GFT in March: Polanski and Malik

Having been all about the puppetry last week, I am all about the films this week. Please don't think of me as fickle. I am just trying to keep up with the pace of Scottish festival culture. Any comment along the lines of "it seems like there is a festival every week of the year these days," isn't a wise-acre crack. It's true. Isn't Creative Scotland having a year of the festival for 2013?

On a non-festival note - although this does feed into my enthusiasm for the GFF, the GFT have just announced their programme for March. When it gets laid out like this (rather than forcing me to look at the programme and use my brain to follow the strands), I can suddenly see that the talk about the GFT as a local treasure is true, too. 

To be honest, I am never that interested in new release films. Being more of a theatre critic, I prefer to leave the rough and tumble of contemporary film critique to the professionals (unless I am called upon by the wonderful Jesuit inspired website, Thinking Faith to review something featuring a knotty moral question). So the GFT excites me more because it has those seasons of old films, ones that have already been described and classified by quality, leaving me free to write about their moral worth.

Case in point:  the TERRENCE MALICK: FILM POET strand. Five films, plus his new one To The Wonder, from a man described as "cinema's invisible man." I tried to find some critical writing about him, but all I discovered was articles saying how he shuns the spotlight. 

Badlands (Sunday 3 March, 17.20) is based on a true story, involving rebels without a cause finding purpose in madness and bloodshed. Starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, it sits comfortable amongst the other 1970s films that came out of the counter-culture into the mainstream, splattering the screen with blood and dark prophecies. His last film, however, The Tree of Life (Sunday 31 March, 17.00) shows a director more willing to embrace a positive, holistic vision, even if he got the underwhelming Brad Pitt involved and replaced coherent argument with spectacular visuals to make his point that life is just dandy.

Days of Heaven (Sunday 10 March, 17.45) is closer to Badlands - more lovers doing bad things, but Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’ autobiographical 1962 novel, The Thin Red Line (Sunday 17 March, 16.45) has the scope of Apocalypse Now without that film's unfortunate implication that war is probably fun and a personal journey to understanding the mind of man.  The New World (Sunday 24 March, 17.00), covers the same ground as Disney's Pocahontas myth with less singing and more serious examination of cultural conflict.

Malik could be seen as a lazy director - he's managed six films in forty years - but each one is worth a gander. His later work (Tree and Line) does tend to wander about the subject and revel in the joy of cinematography, but at least he isn't just about the explosions and refutes the idea that low budgets, or self-consciously arty aesthetics, are the only place for intelligent film-making. 

I'm not sure how I feel about the Polanski season. Sure, Knife in the Water (Friday 8 – Saturday 9 March) is a classic of suspense and repressed violence, triple Oscar-winning Tess (Monday 18 – Tuesday 19 March) is a lavish version of Hardy's tale that broke my heart when I was eighteen but seems rather melodramatic and polemical to me now and Repulsion (Friday 15 – Saturday 16 March), Polanski’s first feature after he left Poland and starring Catherine Deneuve, is a genuine freak-out.

But it's him. After that business about his Savile style activities, his cinematic eye feels sinister. Especially with Tess. In the book, Hardy explicitly states that his heroine was being toyed with by the gods: her torments in the film then become an act of cruelty by the director. This would be the point where a discussion of the relationship between an artist's personality and his art would be helpful. 

Life would be so much easier if only good people made films, and characters like Gary Glitter destroyed their career earlier - no-one is too fussed that My Gang isn't disgracing the radio, and we have been spared endless repeats of Jim'll Fix It on satellite television. But Polanski made intriguing films - it is a question of whether his behaviour is reflected in them. Since misogyny is a staple of much cinema ("female terror" being the basis of way too much horror), traces of it in Polanski's films might be almost invisible, except for the publicity surrounding the case. 

So - in the meantime, I'll stick to Malik and the Slasher Appreciation night. Nothing to worry about there...