Change Your Image
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjQ4MTY5NzU2M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDc5NTgwMTI@._V1_SY100_SX100_.jpg)
forgettingofwisdom
Reviews
Solo (2008)
Amazing Tale of a Solo Kayak Adventure on the High Seas
Michôd and Peedom's hour-long documentary recounts the tale of Andrew McAuley, an Australian adventurer who, in 2006, launched a quest to become the first person to paddle a kayak across the treacherous Tasman Sea, one of the loneliest and toughest stretches of water in the world.
Obviously, the story itself is both amazing and remarkably sad. The documentary begins by introducing McAuley - a heroic, adventurous and fatalistic figure who wouldn't be out of place in the films of Werner Herzog - as well as his wife and young son, friends and supporters.
With shades of Kevin McDonald's 2003 feature documentary Touching the Void, this well crafted Australian documentary tells a remarkable and tragic story in a fascinating and engaging manner and Michôd and Peedom approach the documentary with a steady enough hand. They recount the story with a mixture of original footage and interviews, in manner perhaps befitting the sombre and serious tone of McAuley's story. Yet it's hard to feel that, given both the length of the piece and its over-reliance on talking heads, subtle fades and straight-forward storytelling, that it is anything more than a fairly run-of-the-mill TV doco in the realm of ABC-TV's popular and successful series 'Australian Story'. That said, the strength of the material and the measured approach from the directors, means that Solo has rightfully gained an audience around the world, featuring among film festival programmes from Adelaide to Sheffield to Toronto and appearing on prime-time television on BBC 2.
Writer's Block (1994)
A Nightmare of Svankmajer-ish Proportions
Welcome to the nightmarish world of a wordsmith who succumbs to writer's block and lets his self destructive imagination take hold. Leon Cmielewski's stop-motion short, which won Best Australian Short at the 1995 Melbourne International Film Festival, is an allegorical tale of Svankmajer-ish proportions and an underrated classic to boot.
Gloriously shot in 16mm black & white, Writer's Block opens with an anonymous writer sitting at his desk struggling to coax the words from deep within his sub-conscious. The muse, however, is denying his every advance. We've met this man before, and we've met him since. He's Charlie Kaufman. He's Harry Block. He's Barton Fink. Before long, our hero enters a world as wonderfully strange as any of these semi-mythical myth-making acolytes. This writer has spent years pounding the typewriter and now comes retribution.
Cmielewski's near-perfect stop-motion acrobatics create a space in which the nightmares of a writer come to life. Not being able to gush forth onto the page is one thing, but what happens to poor soul is something else entirely. His initial hallucinations soon turns nasty, as accoutrements turn on their owner and his own typewriter assaults him (literally and figuratively) with the cruellest of insults: 'he couldn't write to save himself'.
Let's face it, we could all do with more stop-motion in our lives. So while you wait patiently for the odd, and unlikely, film festival appearance of the latest opus from Jan Svankmajer, you could do worse than revisiting Cmielewski's (partially) hidden gem.