter 's vocal performance has been described as "perfect" by reviewers and she says she had a good time making the film.

Woodenhead plots the journey of Gert and Plum, which starts off well enough until the inevitable obstacles present themselves along with a variety of skewed characters including an escaped circus strong man, a lunatic tramp and a circus ring mas- ter.

Potter's parents live in Martinborough. Her father David is a TV/film producer and organic farmer and mother Jancis a music teacher and current head of music at Wairarapa College. She began playing piano long before she started school, taking for- mal lessons from her mum when she was 5 and also learnt violin. Following college she completed a two year Diploma of Performing Arts in Hawke's Bay.

Potter says she is pleased with the local reaction to the film and says although it is experimental unlike some of its peers doesn 't alienate the audience. As well as being heard as Plum 's voice Potter also makes a cameo in the film as a gum-chewing waitress. "I 'd been chewing on gum for the scene where the waitress is to blow bubbles but the gum had lost all of its elasticity, it was like trying to blow up a hot water bottle," she says. "I wasn 't happy with the bubbles, but the wisdom on set was that the strained facial expressions were right, so that was that"

Wairarapa News 19 July 2003 By SEAN HOSKINS

Arts on A Wednesday # 54 for July 24, 2003-07-18 Larry Jenkins.
Northland News

"Woodenhead" a masterful work by Florian Habicht

I'd never spotted a spotted ass before, but there it was, tethered to the railing of the Auckland Public Library. Well, I say spotted, perhaps dappled would be a better word. Anyway, it was a white, four-legged animal with long ears and splotches of black and brown spread around it, and it was very friendly too; nuzzled my hand. I longed for a sugar cube.

Its presence there above the Academy Cinema (which is below the APL) heralded somehow the premiere of Florian Habicht's film "Woodenhead", its first screening on Monday night having received a lot of press attention. I was to find out later just how the little donkey fitted in as the film progressed, but the glittering young things who were attending the long-awaited appearance of "Woodenhead" were gathered and waiting in the rather small foyer of the cinema on Lorne Street. I joined them.

Florian towered a good head above them all. (I don't remember his being so tallÉ) He was, of course, full of nervous energy - some trouble with the projection equipment contributing to his jitters. His partner Teresa Peters, star of the film, wore her op-shop beads and pinkish boa with the calm assurance that only someone as striking looking as she can do. We were eventually herded to our seats and, after a long thank-you introduction, the show got on the road.

"On the road" is exactly where it got, for the film is about a journey, and sure enough, well into the film there was that ass, - or another one (ass, not film) this one very much a solid brown one like the ones we all know. Astride it was the aforementioned Ms Peters, led along by Gert (played by Nicholas Butler, who is making his film debut in this role). Wait a minute, here is a clear allusion - the Virgin Mary en route to Bethlehem, led not by her husband Joseph but by Charlie Chaplin.

Habicht's film is full of other references - to Shakespeare, for instance. The central plot is a bit like "The Tempest" gone very wrong. Warwick Broadhead's dump owner is without a doubt Prospero, Peters' Princess Plum, his Miranda, and the appearance of Matthew Sunderland's Calaban-esque character confirmed, in my mind, anyway, that young Habicht is not only erudite but somewhat of an iconoclast, too, rather prone to sending up cultural deities.

Further in to the film we find other obeisances - Peters, dressed only in a scanty pair of panties and a dog collar, on her knees and on a leash. What else could this be but a nod in the direction of the great director Pasolini's "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom."?

I mention this because much has been said about the film's fairy-tale origins and inferences having been drawn from the Brothers Grimm, from the circus world, and from various Teutonic influences such as the film "The Tin Drum." But no-one, bar yours truly, has seemed to twig that the two most powerful tugs on Habicht's imagination in this work are Italian arthouse films and the Bard of Avon.

Shot magnificently, despite a risible budget, by Christopher Pryor in black and white, the film will raise cries of recognition around here, as it was filmed almost entirely around Kaikohe, Ngapha, and TaraTara, near Kaeo. The landscape looms large and the camera sweeps majestically around it, contrasting its grandeur with scenes of squalid rubbish tips and abandoned, rusting cars.

It's not often that one stares into the face of genius. Habicht has here created a minor masterpiece, and I don't doubt that he will go on to give the world a major one given the time and the funding.

BRIGADOON SITGES International Film Festival of Spain.
"WOODENHEAD y CRESPIË: el surrealismo en las ant’podas Dos de los films m‡s inusuales y originales de BRIGADOON 2003 son estos dos t’tulos que, pese a la distancia de su origen, tienen alguna cosa en comœn: la neozelandesa Woodenhead y la catalana Crespiˆ. La primera se autodefine como Òun cuento de hadas musical de los hermanos GrimmÓ, y ofrece un alucinante viaje por los paisajes casi v’rgenes y desconocidos para nosotros de Nueva Zelanda, un entorno salvaje y agreste que aporta la atm—sfera de enso–aci—n que requiere la historia. Su director Florian Habitch, uno de los j—venes realizadores m‡s prometedores de aquella ahora emergente cinematograf’a, se meti— en tierras ind’genas protegidas, sin permiso gubernamental alguno, y film— a placer en unos decorados naturales que cualquier artista dar’a un brazo por conseguir. Woodenhead es un film obligado para todos los amantes del cine independiente y vanguardista. A la estupenda fotograf’a se suma un original tratamiento del sonido: todas las voces est‡n grabadas a posteriores y no se corresponden con las gesticulaciones de los actores. A destacar tambiŽn el protagonista, Nicolas Butler, un Buster Keaton perdido en la inmensidad de su cabeza, y Teresa Peters, una joven y prometedora actriz que se ha ocupado tambiŽn de la direcci—n de arte. En suma, un turbador periplo por el alma oscura del hombre. Contacto: www.woodenhead.co.nz Para redondearlo, antes estrenaremos dos cortometrajes cuyas directoras est‡n pose’das por un bello esp’ritu surrealista: The Girl with the Pearl Suspended, de Natalija Vekik, que coincide con Woodenhead en su atm—sfera de cuento infantil e imaginer’a circense (pero en su caso pintado de colores) y El rostro de Ido, de Paula Ortiz, otro cuento sobre un bello joven que pierde los rasgos de la cara, nuevo eslab—n en la emergente carrera de la joven realizadora zaragozana." Hern‡n Migoya -

BRIGADOON SITGES International Film Festival of Spain.
"WOODENHEAD and CRESPIË: Surrealism... Two of the most unusual and original films of BRIGADOON 2003. It is these two titles that in spite of the distance of their origin, have some thing in common. The New Zealand Woodenhead and the Catalan Crespiˆ The first film is described as a musical fairy tale of the Grimm brothers, it offers a hallucinating trip to the almost virgin landscapes to strangers for us of New Zealand. Wild and rustic surroundings that contribute the atmosphere that requires history. The director Florian Habicht, one of the young more promising directors from that now emerging cinema put in protected indigenous earth, without governmental permission at times, and filmed pleasingly in a natural scenery that any artist would give an arm to obtain.

