Rick's Reel Recommendations: 3 Films on NZ Music

RICK'S REEL RECOMMENDATIONS | COLUMN | PUORO O AOTEAROA / MUSIC

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickylaitheokperson | Contributing Columnist

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These films are in a Letterboxd list here: https://boxd.it/GTgJ6/detail

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King Loser (Cushla Dillon & Andrew Moore, 2023)

New Zealand’s patchy recollection of its own musical history is often told through documentary. I’m not referring to the feel-good story of Six60 or whatever, though – the method is kind ofa essential for the way we’ve sustained wide-spread interest in capturing the underground scene besides word-of-mouth. Lots of them are free to watch online – Simon Ogston did wonders for recounting Chants R&B (‘Rumble & Bang’), Skeptics (‘Sheen of Gold’) and Philip Dadson (‘Sonics from Scratch’). In recent years, though, Ogston-esque style has been reprised through Dillon and Moore’s memoir of ‘90s psych-n’-noise rock band King Loser during their farewell tour. It’s not a hagiography – that’s one gratitude of mine. No received wisdom about a certified great artist, no hacky sentiments on national identity, no emotionally manipulative narrative to oblige your invested time. Just a celebration of a weird band from a weird scene. Chris Heazlewood and Celia Mancini are impossible subjects to not watch yap and smoke – they would prop up a 10-episode television serial, let alone a 90-minute feature.

Sweet As (Shirley Horrocks, 1999)

Somewhere on the NZ On Screen website lays this strangely liminal, 45-minute television doc about the slippery chaos unfolding at the 1999 Sweetwaters Festival in Pukekawa. Research tells that this year’s revival of the multi-day festival was managementally a disaster – Chris Knox and Elvis Costello are shown disclaiming to the audience that everybody has been underpaid – and this trouble only emerges slightly on the frayed edges of this film, which instead follows two groups of attendees. One is a posse of ruckus-seeking teenagers, and the other is an older 30-something group of nostalgics for the Sweetwaters’ heyday. While everybody seems to be having a fine enough time, there is an air of disappointment that it’s not quite what it’s scratched up to be – and I find that mood fascinating; refreshingly unromantic; even kinda… Kiwi of us, no? You do have to sit through a short clip from a UB40 set, so approach with caution.

Woodenhead (Florian Habicht, 2003)

I haven’t had this much fun with a movie from our country, in like, ever. Florian Habicht is currently the most lauded film surrealist from Aotearoa, and ‘Woodenhead’ is a Brothers Grimm-styled fairytale through liminal Northland forestry, drawing from not only the creepiness of Lynch but his sense of mischief, too. I highlight this film here because it’s a musical film in a very different sense. The sound in ‘Woodenhead’ appears to be dubbed and horridly out-of-sync, but in actuality the central experiment here is that the soundtrack – not just music, but every single sound effect and voice that you hear – was recorded first, with the accompanying scenes shot afterwards. As a result, all the dialogue feels internal, like garbled, muted re-interpretations of our countrypeoples’ strange ways of living and talking. The present tense moment is imbued with a pre-recorded sense of the past; true to fairytale form. And it’s funny, too – the theme of trickling water on the soundtrack may typically bring to mind a river or a waterfall, but Habicht also chooses to pair it with the image of somebody pissing in the woods. Sure, that’ll sound freakish to a lot of people, but if you’re not at least a little curious about the strange, then are you truly a reader of Debate Magazine?