Published 2016 on Down Under Flix
Director: Paul Cox
Director: Paul Cox
Stars: Derek Jacobi (narrator), Leigh Warren &
Dancers (dancers)
As
Mario Andreacchio’s Gauguin biopic Paradise Found attests, the lives and
work of international artists are not beyond the purview of Australian
filmmakers. In 1987, Paul Cox directed an acclaimed documentary about painter
Vincent Van Gogh, titled Vincent,
which featured narration of the artist’s letters by John Hurt. In 2001, Cox
released a similar project, The
Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, trading letters for journals and easels
for the stage to chronicle the mental deterioration of another tragic artist,
the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Derek Jacobi, who also appears in Cox’s film Molokai: The Story of Father Damien,
serves as narrator for this feature.
In
the early twentieth century, Nijinsky was one of the world’s premier dancers.
Following the outbreak of World War One, his ability to travel the globe
performing was severely impeded. Consequently, he suffered a severe mental
breakdown and experienced delusions, as chronicled in his diaries. Cox’s film
does not dramatize or depict these events per se. Rather, Jacobi narrates
Nijinsky’s diary entries over the footage – of nature, of dancers in
performance, and of art and archival material – that Cox has assembled to
visually symbolise or contrast these spoken words.
With
this review, the late Paul Cox joins Geoffrey Wright and Gillian Armstrong (and
next week Rachel Perkins) as directors who’ve had more than one film
spotlighted on Down Under Flix. Human
Touch, reviewed in the early days of the site and
shortly after Cox’s passing, was indicative of Cox’s fondness for the arts and
view of their centrality to the human condition, but couched this within a
standard screen story. The
Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky is another beast entirely, a
passion project three years in the making and many more in gestation that does
not come in readily palatable form. It’s neither narrative film nor
dramatization – there is one of those out there, Herbert Ross’s Nijinsky with Alan Bates
and George De La Pena – but nor is it a documentary. It is, simply put, the
diaries rendered in spoken form with accompanying visuals and music, akin to
something you might expect to view in a world class art gallery or museum. Cox
himself aptly described it as a “cinematic poem” (see here).
Much
like a poem, the finished product was the fruit of much solitary work. Whilst
there were plenty of collaborators – including Jacobi, composer Paul Grabowsky,
Adelaide-based dance troupe Leigh Warren & Dancers – Cox stated that he
“made this film in the editing room” (see here).
This is evident from the finished product, both in the way it assembles
disparate footage and in its somewhat insular feel. Cox’s fascination with his
subject is strongly felt, if not necessarily transparent to the audience.
Viewers unfamiliar with Nijinsky’s work and with little sense of his accomplishments
are, after a fleeting passage of introductory text, thrust directly into and
bound to Nijinsky’s point of view for the remainder of the film. One is
reminded of the documentarians played by Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors and
Ben Stiller in While We’re
Young, who become infatuated with the philosophical/intellectual
figures at the core of their passion projects and are unable to wrestle them to
completion.
And
yet Cox does have a handle on his subject, and the shortcoming perceived above
– that for Cox, Nijinsky’s text is all and context is naught – could equally be
considered a strength. In its rendition and recreation of Nijinsky’s
journals, The Diaries of
Vaslav Nijinsky is celebratory but also funereal, a work of
mourning. Gradually it dawns upon the viewer (or at least this not-too-clued-in
viewer) that Nijinsky is a deeply unreliable narrator – with many of his
philosophies, attitudes, and fantasies being of the diseased mind variety – and
the words and their accompanying images gradually become more unsettling. Much
of the imagery is, admittedly, standard documentary filler (e.g. nature shots),
but the dance sequences by Leigh Warren and Dancers are great: alternately
entrancing, erotic, disturbing, and bizarre, sometimes within the space of a
single performance.
Though I’d recommend the film, I do so with
caveats. The Diaries of
Vaslav Nijinsky is a hard work to warm to. It’s a very
particular flavour of film, one without the usual reliable crutches to rest
upon (i.e. narrative arcs and clearly delineated protagonists for feature
films; concrete facts and incidents for documentaries), so the viewer has to
rise to the occasion, much as one would reading Ulysses or The Waste Land. At times I was
thoroughly ill-equipped for the task. But ultimately, the film is worthwhile:
it’s a small film, but also a deeply felt, truly personal undertaking by its
director, a portrait of one artist by another with a tangible, consuming,
almost painful investment in its subject.
Ben Kooyman