Conor Bateman's Blog

The men in ski masks and flak jackets are taking longer than expected to enter from the alleyway. At the end of a row of blank, silent houses, journalist Sinead O’Shea (al-Jazeera English, The New York Times) is waiting to meet a local paramilitary member, a one-off meeting set up by a local intermediary (and former IRA member). The wait, of course tense, is also oddly comical. A handful of the paramilitary men round buildings, backs to walls and guns raised, as if Derry in Northern Ireland...

Senator. How are you going to counter Mr. Humphrey in his, uh, backgrounding you as far as the delegate votes go?

Senator Kennedy has been… Senator Kennedy has been shot! Is that possible? Is that possible? It could… Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has… not only Senator Kennedy… Oh my God! Senator Kennedy has been shot.”

This is a transcription of a reel-to-reel tape recorded by radio reporter Andrew West on June 5th, 1968 — the night of the assassination of Senator Ro...

We’re in a run-down bedroom somewhere in the Caucasus, watching a middle-aged man watch television. The bottom-half of the long wall behind him has been painted a creamy pink; its top half is broken up into uneven rectangles of brown and teal. The teal paint is fading at points, revealing the pink base coat underneath. Dotted across the wall, almost forming an arc above him, are large splotches of white paint masking repair work, though one gets the feeling that these are not recent repairs,...

“Film was born of an explosive,” reads an intertitle early in Bill Morrison’s latest and longest film to date, Dawson City: Frozen Time. He is literally referring to the roots of nitrate film stock — gun cotton — but the sentiment lingers on in the notion that film is home amidst the blast wave of human destruction.

The story of the eponymous Northern Canada town is also one of ripple effects; the documentary begins and ends with an incredible tale: in 1978, hundreds of nitrate film reels wer...

Year in and year out, one of the most interesting screenings at Melbourne International Film Festival is the Experimental Shorts program. An eclectic mix — local and international fare, film and digital projection — bombards the viewer, though some of the films’ potency is felt much later, in post-screening arguments between audience members. One of the shorts that most impressed me in this year’s program was Fern Silva’s 16mm work Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder, which had its world...

One of director Hong Sang-soo’s favourite cinematic preoccupations is upending conventional notions of temporality, particularly when dealing with romantic narratives. His films repeat, fold in on themselves, and blur time and space without indulging in the light metafiction of American cinematic forebears: Bill Murray knows it’s the same day on repeat; Hong’s protagonists approach their reverted worlds unfazed.

Take his 2015 feature Right Now, Wrong Then. A barrage of A/B testing for a pote...

“Ezra,” the second track on Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2016 album Gardens of Delete, is built around a series of seemingly disconnected movements. An ominous, echoing call for the eponymous figure precedes propulsive synths, which in turn precede the sounds of a swiftly plucked upright bass. Around a minute in, we reach a section of the song that Daniel Lopatin, the man behind the Oneohtrix mask, calls “Contra,” after the 1987 Konami arcade game. A pitch-shifted pseudo-Gregorian chant is blanke...

For me, the most potent musical moment this Sydney Film Festival came courtesy of Georgian-German filmmaking pair Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß. At a school reunion on the outskirts of Tiblisi, the attendees — all in their early 50s — have worked their way through speeches and gossip and one among them, a gregarious burly man, requests a tune. A guitar is procured, a chair is placed in the centre of the room, and Manana (stage actress Ia Shugliashvili) is pushed to perform despite her pr...

Laura Poitras’ Risk seems, at first, concerned with mapping time. Onscreen text tells us that in 2006 Wikileaks launched an anonymous online document submission system and that in 2010 they received hundreds of thousands of leaked documents from the United States Military and State Department. In 2011, we watch as Jacob Appelbaum speaks in Cairo about that year’s revolution. We track the days Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spends in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, starting on 19 June 201...

Late in Warwick Thornton’s We Don’t Need A Map, Professor Ghassan Hage of the University of Melbourne is talking about stolen land. It’s to be expected in a documentary addressing white Australia’s entrenched ignorance of indigenous issues, ideas and history but Hage isn’t making a point about ignorance, rather one centred on a knowledge that runs to the heart of Australian colonialist identity. Fear of boats and refugees mask a collective psychological panic: our land will be taken from us....