Woodenhead is a film for all the lovers of the independent and vanguardista cinema. To the wonderful photography an original treatment of the sound is added: all the voices are pre-recorded- they do not correspond with the gesticulaciones of the actors. To also honor the protagonist, Nicolas Butler, a Buster lost Keaton in the immensity of its head, and Teresa Peters, a young person and promising actress who has also taken care of the films art direction. In sum, disturbing periplo by the dark soul of the man. Before we will screen two short films whose directors are had by a beautiful surrealist spirit: The Girl with the Pearl Suspended, of Natalija Vekik, that agrees with Woodenhead in its atmosphere of circus fairytale and imaginer’a (but in its painted case of colors) and the Gone face of, of Paula Ortiz, another story about a beautiful young person that loses the characteristics of the face. (english translation from festival publication)

Depois sai desse cinema e fui correndo pro ACMI (Australian Centre of the Moving Image), que eh um lugar muuuito legal e tem um cinema maravilhoso. Eu vi um curta holandes chamado "Equestrian", que era simplesmente um conjunto de recortes e tomadas de varios angulos de uma pessoa cavalgando no centro de Rotterdam. Palmas..muitas palmas. O ultimo filme do dia era da Nova Zelandia, de um diretor chamado Florian Habicht (vcs ainda vao ouvir esse nome...): Woodenhead. Nenhuma explicacao sobre esse filme seria suficiente para entender ou ter alguma ideia do que se trata, mas vou tentar... TODO o som do filme foi gravado antes das cenas serem filmadas, inclusive os dialogos. Portanto, o que se ouve sao vozes de personagens dos quais as bocas permanecem imoveis e uma voz em off narrando a historia como se fosse um conto de fadas - o que nao tem nada a ver com as cenas surreais do filme. O enredo nem adianta explicar. Tudo eh surreal. Em uma cena, por exemplo, o casal de protagonistas para o carro numa tendinha (um kiosko hein hermana) no meio da floresta neo-zelandesa e comecam a dancar sem musica na grama; enquanto isso, um grupo de bebezinhos loirinhos e fofinhos comeca a quebrar o carro - batem com pedacos de pau, picham, etc etc. Com uma trilha sonora tambem digma de contos de fadas, o casal comeca a trepar no topo de uma montanha, olhando para o horizonte... Pra completar, o filme eh em preto e branco daqueles com muito contraste e ceu muito estourado. E no final, claro, palmas...muitas palmas. O filme era bom, mas se durasse a metade do tempo eu nao ia me incomodar. Eh daquele tipo q ja provou o q tinha q provar mas insiste demais... Enfim, so vendo pra entender.
DE VOLTA

Little Nina Magazine, Portugal

WOODENHEAD Rating: 3 1/2 stars Review by Richard Scheib 2003 from the Roogulator Fantasy Film Review Website www.roogulator.esmartweb.com/fantasy

New Zealand. 2003. Director/Screenplay/Producer Florian Habicht, Photography (b&w) Christopher Pryor, Music Marc Chesterman, Additional Music Steve Abel, Foamy Ed, Mardi Potter & The Ratana Brass Band, Art Direction Teresa Peters. Production Company Pictures for Anna. Cast: Nicholas Butler (Gert), Teresa Peters (Plum), Tony Bishop (Goerdel), Matthew Sunderland (Gustav), Warwick Broadhead (Hugo), David Hornblow (The Tramp), Mardi Potter (Kathy the Waitress), Henry Lee (Ringmaster) Voices: Steve Abel (Gert), Mardi Potter (Plum), Lutz Halbhubner (Goerdel/Radio DJ), Matthew Sunderland (The Tramp), Vanessa Rhodes (Kathy the Waitress), Margaret Mary Hollins (Narrator)

Plot: Gert, a rubbish man at the Woodland dump, accepts the task of driving his boss Hugo's daughter Plum to her wedding in neighbouring Maidenwood. But along the route Gert's car breaks down and he and Plum are forced to continue on by donkey. They become lost in the woods and, after divesting most of their clothing to leave a trail, they are overcome by romantic desire when they spend the night at a cottage they come across. But continuing on the next day, Plum is abducted by Gustav, a mute strongman who has escaped the circus and now desires a wife, while Gert runs afoul of the hunter Goerdel.

For one reason or another New Zealand has gained a reputation as a cinematic fantasy landscape. Various international productions such as George Lucas 's Willow (1988), tv's Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1999-2001) and the upcoming The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) have sought to exploit the imagery of clean, green untouched landscapes. Of course the New Zealand fantasy landscape was propelled into high gear by Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with the country even renaming itself Middle-Earth and spinning off a vast tourist industry from such. New Zealand fantasy is also a dual-edged coin. While on one hand the pristine openness of the landscape is sought as a stage for epic adventure fantasy by international filmmakers, on the other local filmmakers when venturing into fantasy often tend to look at it as though the very rawness were something darkly oppressive and primordial. Look at films such as The Lost Tribe (1985) where the Fjordland locations become something completely haunted in their primality; Vincent Ward 's visually stunning quasi-fantastical Vigil (1985) which is a like a single visual tone poem to the raw magic of the Earth and his subsequent The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey (1988) where the modern world broods with mediaeval imagery; the oppressive silence that haunts Geoff Murphy 's The Quiet Earth (1985); even Harry Sinclair 's The Price of Milk (2000) which found an appealingly absurdist Magical Realism amongst the cow pads.

These disparate strands of the New Zealand fantasy landscape find their meeting point in Woodenhead. The film was made by 28 year old Florian Habicht. Habicht is German born but has been a New Zealand immigrant since the age of eight. Both of Habicht's diverse backgrounds find a meeting point in Woodenhead. Habicht draws upon a distilled version of Grimm fairytales and claims inspiration from films such as Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum (1979), a Magic Realist work in which similarly twisted repressive forces keep making themselves apparent. Yet on the other hand he also intuitively taps into New Zealand filmmakers ' sense of an oppressively primal landscape that seems to brood with all manner of outward expression of inner turmoils. The North Island landscapes have been shot in black-and-white and the bared open fields and native forests of the country brood with a forebodingly stilled ominousness.

Woodenhead is a Grimm fairytale of sorts. But it is clearly also a deconstructed fairytale where the modern world and the landscape of fairytale combine in peculiar ways where the hero of the fairytale takes the princess heroine to her destined wedding alternately in a broken down Humber and by donkey, where they stop for the journey along the way at the classic piece of Kiwiana the roadside pie cart. It feels like Habicht has distilled fundamental elements of fairytales the journey lost in the woods from Hansel and Gretel, the deserted cottage with the food laid out from Goldilocks, the swarthy woodsman out to kill the hero/heroine from Snow White, the magic beans from Jack and the Beanstalk and run it all through with something akin to the surrealistic aesthetic of an Eraserhead (1977) or kitsch Canadian director Guy Maddin, of Careful (1993) and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) fame. There are some hysterically weird scenes the love scene between Gert and Plum where Habicht manages to turn the bizarre image of he feeding her from a baby's bottle into something erotic, before ending on quite one of the most hysterically deadpan love scenes all with the camera turning topsy-turvy as Gert's bare butt frenetically humps away at her, after which the narrator coyly informs us øPlum and Gert had kissed for the first time; to the bizarre encounter with a priest who tortures Gert in a field by having a goat nibble his ankles; to the charmingly wacky image at the end of a trio of girls in bloomers lying on their back on a beach conducting a dance with their legs up in the air.

