The Turning

Doortje and I went to see the movie of Tim Winton's The Turning, which as keen readers will know, is a book of seventeen short stories with related characters and settings. When we heard that the film, which runs for three hours, is actually a collection of seventeen short films by different directors, we were keen to see what the result was like and if it does justice to Winton's stories.

The answer is that although (as in most cases with film adaptations) the short films were generally not able to convey the complexities of the stories and their themes, as a collection they brilliantly portrayed Winton's physical settings and atmosphere. All in all, it was a bold experiment that led to cinema that was "outside the square"—I find it hard to imagine that something similar would have been attempted before. Vic Lang, a main character in the stories, appears in eight of them at different times in his life, and played by eight different characters! To have read the stories enhanced understanding, but it was enough to soak up the experience rather than try to unravel it.

Anyway, we both enjoyed it immensely, and I would go so far as to call it a milestone in Australian film-making.

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On the subject of short films we used to watch the SBS program SOS (Shorts on Screen) and it always seemed as if the credits were as a long as the film—a 3 minutes film might have more that a minute of credits, or so it seemed. So I imagined that The Turning would have lots of credits. Thankfully, they were all left to the end and were relatively short.

Then I got to thinking I could make a film that consisted entirely of credits. I could call it Film Credit Film or similar and it would look something like this:

Film Credits        :            Credit Where Its Due

Spelling               :            CheckItOut

Extra Credits      :            Bank On It

Fruit Supplies      :            Rhubarb 'R Us

Racing Tips         :            George

Toilet Rolls         :            Sorbent

Best Boy             :            George

Gaffer Tape        :            3M

Completion         :            No

Lighting              :            Redheads

Insurance            :            Leave Blank

Catering              :            Play On Words

And so on… (a work in progress, or feel free to make contributions in the Comments section).