How to Direct a Play

Last week an Irish make-up artist visiting Melbourne asked me if I was sport-obsessed, like all the other Aussies she had met. I said I wasn't.

Last weekend I saw Zinedine Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait

I want to be him.

It's a beautiful film. Co-director Douglas Gordon also made 24-hour Psycho, that film slowed down so that it lasted 24 hours...simple, effective. This portrait is in real time and it is a hypnotic 90 minutes that closely follows Zidane through a match he is playing for Real Madrid. So closely is he observed that you don't really know how the game is progressing and it takes you a while to realise he is sharing the pitch with the likes of Beckham and Ronaldo. He stalks like a lion, clips the ground like a restless horse and when he does strike, it seems to be in slow motion (which mirrors the experience of watching Wayne Carey live, btw) He doesn't waste time with words, just the odd yell. In the one moment when he smiles, his whole face lights up; it's a "feminine" moment in a portrait of pure masculinity. Masculinity and Flow. The first is intrinsic to the subject, the "sitter", the second is the theme that justifies the form, the use of the close-up video, the manipulation of the sound from personal, interior space to the roar of a full stadium, and Mogwai's music. The 'Flow" that is achieved when you are totally focussed on a series of discrete actions, when time stops behaving and ideas link with each other before you have thought them. When you have forgotten the exterior world and yet are totally in synch with it. When you feel predestination. This film is a celebration of the sportsman as artist, or the masculine in art, or the art of masculinity.

In an interview Gordon suggested that Zidane's headbutt-exit from the World Cup was an orgasmic/destructive urge to sully the perfect moment. I have an ongoing , complex response to Zidane's 'final moment' so the simplicity of this idea is attractive.

And I want to be him.

Anti-AFL-ers should duck the next two pars. I was losing bits of teeth reading the likes of Robert Walls pontificating about North Melbourne and as always, Leapin' Larry at The Age leaps the right way:

SNOOZER OF THE WEEK
Anyone still congratulating themselves at length on recognising the Gold Coast as the Kangaroos' "only option". Yes, after years of successfully white-anting such local supporter base as they had here by shipping their games all over the national landscape, and otherwise publicly eroding confidence in their finances, there was only one path left, so all due congratulations to those pundits on the marvelous feat of recognising it. Hoorah. (The Sunday Age, 4/3/07)

As a former Fitzroy supporter who couldn't bear (ha bloody ha) a Brisbane-based version of his beloved club and so spent 3 seasons in the wilderness before following North (another inner-urban club, a smattering of ex-Fitzroy players) you can imagine how overjoyed I am by the prospect of never seeing a free-to-air game not telecast from the Gold Coast. Gold Coast Kangaroos? Oh, the humiliation.

Ben Ellis points us to the Radio 4 site for some Tynan. Also there at the moment is Mike Brearley, yes, THAT Mike Brearley investigating the Art of Directing. (Can't link directly, click on a weekday and find it in the A-Z listing).It's typically English, uptight but forensic. Early on, Sir Peter Hall describes G.B. Shaw's rehearsal process and it is soundly tut-tutted. Unfairly, I think.

You can't go past Katie Mitchell's "98% of directing is hard work." Her observations of the origins of Stanislavski's Method should also ring some bells for Melbournians, although the implications for a methodology that is founded on fear are not pursued.

All in all, well worth a quick listen, and I look forward to the second installment next week.

I now have an image of Alan Border interviewing Simon Phillips about rehearsal processes, and it won't go away.

I'd like to dedicate today's blog to the The Age report, about Harry Potter performing in the current West End production of Equus, that described the protagonist Alan Strange as "a stable boy obsessed with horses." Makes me feel very sane indeed.

and did I mention this man amongst men?