What is unique about the way in which Woodenhead was made is that Habicht recorded the entire soundtrack before he actually shot any of the film, something that is probably a world-first for any non-animated film. This has a striking effect the actors seem to perform independent of their voices. Voices will come on the soundtrack but the actors mouths don't move, just like a cheaply dubbed Italian or Japanese B movie. This has quite a weirdly disjunctive effect it is surely the cinematic equivalent of thought balloons in a comic strip panel. In the press notes for the film Habicht recounts a hysterically amusing anecdote about how he received the idea in a dream in which he saw two angels descend from Heaven that turned out to be Milli Vanilli (the infamous 1980s pop group who revealed they had had their voices dubbed) who told him that he must prerecord the voices for the film. More to the point it is also something that allows Habicht to cast one set of actors for the way they look and a different set of actors to provide the voices that are right for the part. All the actors have been chosen for the strikingly physicality of their appearance Habicht's girlfriend Teresa Peters plays the princess Plum, where her long face and strikingly bony, almost masculine, features have a cool, distantly aloof beauty; hero Nicholas Butler has been chosen for his blankly impassive appearance, where all the expressiveness of his character is denoted by the wrinkling of his prominent forehead; and in the part of Goerdel, Tony Bishop has been deliberately cast as an almost clichŽ image of a swarthy criminal.

A TALE TO TELL By Veronica McLaughlin
REAL GROOVE MAGAZINE JAN/FEB 2004

"Once upon a time there was a handsome young dump-hand called Gert, who was always merry and full of joy. He lived in a small, quiet village named Woodland, which was surrounded by a great forest. Gert worked so hard that Woodland was the most shining, sparkling village in the land. He was the luckiest fellow under the sun."

From its opening scene of Gert clearing rubbish from a rural Northland roadside, you know Woodenhead isn't what you expected. In the next, where Gert reads horoscopes to his boss, the dump owner, Hugo, we hear his' voice, but his lips do not move; you realise you've wandered someplace you vaguely remember, maybe from childhood. Gert's horoscope informs him: 'Tomorrow is going to be the best day of your life.' That is the day Hugo entrusts his princess, his daughter Plum, to Gert's care. He must deliver her to Maidenwood, where she will be married to a corn farmer, a man she has never met. Hugo issues a stern warning to Gert that he is to deliver Plum to her groom and under no circumstances is he to lay a hand on her. And so, our hero sets out behind the wheel of his little car with Plum by his side. After a time they stop for a chaste frolic in the woods. While they scamper through the verdant forest, Goerdle (Tony Bishop), a troll-like creature also in Hugo's employ, fiddles with the car's engine. When their vehicle won't start, Gert and Plum exchange it for a donkey and continue on their journey; one fraught with beauty, sinful pleasure and dire peril.

Woodenhead is simply spellbinding, as audacious and mesmerising as David Lynch's Eraserhead, but a hell of a lot more fun. Shot in black and white, its denizens inhabit a netherworld that is both ordinary and supernatural, not the New Zealand we know. Scanner spoke to the film's director, Florian Habicht (28), following a media screening in Auckland. Top of the list of questions :just where did this brilliant idea come from?

"It was definitely inspired from Grimm fairytales," says Habicht. "You know how they've always got darker sexual overtones. As a child you're not really aware of them, but when you get older you look back and see what they were really about. The idea of Woodenhead is to have that fairytale story, but to bring those elements to the surface. We did use a few themes from Grimm brothers; the Grimm's Circus, Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the wolves. And the dog chewing up the grandmother in the bed, like Little Red Riding Hood. Though that was a true story I read in Thailand about an old lady letting the dog lick her lips. And when the old lady overdosed on sleeping pills, her dog bit her lips off."

Habicht laughed when asked if he'd been influenced by David Lynch. Sure enough, Eraserhead is his favourite. He adds: "But what I really appreciate about Lynch and the composer [Fats Waller and Peter Ivers], is that he gives the sound equal importance in the film."

To that end, Habicht arranged for the entire Woodenhead soundtrack to be recorded before a single frame was shot, a technique used often in animation, but almost never in live action film. Why did he decide to construct the film this way?

"There were lots of reasons. Not recording sound [while shooting] was great for the budget cos the shoot would have taken three or four times as long if we were recording sound. That meant we could record the mangrove scene right next to the main road and not have to wait for cars. Otherwise, you have to redo takes just to get the sound right. Also, we could have really high quality sound for a digital video feature. Everything was pre-recorded, the location sounds, the dialog and the music. The music is mainly by Marc Chesterman, and Marc and I were sound designers for the film. It also features Mardi Potter and Steve Abel, both talented Auckland singers and songwriters, who also do the voices for Plum and Gert in the film. Nicholas Butler and Teresa Peters do the main characters, the visual performances. Mardi and Steve do their voices and sing their musical numbers. There's also a character who sings an operatic track on the soundtrack, Warwick Broadhead. He plays Hugo, the dump boss."

With the sound pre-recorded, Butler and Peters not only do not speak their lines, Plum and Gert's mouths don't even move as they converse. This is disconcerting at first, but as one becomes immersed in the magic of Woodenhead's world, it seems oddly natural. Still, it's not something I'd ever seen done. Habicht laughs guiltily: "I didn't have the heart to make the actors learn so many lines to lip synch. Secondly, the whole technique let us create a fairytale world. Fairytales are otherworldly and having them speak telepathically is part of the film's world. We're always being experimental, so sometimes I wouldn't play the soundtrack when they were acting. And other times I would and they would be inspired. And sometimes I'd play something irrelevant. One time we played the sex conversation while they were riding the donkey through the beautiful landscape."

By Hollywood standards, all New Zealand films are made on tiny budgets, with major projects like Whale Rider working with a few million bucks and small budget features like Kombi Nation with $200,000-$300,000. Woodenhead was produced for the miniscule sum of $30,000, most of which came from the Creative New Zealand Screen Innovation Fund, which is designed to encourage experimental filmmakers. How did Habicht manage on such a meagre budget yet deliver such a high quality film?

"It was hard," he says, "but we still managed to be able to pay people minimum wages, to cover their rent and so they could be focused on the project and not have to have another job to go to. We filmed in the far north and we all stayed at my parents' house, two or three people in one bedroom. My mum did the catering. We were a small, intimate group of people and it felt like making something with your close friends.

"The cast and crew are bloody talented performers and artists. What you see in the film is only a fraction of what they can do. The main actress, Theresa Peters, also did the poster and the art directing. Christopher Pryor [DOP] also did the editing. Theresa and Nick had been in my short films before. Teresa is not an actress; she's a really talented artist. You'd be more likely to see her paintings than see her on Shortland Street. But the whole cast would have real problems getting on Shortland Street, lots of them have tried," says Habicht with a chuckle. "They're all quite believable, aye? The people were really similar in real life to the characters in the film. Sometimes when the camera wasn't rolling we didn't know if people were acting or being themselves.

"Those landscapes that made it special. Spending three days on this hill in the middle of nowhere made it special for everyone. Though when we were doing a sex scene on the hill on a farm, we didn't tell the farmer what was going on. And while we were shooting, we saw the farmer arriving on his tractor. I had two bottles of Lothlorien Wine and that seemed to please him and he gave us some privacy. There were lots of Ed Wood moments making the film."

Woodenhead which opens at the Academy Theatre in Auckland on February 13 premiered at the Auckland Film Festival and quickly sold out, so additional dates were added. It also screened in the Wellington and Melbourne festivals. "When we finished the film it was hard getting it into festivals," explains Habicht, "but someone always loves it and really pushes for it. It's playing in Spain in the Sitges Film Festival. It was accepted in Buenos Aires but they will only play 35 mil' prints, so we won't be showing it there. We sent it to Sundance and London and got turned down, but we're still hearing back." He lets loose with a sinister giggle. "I did have an agent in Hollywood desperate to see the film and represent me. When I sent it, I didn't get a reply!"

