Thursday 17 October 2013

Representing Australia: Lake Mungo (2008)

From http://www.impawards.com/2010/posters/lake_mungo_ver2_xlg.jpg

Dir. Joel Anderson

Told as a documentary, Lake Mungo is the story of the disappearance of a sixteen year old girl named Alice, her family coping badly with her loss but, over the next two years, dealing with the possibility that her ghost haunts their home and certain other areas. Using the tropes of the stereotypical documentary found on television - talking head interviews, establishing footage, archival material from the hauntings and slowly discovered events - the story peels away the layers until the truth about Alice' life and her last days alive are revealed. It sounds very interesting. The film reaches something of immense interest when there is more to the story than a mere haunting, the contradictions of a family where members don't reveal things to the others, expectations are not met and new discoveries are found, including an almost mythological or Edgar Allen Poe-like conclusion to the story. But there is a fatal flaw. It may be only a personal one for me as a viewer, but it's a major aesthetics issue that ruins the film. The documentary structure itself.

Fromhttp://thewolfmancometh.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/lake-mungo-movie-film-alice-ghost-woodas.gif

It looks like a lot of documentaries made nowadays on purpose, on cinema screens as well as TV, which is worth praising for accuracy, but this is a bad mistake in terms of cinematic style for Lake Mungo as it continues a side of filmmaking I hate for its laziness. Now if the film had manipulated and scrutinised the style, this would have helped the film immensely, but aside from actual documentaries on cinema itself, which feel more like moving resource books, it is completely insipid for me as a style that has been repeated ad nauseum. Creating it for verisimilitude in this fake documentary was not a good idea. Filmmaker Peter Watkins dubbed this kind of presentation - in editing, use of music, number of shots - the Monoform, a basic structure of audio-media composition repeated continually in most works, a barrage of audio and visuals. It's used in documentaries, sports coverage, the news, many places. Replicated in countless documentaries from talking heads and musical scores that make you feel emotions from the beginning of the work instead gain them yourself, Lake Mungo as a fake documentary replicates it all without ever questioning it in context of its story. For me, you have no time even contemplate anything in the film, no time to think to bring it altogether for yourself, as narration immediately goes into the next interview, no time to illicit emotions of your own because the film's score tries to force you into how it feels you should at that moment. In replicating the real examples of this filmmaking, Lake Mungo becomes a tedious work, where a potentially disturbing and emotionally affecting story is transformed into the kind of supernatural documentary on television that trivialises concepts of death and trauma for cheap emotional pull. Pandering to our desires to feel sadness for others' plights without caring for them once the show ends, not even as fictional characters in a  good drama. It's a potentially meaningful ghost story turned into a trivial piece of (fictitious) tragedy porn, straight jacketed into the format it has. Again, it could have played with the format, especially as this happens in the film with the haunting footage itself, while other films have television formats and made great use of them, but barring the story idea surrounding the titular lake, you are being forced to watch a replication of documentaries with rarely any real soul to them and tiring for me to see.

From http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q80/trungcang/hdbitz-org/lake-1.png

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