Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 27 August

Giselle (Fraser, 2013)

I haven’t men­tioned it here before but for a while in 2013 I was edit­or of Aotearoa’s screen industry magazine OnFilm. I haven’t men­tioned it because it was a pretty unhappy experience.

The magazine was get­ting a reboot from new own­ers after a few years out of print. I was stoked to be selec­ted as edit­or and we made one really good first issue that focused on Dana Rotberg’s White Lies (recom­men­ded here back in July) and the res­tor­a­tion pro­cess for Geoff Murphy’s Utu, with some flash­backs to the ori­gin­al release of that film thanks to the OnFilm archives.

We fin­ished a second issue before I real­ised that the whole endeav­our was just a big pub­lish­ing Ponzi scheme (with advert­ising from one magazine used to pay the bills of anoth­er) and that I wasn’t going to get paid. I ended up being owed more than $8000 and one of the own­ers went to jail for a year.

The second issue that we pub­lished centred around Toa Fraser’s filmed ver­sion of the Royal New Zealand Ballet pro­duc­tion of Giselle. I got to inter­view Fraser and cine­ma­to­graph­er Leon Narbey and it was one of the great pleas­ures of my career.

I’ve just had a hunt through my digit­al archives to see if I still have any­thing from those days but I sus­pect it was too raw at the time for me to both­er with pre­ser­va­tion. We nev­er got as far as relaunch­ing an OnFilm web­site. I do have a few cop­ies of the magazines though, so maybe I’ll scan those one day.

I don’t know where all those leather-bound edi­tions of nearly 40 years of the magazine have gone.

I do have my Funerals & Snakes review of the film from this very day in 2013 though:

Theatre, bal­let and opera have become a staple in our art-houses over the last few years as high cul­ture has found a home where live sport and rock con­certs (the “altern­at­ive con­tent” that was pre­dicted to dom­in­ate the new digit­al envir­on­ment) have failed. While the Met Opera and National Theatre have estab­lished inter­na­tion­al brands and repu­ta­tions to lead them, Toa Fraser’s Giselle has some­thing else – it works as cinema. Beautifully shot by ace Leon Narbey and his team of ded­ic­ated cine­ma­to­graph­ers – like Scorsese’s Rolling Stones film Shine a Light, Narbey insisted that every cam­era oper­at­or be a first-rate shoot­er in his own right – Giselle show­cases the sub­lime per­form­ances of prin­cipals Gillian Murphy and Qi Huan as well as Kendall Smith’s beau­ti­ful lighting.

Fraser leaves the aud­it­or­i­um occa­sion­ally – to New York, Shanghai and the Wellington rehears­al room – gently hint­ing at the con­nec­tions between per­former and char­ac­ter that are usu­ally the prerog­at­ive of our imaginations.

Also in that column: Matt Damon and Jodie Foster in Elysium, Director Park’s Stoker, future Ted Lasso Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston in We’re the Millers, Sandra Bullock team­ing up with Melissa McCarthy in The Heat, WWI story Private Peaceful fea­tur­ing baby-George Mackay and baby-Jack O’Connell, Matteo Garrone’s mod­ern fable Reality, and puzzle-thriller Now You See Me.

Where to watch Giselle

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Apple and NZ On Screen

Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple

Canada: Streaming on Knowledge

Ireland, UK and USA: Not cur­rently available