Habicht is planning his next project with the New Zealand Film Commission, who have provided funding to develop script ideas. While he enjoyed the intimacy of shooting on digital video, his next project will be film. "Being able to shoot with a camera that's like a camcorder gives you total freedom. It meant that I could do the handheld camera operating. But I still prefer the look of film and want to make the next one on film. With a budget."

Adults-only fairy tale By FEDERICO MONSALVE NEW ZEALAND HERALD 11.02.2004

Someone once said that to make art that conforms to someone else's standards is not to make art at all, but entertainment.

For Florian Habicht, director of the film Woodenhead, the statement seems to have been fuelling his career for quite some time.

"I would rather try something new than follow the safer footsteps of conventional film-making," he says.

The 28-year-old is about to re-launch Woodenhead after a sellout at last year's Film Festival.

The dark, sexually charged and at times disturbing film is a continental circus with a strong Kiwi flavour.

According to Creative New Zealand, Woodenhead presents an immigrant's perspective on life here.

Habicht arrived in Paihia from Germany with his father Frank Habicht (who was the stills photographer for Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth) and Woodenhead holds on to certain verbal traditions of his motherland.

Habicht says he combined elements of his childhood in Germany with his upbringing in the North Island.

"We came here in the 80s and Germany back then was a dodgy place to be, with lots of fear about nuclear war. A year after we arrived Chernobyl happened and it was the best time to get out."

The film, shot mainly in black and white with occasional subtle colours, is a fairy tale for adults that has accordion and tuba players comfortably parading alongside Kiwi caravans amid luscious Northland scenery.

In the story, Gert (Nicholas Butler), a simple man known for keeping his town clean, is asked to drive Plum (Teresa Peters, also the film's art director) to her wedding.

Gert is given a set of strict rules that include pampering the princess, delivering her on time for her nuptials and never, ever, laying a finger on her.

Plum's father, Hugo, sends his faithful manservant Goerdel (voice by Lutz Halbhubner, who played one of the main characters in the German arthouse classic Das Boot) to keep track of the couple's progress.

On their journey Gert and Plum encounter a gallery of hobos, murderers, and 5-year-olds on a car-smashing rampage ... the whole gamut of the grittier, darker elements of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and circus freaks begins to simmer.
This is a dark, fantasy-drenched New Zealand. It breathes with the black and white sensuousness of our geography and speaks with a sobering and surreal continental accent.

The result is absurdist, with tinges of French surrealism akin to Jean Genet and the moral sensibilities of Rimbaud let loose in a sex shop.

"I chose the fairy tale because it provides an easy-to-follow plot," says Habicht. "The filming technique was already experimental enough and I wanted to give the audience something they could sink their teeth into."

To explain the unconventional filming technique that won him $25,000 from Creative New Zealand's screen innovation fund, he reverts to yet another fairy tale of how the idea came about.

"I was on a rugby field in the middle of the night," he explains. "Two angels came down from the sky, and as they got closer I noticed they were Rastafarian angels with dreadlocks.

"As they came even closer I realised - oh my God - it was Milli Vanilli, the pop duo. I'm a big fan."

Apparently the pair ordered him to "pre-record all the voices, all the location sounds and all the music".

The result of this Vanilli-like lip synch gives the impression of a badly dubbed film.

Silences become more pronounced, speech is intercepted by awkward movements, and the music, according to NZ Musician reviewer Michael Beggs, is "ethereal and carnivalesque, full of gloomy textures".

The result is impressive, says Ant Timpson, director of the Incredibly Strange Film Festival.

"Given the constraints, they managed to put together a first for New Zealand film - a very tight piece of artwork."

Since filming Woodenhead, director of photography Christopher Pryor has been accepted at the prestigious Berlin Talent Campus.

The film has screened at festivals in Australia and Spain, and the Film Commission is funding a DVD soundtrack package and showing Woodenhead at the American Film Market at the end of this month.

Reflections on Creativity at the 2003 Melbourne International Film Festival Aaron Catling

The second film at the Melbourne International Film Festival to reshape my preconceptions of digital narrative was Woodenhead from New Zealand. Funded by the New Zealand Film Commission, director Florian Habicht was given $25,000 to make a short. He came back with a feature that defies conventional logic on how to make a film. Shot on a Sony PD150, the approach he took to the production of the film was nothing short of genius a little crazy, as most genius is, but extraordinarily effective nonetheless.

Woodenhead is a drama/musical in which a local rubbish tip worker must escort the local 'princess' to her soon to be husband who is a long hike from their village. What follows is part fairytale, part fantasy; but the end result is a very entertaining film that leaves the entranced audience wondering how on earth Habicht managed to pull it off.

Unhappy with the quality of actors he could find for this low budget film, he decided to break each role in the film into its core components vision and sound. As such, he cast voice actors to record the dialogue and got musicians to sing the score. Once he had recorded and sound-mixed the entire film, he set about casting the visual actors and getting the shots to match the ninety minute score.

The final master stroke, and what sets this film apart, is that he did not try to 'sync' the visual performance with the score. The film seems somewhat disjointed until the audience gets used to the style (at first you think it is a mistake. Then you begin to realise that the lack of lip-syncing (and, indeed, the lack of the visual characters even opening their mouths sometimes) allows you to focus on both aspects of the performance. They combine to form a symbiotic relationship that creates some of the most vivid characters I have ever seen on screen.

Once I put aside the unusual method of production, I found myself reflecting that what Habicht had captured was a simple story, told beautifully. Although it was made on digital, it really was the kind of narrative usually seen on film. The only difference was that no one would have had the guts and foresight to finance such a shoot-on-negative film. The content was driven by itself; the form was merely the only way possible to tell that content within the budget.

This may be a subtle shift, one that most may not consider important. However, one of my hopes for film is for the medium to become a free flowing source of stories and ideas where any story could be told, and where anyone with the courage to make a film could. This type of ideology exists around the world with the recent success of the short film as a genre in, and of, itself, but not in features. Not until now.

The boundaries of form and content still exist. They are important when we consider film as an artistic medium. However, they can be limiting, from the documentary filmmaker who is told to shoot digital rather than 16mm, to the young filmmaker told that digital is a medium for unprofessional genre films.

Such dated production imperatives limit a filmmaker's potential and, as such, limit the boundaries of film as a creative medium.

These two festival films may never be seen by the masses, but I saw them. And as I become a filmmaker I will remember the lessons they taught me. To be creative, to be bold, and to tell a story the best way that it can be told.

FEISTY NOODLE MELBOURNE REVIEW

Woodenhead. Really, really odd New Zealand film where they recorded all of the audio and then shot the images to match it. When it worked it was brilliant, but where it didn't it was poor. The work of a madman!

WOODENHEAD FEB/MARCH 2004 Rip it up Magazine.

****

For the art-house cinema aficionado. This film is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing, imaginative and artistically tight films to come out of New Zealand in the last few years. Put together with a $30000 Film Commission grant, this is a slick ethereal (yet disturbing) , artfully shot fairytale.

Gert (Nicholas Butler) a simple towns man who works in the local tip is given the task of driving his boss' daughter, Plum, to her wedding. He is told a few "simple" rules that he must abide by or lose his head (by the hand of Gustav the strongman, one of the scariest wrestler types in the land).

Pl um, the silent princess (Teresa Peters), has a penchant for trouble and a sensuous personality that makes Gert's job of protecting her all the more difficult.
The voyage becomes a mythical, epic journey filled with circus freaks, magic potions, animals, sexual innuendoes, and references to every Grimm's brothers imaginable.

