The 35th Auckland International Film Festival

By GRAHAM REID

In retrospect it's interesting the film generally considered the first talkie was about a singer and dancer. The Jazz Singer of 1927 starring Al Jolson brought song and dance together and nothing was ever the same again. The careers of some silent movie stars were finished and by the 1930s visually elaborate musicals by Busby Berkeley were pulling millions into movie parlours.

Today if you scan the listings of multiplexes you might think we've reverted to the pre-sound era of action shoot 'em ups such as the first American silent film, The Great Train Robbery. Song and dance films such as Chicago are so rare they gather publicity for that reason alone.

The 35th annual Auckland Film Festival, however, includes a number of features - and a compilation programme - where the focus again is music and dance. And some of the music pulsates off the screen with a full-blooded concert sound.

Monterey Pop turns back time to the great rock festival of June '67 - the pinnacle of the American "Summer of Love" a fortnight after the Beatles released Sgt Pepper's. The air was full of love, peace and marijuana at Monterey and the line-up shows just how few barriers there were between musical genres at the time. The line-up included Jimi Hendrix (who famously burned his guitar at the end of his set to upstage the Who), soulman Otis Redding, folk-into-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel, psychedelic explorers Jefferson Airplane and Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar. The Monterey Pop Festival was the first such commercial rockfest and paved the way for Woodstock which took place two years later.

The restored print of this important concert-doco (filmed by D.A. Pennebaker who did the penetrating study of Bob Dylan Don't Look Back the previous year and Bowie's Ziggy concert in '73) comes with fat stereo sound and digitally enhanced footage.

Also in the programme is the equally celebratory Standing in the Shadows of Motown which offers the long-overdue spotlight to those great musicians who played on hundreds of Motown songs, then turned up to the Detroit studio one day to read the notice which said the company had moved to LA. Motown boss Berry Gordy isn't interviewed for the film, needless to say.

This funny, emotional and groove-oriented salute to these previously little-known musicians allows them to reminisce in the tiny studio where they worked their soul magic, joke, recall fallen friends (notably the late bassist James Jamerson who was a genius but sounds like a difficult cuss) and again to perform this classic material with help from the likes of Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Chaka Khan and Joan Osborne. The Funk Brothers, as they style themselves, haven't lost the groove either.

Only the Strong Survive - also by Pennebaker, himself the subject of a festival doco, See What Happens - looks at the life and struggles of Sam Moore, of soul legends Sam and Dave, who fell from fame through drug addiction and ended up in a doss house in Times Square within a few years. It is a story of tragedy and redemption to a great soundtrack.

One whose life was more happy was jazz bassist Milt Hinton, who died in 2000 aged 90. Not only did he perform with everybody - Guy Lombardo to Willie Nelson is some haul - but he took intimate, unposed photographs of his fellow musicians. Keeping Time: The Life, Music and Photographs of Milt Hinton is an extraordinary biography of the man, but by also being a history of jazz in America last century it is also by extension about race.

Hinton's black and white photographs - he took some 60,000 - are a rich collection of American images, none as important as those where jazz legends are simply relaxing or intently listening to a playback in a recording studio. The roll call of artists is astounding: Dinah Washington, Sammy Davis Jnr, Barbra Streisand, Sam Cooke, Tony Bennett, Count Basie, a young and crew-cutted Gerry Mulligan and telling portraits of a relaxed Charles Mingus, a man renowned for his permanent grumpiness. These were Hinton's friends and colleagues, so he had unrestricted access to their lives and emotions.

"It's a way of learning about what happened in the past," says the modest and affable Hinton about his photographs. "It's a record of those days, everyday happenings, telling a story. I just wanted to take musicians the way we see each other, not as photographers see us."

His images of Billie Holiday in her final studio session when her life was being eaten away by drugs, vodka and loneliness are heart-breaking. To hear her try to sing and knowing she wasn't cutting it is like being an eavesdropper at an emotional breakdown, yet Hinton's photographs are sympathetic and not intrusive. His images as much as his exceptional bass playing are part of the large legacy he left.

History is equally captured in Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony which traces the struggle against apartheid through the songs of the people who resisted and turned song into a weapon. These recollections of great artists reminiscing (Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela the most well known), plus historic news footage, re-enactments and snippets from contemporary South African public service films (which are painful) are a reminder of a shameful period when skin colour was the determining factor in the lives and fates of millions. That the struggle against such a warped ideology found its voice in moving songs is a miracle of the human spirit.

Elsewhere in the programme Good Times: The Movie is a profile of DJ Norman Jay and his 80s warehouse parties and sound systems at Notting Hill Carnivals, and there are number of films where dance is the focus.

The mesmerising Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is an extraordinary conception that beautifully shuffles the deck between contemporary dance, music-hall melodrama and silent film techniques. With the music of Mahler this exquisite, expressionist film uses as its source a stylised adaptation of Bram Stoker's original story as interpreted by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Company. But then film director Guy Maddin works magic on it.

Through pin-hole camera and inter-titles from silent films, the sepia tones and washed black and white footage, the result is a dramatic, slightly camp but visually engaging piece suffused in repressed sex and overt sensuality. It is also as much about film as dance, so those for whom a Dracula ballet doesn't sound appealing should set aside prejudice and prepare for a cinematic treat which redefines notions of filmed dance.

Similarly Lumin, a highlight in the Homegrown III: The Dance programme, explores the interface of film and footwork, interpretive movement and innovative editing. Lord knows what it all means, but director Daniel Belton's 25-minute mini-feature uses the complete catalogue of cinematic techniques - scratched film, blurring, rinsed-out images, slo-mo, split screen and rapid cutting among them - in the service of interpretive dance. It was over two years in the making and you can see every minute in the dazzling result.

Also in Homegrown III is the muscular and metaphysical short dance Small War by director Alyx Duncan who also shot the whimsical Union about a three-legged dog and a one legged man.

Haunting Douglas is Leanne Pooley's biographical feature of dancer/choreographer Douglas Wright which includes historic footage of his finest, muscular and lithe work. While necessarily interpolating biographical details of his private life - which he mildly objects to - this is a consideration of his life and work. Wright has been driven in both and while informative, enlightening and never less than interesting it is also something of a hagiography. There are no dissenting voices save an anonymous critic who we are told disliked a particular work.

Wright takes his art, life and himself very seriously, so the audience will be left to make what they will of what follows. Wright, in tears, says, "I find human beings so vicious sometimes, I have no desire to be part of the human race. I much prefer the company of trees and animals. I think it's quite a shameful thing to be a human being."

On a more up-beat note the new print of Singing in the Rain takes us back to the start as Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor sing and dance their way through a big-hearted, joyous story about that transition from silent movies to talkies.

Films about music are central to this year's festival and a close reading of the programme also reveals those with soundtracks by Howard Shore, Sonic Youth, Ludovic Navarre (aka St Germaine), John Surman, Ennio Morricone, Shayne Carter and Arvo Part.

And who could resist the parody of 60s folk by the ensemble behind Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.

Be there and be square for A Mighty Wind.