The movie's soundtrack was done first and the images fitted around it. It is a jazzy mixture of experimantal noise. The voices are not the actors themselves but voice over actors which gives the film an even more surreal feel.

Habicht has managed to create a very precise, distinct movie with a strong plot, surreal madness and visual magnificence.

Email from a stranger...

Hello. I am a tourist. While visiting new zealand for a week back in december( i am still here) i headed down to wellington for the lord of the rings festivities. Much to my pleasure i found that there was also a digital film festival coinciding with the event. So i jumped off the mainstream route and found myself inside the chilly Bats theatre. i paid for 2 shows, and after watching the first one, i was almost ready to leave. But then i remembered i had nothing else to do, and i may as well give the next one a chance. and i did. and i was blown away. I thought woodenhead was incredible. it had everything in it. great shots, cinematography, costume, soundtrack,humour,insane adaptation and fresh ideas. Well, im just writing to let you know how much i appreciate your film, and that i still think of it 3 months on, and if ever i make it home, i will do my best to promote woodenhead there.

GUEST James Littlewood in the culture -film review.

Extremely New Zealand films | Feb 23, 2004 10:59

So I got an email flyer about Woodenhead from someone who knew someone who obviously knew director Florian Habicht. "We can't afford a big publicity campaign" ran the text "so tell your friends É". The next thing I knew, I was flat out on the couch staring 10.30 Friday night in the face, so off I ran to the late night screening.

I arrived just in time for the speeches, which involved a punk ballerina doing the do on the cobbly area in front of the Library to the circus tunes of a portable CD player, itself doing the do on the subject of volume. Then Warwick Broadhead got up and attired himself in the drapery prior to its removal from in front of the screen. He thoughtfully advised us on those parts of the film we would do best to applaud (his bits), and then advised us to touch those parts of ourselves we love most. Something about humping. Something about chasing Florian as he ran off with the camera. A very good speech it was. It's hard not to love Warwick.

For those on employer-provided Internet connections but with no time, here's the short version: Woodenhead is a wonderful film. Literally, full of wonder. However, as every artist has always said of every bad review they ever got: this is only one person's opinion. I don't expect everyone to agree with me but here's one for starters. I hope someone reminds me I said that the next time I pan something. For those who shell for it themselves and want bang for their buck: here's the longer version.

Firstly, some films it made me think about:

Eraserhead,
The Price of Milk,
Jean Cocteau's OrphŽe and La Belle et la Bette
and Breathless.

Well-cinematefied readers will observe that four of these five films are in black and white. Coincidence? I think not. No-one needs reminding that this is the colour scheme of choice for auteurs with a truly healthy, hands-on and rigorous grip of the unconscious. More what it has in common with these films is a sense that actually, goddammit, we will reinvent the wheel, that films not only can be made by uniquely tailored production techniques, but that they ought to be, that (therefore) not all films need look or sound the same (nor should they, although most do), nor should audiences regard them as such. Little chance of that happening with a film as unique as this one. Fortunately for Habicht, Woodenhead is nowhere near as tedious as the greater majority of Goddard's footage. Well, no great achievement there of course (possible exception: Alphaville, in parts). But while he and cinematographer Christopher Pryor succeed in creating a mise en scene that is genuinely seductive, they simultaneously remind the audience that it knows what it is doing, that it too has a role to play in helping the imagery and the narrative stumble along, just as a good film helps us to stumble through and understand our own little imagined lives. How? Call it magic realism (mythical colonial discourses from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Whale Rider). Call it fantasia (drug-psychoses-in-a-not-bad-way). Call it an oedipal sex romp (all roads lead to Rome, or at least Thebes).

Young Pakeha artists - especially visual and literary artists - face an identity dilemma: to regard self as Pakeha or European. I'll avoid getting into the fray when Michael King has done it so brilliantly, twice (or more). But the decision has to be made. Niki Caro and Harry Sinclair: Pakeha. Florian Habicht: European. It's not just that lots of his characters have Germanic names. The entirety of Woodenhead's imagery and narrative logic is grounded in European traditions. For example:

Fairy tale (especially Hansel and Gretel)
Circus
Biblical imagery Ballet
The missionary position (yes)
Orientalism

The overall effect is one of a mythical New Zealand as German colony. And as with any decent colonial fairy tales, the colonised is absent. Which is a polite way of saying there are no Maoris in it. Nothing wrong with any of this. After all, Shakespeare himself only wrote one Jew and two or three black people into his 30-odd plays (thank God for Don Selwyn). None of this is to say that Florian's film is anything other than a New Zealand one. Nor that he's not interested in New Zealand as a subject. It's just that he has swum against the flooding tide of artists who seek out ever more specific examples - and samples, and specimens - of the New Zealand landscape (beneficiaries, pianists, warriors, whale gods and scarfies for example) and who then hold these aloft to the world stage as universal markers from afar. This same tide obsessively teaches its young and hungry that the way to tell the big story is to tell the little story, that the way to tell the little story is through characterisation, that characters are comprised of verbs not adjectives, that voice-overs are cop-outs for flawed narratives, that you save your best 'til last, enter the scene late and leave early, keep ahead of your audience and that if you follow these simple rules, you will then become rich and your dedicated audience will indulge your breaking of them; but if not É you're on your own, kiddo. Florian swims against this tide. As media theorist Stephen Turner (watch this space) has suggested, the national identity project has wedged itself such a secure place in New Zealand's screen production culture, that it has tended to eclipse other subject forms. Thus, Florian Habicht making a feature that floats poetically through the subject of unconscious sexual desires, that frees itself of current narrative conventions and polite ethnic considerations (particularly fashionable in the international funding circuit) constitutes a landmark of authorial integrity in New Zealand film making.

I suppose I should mention a few things about what you can expect to see in it. The first thing you'll notice is a highly engaging relationship between dialogue and image. Ironically, what makes it engaging is its level of disengagement - all the sound including dialogue was recorded before any film rolled. This creates a sort of disconnection between the only two senses that matter in film, and that allows you to both see and hear the film better than you can when the two are synchronised.

You'll see two of my all-time favourite Auckland actors: Warwick Broadhead and Matthew Sunderland. I don't know if Warwick will take this as a compliment or not (it's meant as one), but his film character - a junk yard boss - somehow comes across as being surprisingly closely studied, detailed and naturalistic. You'll still want to applaud his aria though. He saves his best until last. Matt strikes me as New Zealand's most dedicated and least compromising actor. The only thing he won't - or can't - do as an actor is tripe. From Inside Out's Holy Sinner to last year's Blasted at the Silo, Matt is one of the few performing artists who could truly be said to have the power of transformation. He embodies his characters down to their very viscera, and his as well. Relative newcomer to acting David Hornblow is another who puts his guts into his performance, quite visibly. Both are also stunning in Gregg King's Christmas.

You'll see Christopher Pryor's cinematography, which is beautiful. Words like sublime and ethereal come to mind. Rich and deep in allegory. Combined with Teresa Peters' detailed art direction (she also co-stars), the look glides effortlessly from psycho-erotic thriller to biblical metaphor to kitchen sink tub thumper to psychedelic encounters of the 3rd kind: everybody making music. And you'll hear Mark Chesterman's music, as strange as God and as normal as a day at the beach. You'll want to buy the original soundtrack afterwards, so it's just as well you can. And you'll see Teresa Peters (who also art directs) and Nicholas Butler in the lead roles as the hapless, human innocents. How to describe their screen presence? Transcendent. Radiant. Rogers and Astaire, Di Capprio and Winslet, Houston and Costner, Curtis and Munroe, Cormack and Urban, Owen and Morrison, Harrelson and Lewis É all rolled into one. They dance. They talk. They sulk. They do crimes. They shag. They eat like there's no Tampopo. You'll see what I mean. So, that was the long version.

Bear in mind that the cinema will pull it as soon as the audience numbers drop off, and for New Zealand films (like the music in decades past) this tends to happen glumly fast. So if you wait to hear the reviews, you'll probably miss it. But if you hurry and get down there, you'll be encouraging the cinema to keep it open another day, and helping someone else to see it, and that in turn will help them sell it overseas. Remember, they don't have a Hollywood-sized campaign budget to tell you in what way you're supposed to like it.

Roogulator Fantasy Film Review by Richard Scheib.

New Zealand. 2003. Director/Screenplay/Producer - Florian Habicht, Photography (b&w) - Christopher Pryor, Music - Marc Chesterman, Additional Music - Steve Abel, Foamy Ed, Mardi Potter & The Ratana Brass Band, Art Direction - Teresa Peters. Production Company - Pictures for Anna. Cast: Nicholas Butler (Gert), Teresa Peters (Plum), Tony Bishop (Goerdel), Matthew Sunderland (Gustav), Warwick Broadhead (Hugo), David Hornblow (The Tramp), Mardi Potter (Kathy the Waitress), Henry Lee (Ringmaster) Voices: Steve Abel (Gert), Mardi Potter (Plum), Lutz Halbhubner (Goerdel/Radio DJ), Matthew Sunderland (The Tramp), Vanessa Rhodes (Kathy the Waitress), Margaret Mary Hollins (Narrator)

Gert, a rubbish man at the Woodland dump, accepts the task of driving his boss HugoÕs daughter Plum to her wedding in neighbouring Maidenwood. But along the route GertÕs car breaks down and he and Plum are forced to continue on by donkey. They become lost in the woods and, after divesting most of their clothing to leave a trail, they are overcome by romantic desire when they spend the night at a cottage they come across. But continuing on the next day, Plum is abducted by Gustav, a mute strongman who has escaped the circus and now desires a wife, while Gert runs afoul of the hunter Goerdel. For one reason or another New Zealand has gained a reputation as a cinematic fantasy landscape. Various international productions such as George LucasÕs Willow (1988), tvÕs Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1999-2001) and the upcoming The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) have sought to exploit the imagery of clean, green untouched landscapes. Of course the New Zealand fantasy landscape was propelled into high gear by Peter JacksonÕs The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with the country even renaming itself Middle-Earth and spinning off a vast tourist industry from such. New Zealand fantasy is also a dual-edged coin. While on one hand the pristine openness of the landscape is sought as a stage for epic adventure fantasy by international filmmakers, on the other local filmmakers when venturing into fantasy often tend to look at it as though the very rawness were something darkly oppressive and primordial. Look at films such as The Lost Tribe (1985) where the Fjordland locations become something completely haunted in their primality; Vincent WardÕs visually stunning quasi-fantastical Vigil (1985) which is a like a single visual tone poem to the raw magic of the Earth and his subsequent The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey (1988) where the modern world broods with mediaeval imagery; the oppressive silence that haunts Geoff MurphyÕs The Quiet Earth (1985); even Harry SinclairÕs The Price of Milk (2000) which found an appealingly absurdist Magical Realism amongst the cow pads. These disparate strands of the New Zealand fantasy landscape find their meeting point in Woodenhead. The film was made by 28 year old Florian Habicht. Habicht is German born but has been a New Zealand immigrant since the age of eight. Both of HabichtÕs diverse backgrounds find a meeting point in Woodenhead. Habicht draws upon a distilled version of Grimm fairytales and claims inspiration from films such as Volker SchlondorffÕs The Tin Drum (1979), a Magic Realist work in which similarly twisted repressive forces keep making themselves apparent. Yet on the other hand he also intuitively taps into New Zealand filmmakersÕ sense of an oppressively primal landscape that seems to brood with all manner of outward expression of inner turmoils. The North Island landscapes have been shot in black-and-white and the bared open fields and native forests of the country brood with a forebodingly stilled ominousness. Woodenhead is a Grimm fairytale of sorts. But it is clearly also a deconstructed fairytale where the modern world and the landscape of fairytale combine in peculiar ways - where the hero of the fairytale takes the princess heroine to her destined wedding alternately in a broken down Humber and by donkey, where they stop for the journey along the way at the classic piece of Kiwiana - the roadside pie cart. It feels like Habicht has distilled fundamental elements of fairytales - the journey lost in the woods from Hansel and Gretel, the deserted cottage with the food laid out from Goldilocks, the swarthy woodsman out to kill the hero/heroine from Snow White, the magic beans from Jack and the Beanstalk - and run it all through with something akin to the surrealistic aesthetic of an Eraserhead (1977) or kitsch Canadian director Guy Maddin, of Careful (1993) and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) fame. There are some hysterically weird scenes - the love scene between Gert and Plum where Habicht manages to turn the bizarre image of he feeding her from a babyÕs bottle into something erotic, before ending on quite one of the most hysterically deadpan love scenes - all with the camera turning topsy-turvy as GertÕs bare butt frenetically humps away at her, after which the narrator coyly informs us ÒPlum and Gert had kissed for the first timeÓ; to the bizarre encounter with a priest who tortures Gert in a field by having a goat nibble his ankles; to the charmingly wacky image at the end of a trio of girls in bloomers lying on their back on a beach conducting a dance with their legs up in the air. What is unique about the way in which Woodenhead was made is that Habicht recorded the entire soundtrack before he actually shot any of the film, something that is probably a world-first for any non-animated film. This has a striking effect - the actors seem to perform independent of their voices. Voices will come on the soundtrack but the actorsÕ mouths donÕt move, just like a cheaply dubbed Italian or Japanese B movie. This has quite a weirdly disjunctive effect - it is surely the cinematic equivalent of thought balloons in a comic strip panel. In the press notes for the film Habicht recounts a hysterically amusing anecdote about how he received the idea in a dream in which he saw two angels descend from Heaven that turned out to be Milli Vanilli (the infamous 1980s pop group who revealed they had had their voices dubbed) who told him that he must prerecord the voices for the film. More to the point it is also something that allows Habicht to cast one set of actors for the way they look and a different set of actors to provide the voices that are right for the part. All the actors have been chosen for the strikingly physicality of their appearance - HabichtÕs girlfriend Theresa Peters plays the princess Plum, where her long face and strikingly bony, almost masculine, features have a cool, distantly aloof beauty; hero Nicholas Butler has been chosen for his blankly impassive appearance, where all the expressiveness of his character is denoted by the wrinkling of his prominent forehead; and in the part of Goerdel, Tony Bishop has been deliberately cast as an almost clichŽ image of a swarthy criminal.

Otago Daily Times April 3rd, 2004:
"Breaking all the rules to delight" by Christine Powley
Rating ****1/2

Remember the group "Pop will eat itself"?. As Homer Simpson would say : "It's funny because it's true", and cinema is in a simular self referencing bind. There is little that is fresh or new. It sometimes feels as if the scripts are put together according to the rules of scrabble: you pull out your seven elements and try to make the highest grossing film of what fate has dealt you. But in the strange little pockets of the globe, there are people making films to their own rules. Local film "Woodenhead" (Dundas St Academy) is that scariest of beasts: an experimental film.

It is shot in black and white, with distortion that squashes everyone into a sideshow mirror figure. But the real arty coup de grace is that the soundtrack was recorded first and the images filmed to match it.

I was nervously hoping the visuals would make "Woodenhead" bearable. Instead, to my immense surprise, I was soon roaring with laughter.

"Woodenhead" does not contain jokes but the dissociation between sound and image keeps throwing up amusing moments as simple as people talking without moving their mouths or having a blade razor shave to the sound of an electric razor.

All the rules of continuity which regular film tries so hard to enforce here are casually tossed aside. The entire effect is rather dreamlike, which suits this adult version of a Grimm's Fairy tale, mixed in with the kiwi love of gothic horror.

Our hero (Nicholas Butler), is sent to take Plum (Teresa Peters), his boss's daughter, to the next town for her wedding to a rich wheat farmer.

Misfortunes soon overtake them. Their car is sabotaged so they swap it for a donkey and then walk into the forest following enchanting circus music.

These adult babes in the wood fall in love and continue on their Brothers Grimm-themed way.

"Woodenhead" is the kind of movie you want to see at least twice - once by yourself and then with a group of friends, just to relive the surprise of it.

Fast, Cheap and out of control:
Three films from NZ's Digital Revolution
By Philip Matthews
www.senseofcinema.com

In the film The Waiting Place (Cristobal Araus Lobos, 2001), two escaped convicts make their way through the landscape of New Zealand's North Island on their way to a rendezvous at a decommissioned psychiatric institution. This image is familiar at a deep, almost primal level for New Zealanders. The romantic idea of the New Zealand man in the wilderness, as a kind of feral survivalist or refugee from society, is nearly as old as the colonial nation itself, and it found popular expression in some early New Zealand novels - Man Alone (1939) by John Mulgan, who inadvertently gave the tendency a genre name; A Good Keen Man (1960) by Barry Crump - while its cinematic apotheosis is still Smash Palace (Roger Donaldson, 1981), in which Bruno Lawrence takes to the bush, after attracting the hostility of polite society - his wife, the police. A persistent anti-authoritarian strain in New Zealand's psyche meant that such loners - violent and misogynistic, if not simply misanthropic - were viewed as heroes. One of the innovations that The Waiting Place's writers, Cristobal Araus Lobos with actors Dane Giraud and Dave Perrett, bring to the material is that their loner figures are seldom viewed sympathetically. They are presented as ugly and vicious, with none of the roguish charm or popular appeal of Bruno Lawrence; they sink into delusion and madness; their story begins in the bush where Òman aloneÓ stories usually end - it's the Òman aloneÓ at the end of the road.

As part of a private arrangement, Lobos and his collaborators were careful, when the film was released in 2001, not to name the psychiatric facility that serves as the characters' destination, but a scan of the credits would have made it clear to any New Zealander: as the film was shot around the towns of Bulls and Wanganui, the hospital must be the notorious Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital, which was decommissioned only five months before the filmmakers used it as a location (the shooting take place over four weeks in 2000). The character named Belmont (Perrett) was in prison for murdering his wife's lover; he has arranged to meet his wife, Susie, at Òthe waiting placeÓ, or the hospital. Ramsey (Giraud) is a younger, more violent criminal who escapes with him.

One of several New Zealand mental hospitals to have had a forbidding reputation for abuse - in the same year that The Waiting Place was released, 95 former child patients received more than NZ$6 million compensation for abuse suffered there during the 1970s - Lake Alice was a dream location for a low-budget filmmaker. Lobos's cinematographer Paul Tomlins generates a landscape of psychological fear from the trashed rooms, the broken windows, the institutional corridors, the empty swimming pool. Lobos and his crew found the debris of patients scattered throughout the place, they improvised with it and did their best to invoke its dark resonances. Lobos names Roman Polanski's impressionistic descent-into-madness classics Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) as influences, but the way that the environment and location comes to represent some disembodied source of horror also puts it near The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) and The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999). As in both of those films, especially the latter, a little subjective camera goes a long, suggestive way: who, or what, is observing? Another, somewhat cornier horror-movie tradition was invoked by the filmmakers in the media - the ever-popular something-really-weird-did-happen-on-set publicity angle. ÒIt got very scary around the placeÓ, producer Robert Rowe said. ÒCertain ghostly things started happening, voices around the buildings which I personally heard - and I am very sceptical about that sort of thingÓ (1).

Turned down by New Zealand's funding bodies - not just the New Zealand Film Commission, which funds cinema, but Creative New Zealand, which funds art, including experimental film - Lobos and Rowe raised the money privately. They spent around NZ $60,000, which is typically the budget of a Commission-funded short film (previously, Lobos had made a ten-minute short for only NZ $300). Shooting digitally was the secret weapon, but while the production benefited from digital video's affordability and portability, the film itself didn't come with the (occasionally self-regarding) baggage and associations that digital filmmaking has attracted overseas. It seems to have been a budget choice rather than an aesthetic or Dogme-like political one - digital video was not used to contrive an air of documentary-like rawness and intimacy as in, for example, Danny Boyle's 28 Days LaterÉ (2002) and Michael Winterbottom's In This World (2002) (2).

Lobos and Rowe entered The Waiting Place into New Zealand's International Film Festival, a multi-city event that is still the most prestigious arena for local and foreign films. In the 2001 programme, the Festival's directors noted that while the Festival had been inundated with local films shot digitally, Òmost enthusiastically exploit the new technology to essentially frivolous endsÓ. The notion that digital filmmaking had, in some sense, fully arrived in New Zealand was confirmed when the New Zealand Film Awards added a category for digital films in the same year - an award that The Waiting Place won. But the digital revolution actually began earlier, and even further from the mainstream. Wellington filmmaker Campbell Walker debuted his first feature, Uncomfortable Comfortable (1999), at the 1999 International Film Festival (3). Intimate and domestic, dialogue-driven and often improvised, the film owed a debt to one of Walker's influences, Jean Eustache (Walker has identified Eustache's 1973 classic La Maman et la Putain as his favourite film), while the actor-based approach also reminded some of John Cassavetes. Walker, who is based in Aro Valley, Wellington's bohemian precinct, has gone on to develop a small, enthusiastic community of like-minded filmmakers around him, for whom low-budget choices (4) are, again, a brutal necessity not an aesthetic choice - as such, one of the Aro Valley group dismissed the Dogme movement as Òa rich kids' gameÓ, while the media came to love the image of these low-budget films being made only a few miles away from former low-budget filmmaker Peter Jackson's mega-trilogy, Lord of the Rings (5). In the title of his first film, Walker made another meaningful connection clear to those who could pick up the clues: ÒUncomfortable ComfortableÓ was a quote from a lyric by New Zealand musician Peter Jefferies, renowned for pioneering, along with the Dunedin ÒnoiseÓ band The Dead C, a lo-fi aesthetic. Like Walker, Jefferies and The Dead C took pride in how cheaply they could produce work that did the same job as the real thing, without any corporate control or any need to play the industry game (6).

Gregory King's first feature, Christmas (2003), showed clear influences from the Campbell Walker school - Walker even edited it. In the plot, Keri (David Hornblow) returns to his family home for Christmas; the film simply charts the five days from December 21 to December 25, with each new day appearing on a title chart. This kind of austerity defines the film: I counted only two occasions on which the camera actually moves during a scene; mostly, the camera is completely stationary, positioned slightly above the television set in the corner of the lounge, so that the family depicted in the film face us, the audience watching them, or the camera is stationed in the toilet so that every family member is viewed on the toilet, or seen throwing up into it or passed out next to it. The toilet-cam almost acts like the ÒconfessionalÓ used in the reality-television format for candid revelations (Lars von Trier is said to have had a similar ÒconfessionalÓ going during the making of Dogville), accentuating a sense of detached, unjudgmental observation.

As with The Waiting Place, low-budget ingenuity became part of Christmas' story. The production budget was NZ$39,000 - the majority came from arts funding body Creative New Zealand, although around $4,000 was provided by the city council of Whangarei, a small city north of Auckland that most New Zealanders would have had some trouble identifying as a glamorous, movie-making capital. King, who is in his mid-30s, found a location that, for him, must have been every bit as emotionally charged and potentially traumatic as The Waiting Place's Lake Alice - that is, his family home in Whangarei's working-class suburbs. He shot over a summer while his Ê Ê Christmas parents were on holiday, putting his cast of actors up in a local camping ground and giving them $10 per day each towards their catering. The cast is a mix of professional and unprofessional actors, but there does seem to be a palpable sense of emotional connection: this feels like a family, warts and all.

Is Keri the stand-in for King himself? That's an obvious way to read it. As in King's own family, this fictional family - the Cooks - are a mix of indigenous Maori and Pakeha (ÒPakehaÓ being the Maori word for European, adopted by all New Zealanders). As ever, the Christmas season is the occasion for buried stresses and disappointments to rise to the surface - ÒNo wonder no woman will ever marry you!Ó shouts Keri's mother (Darien Takle) at Keri, in a typically belligerent exchange. Besides the mother, Loma, and the father, Brian (Tony Waerea), there are three other siblings: Megan (Helen Pearse Otene), Donna (Kate Sullivan) and Richard (Czahn Armstrong). Megan has two children and a boyfriend, Brett (Matthew Sunderland). In a film in which people suffer in private and scrap in public, Loma is caught crying before Christmas services on television: her belief in Christmas is clear, even if the reality has failed her. Megan's belief is largely intact, too: she wants to give her son Òthe best Christmas everÓ. It is Keri who gets to speak for the filmmaker when he says, after revealing that he has brought no presents for anyone, that ÒI'm not really that into Christmas. I think it's a big conÓ.

This is a deadly accurate, if relentlessly downbeat, picture of hostility, envy and apathy in the New Zealand nuclear family. As a comedy, it is very, very black indeed and many - especially women - find it difficult to enjoy, but, equally, it's hard not to admire the way that it makes the casual violence of New Zealand social life so clear, without framing itself overtly as an ÒissuesÓ movie. In an interview, King said:
It takes a slice of life that sums up what I think of a lot of New Zealanders are and how they live - a stodgy, depressed, angry Anglo-Saxon culture. Look at our mental health statistics, at our suicide rates, there's a lot of tension, conflict and violence in our society. We don't see it in public life, but the contrast between that and what is actually going on is quite startling. It's all there in their rituals, how they talk to each other, but I don't show it in an overt way (7).

Christmas and Florian Habicht's Woodenhead (2003) both debuted at the International Film Festivals in 2003 and immediately developed a life beyond it. Christmas was selected for festivals in Melbourne, Toronto, Edinburgh and Locarno, while Woodenhead sold out its Auckland festival screenings - more had to be hastily arranged - and was also invited to play in Melbourne as well as the Sitges International Film Festival in Spain. In February 2004, Woodenhead even had a well-attended theatrical release, running at Auckland's arthouse cinema, the Academy. Funded again by Creative New Zealand with a budget of around NZ$30,000, Woodenhead had an unusual genesis, one that befits not just Creative New Zealand's mission to fund ÒexperimentalÓ film work but Habicht's training as an artist rather than a filmmaker. The story that Habicht loves to tell is that disgraced lip-synching pop duo Milli Vanilli appeared to him in a dream and told him to make a film in which actors lip-synched. Whatever the truth of that, Habicht and his collaborator, sound designer Marc Chesterman, recorded Woodenhead's dialogue and soundtrack ahead of shooting, meaning that they had something that resembled a radio play - with songs, narration and dialogue - to shoot against, like an aural storyboard. There seem to be no prior examples of this working method outside of animated films, although, in an interview with me, Habicht cited Derek Jarman's soundtrack-and-blue-screen film Blue (1993) as a possible antecedent

As the actors who appear onscreen in Habicht's film are not - in most cases - those who contribute to the soundtrack, and as the dialogue often appears out of synch, the effect is oddly hallucinatory. On some occasions, the actors communicate their dialogue without being seen to open their mouths - for Habicht, they are communicating telepathically. Habicht was also able to cast his friends for their vivid and interesting faces, rather than their acting ability. It is a film of strange, sometimes jarring sensations: a circus-and-fairytale ambience and a Hansel and Gretel-like plotline is subverted by a surreal sense of menace, achieved by a trick as simple as having its kindly-voiced narrator read lines that are more innocent or innocuous than the pictures. Shot in black and white by Christopher Pryor, it looks beautiful for a digital film - it does feel truly cinematic, with its sensualised New Zealand landscapes appearing sometimes in dim, dream-like light. You could argue that while The Waiting Place and Christmas adapt themselves to low-budget filmmaking's limits, through the use of one primary location in each case, Woodenhead transcends those limits.

In the plot, Gert (Nicholas Butler) is assigned by Hugo (veteran Auckland eccentric Warwick Broadhead) to escort Hugo's daughter Plum (Teresa Peters) to her wedding. He is told not to lay a hand on her. They encounter circuses, magic beans, accordion players, a cottage hidden in the woods - spillage from the Grimm tales. They meet Goerdel (Tony Bishop), a barnyard maniac with a face like a cartoon drawing of Quasimodo, and Gustav the Strongman (Matthew Sunderland). Born in Berlin but resident in New Zealand since childhood, Habicht traced his own love of Germanic kitsch to his German background, including repeated viewings of The Tin Drum (Volker Schlondorff, 1979). As Woodenhead's arrival was like an alien landing in New Zealand, critics scrambled about for foreign, generally European predecessors. Although Habicht often appears like something of a gifted ingŽnue, he owned up to a liking for Fassbinder and some knowledge of Herzog (8). Such Guy Maddin films as the camp, delirious pseudo-Nordic fantasy Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) might have seemed influential, but Habicht had never seen Maddin's films. BŽla Tarr and Jan Svankmajer were also cited. The greatest influence on Woodenhead, however, turned out to be Lars von Trier, specifically his Dancer in the Dark (2000) where scenes of outrageous musical fantasy erupt from the banality and frustration of everyday life (9). Like much recent von Trier, Woodenhead is also about the trials suffered by the innocent and na•ve.

In dreaming his European images and stories into an empty, gently melancholy New Zealand landscape, Habicht has done something else as well, something he may not have anticipated: he has somehow removed the angst of New Zealand self-consciousness (10). Ever since New Zealand's arts came of age - sometime after the middle of the 20th century - the nation's artistic output has been anxiously examined and re-examined for what it Òsays about New ZealandÓ. Even those who purport to stand outside the mainstream of New Zealand cultural life - figures such as Gregory King - can't help themselves. For those who stand inside the mainstream, the self-consciousness is often paralysing, and it isn't unconnected with the realities of getting work funded in New Zealand - that is, having to apply to a panel of cultural experts in the nation's capital, Wellington. The sheer, idiosyncratic strangeness of Woodenhead probably disqualifies it as a model for others to follow, but its appearance in New Zealand's national cinema is welcome, if not vital.