Video Fool for Love | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Directed by | Robert Gibson |
Produced by | George Miller Doug Mitchell |
Starring | Robert Gibson April Ward Gianna Santone Cindy Carpenter |
Music by | Antony Partos |
Production company | |
Release dates | 1995 (Sydney Film Festival) 1996 (theatrical and VHS release) |
Running time | 87 minutes |
Country | Australia |
Language | English |
Video Fool for Love is a 1995 Australian autobiographical documentary film directed by film editor Robert Gibson and produced by George Miller. [1] [2] The film is compiled from 600 hours of camcorder footage shot by Gibson from 1983 to 1993. It focuses on Gibson's personal life from 1988 to 1991, particularly his tumultuous relationships with April Ward, Gianna Santone and Cindy Carpenter.
The film opens with an interview with George Miller about the viability of the film. Gibson's parents are also interviewed about how he dealt with a recent breakup with a woman named Gianna Santone, and he is seen running distraught on a beach in the breakup's aftermath chanting "Gianna Maria Gabriela Santone, why do you leave me and make me so lonely?"
In a flashback, Gibson wins an AFI Award for his editing work on Flirting and walks on stage carrying a camera. At this time in his life, he is dating a woman named April Ward. She moves to London, and he promises to follow. In an interview, Gibson is asked by Ward what he considers "sexy" on a woman. He replies "Bottoms. Bottoms and tummies."
Gibson then meets Santone at a hotel bar where she works as a bartender. They begin dating and a series of flirtatious exchanges are depicted. In one long sequence, a naked Gibson searches for a condom in his bedroom so that they can have sex, before finding a box of LifeStyles.
As Gibson plans to fly to London on pre-booked tickets to reunite with Ward, Santone says she does not want to see Gibson anymore. A conflicted Gibson muses to camera about what to do. Before leaving for London, he stops in at Santone's house. As he drives away, he notes that he "forgot" to say he loved her. In a phone interview, his father calls the situation "the height of idiocy."
In London, Gibson and Ward throw several house parties and he proposes marriage to her. They then go on a ski trip, where they have several argumentative exchanges and Ward is upset to learn about Santone. Ward and her friends leave for Paris. Meanwhile, the Gulf War begins. Gibson then returns to Australia, where he moves into a house in Newcastle with Santone and her cat Lewis, who Gibson rescues from being stuck on their house's tin roof. A series of sexually charged moments follow, including one sequence on a beach.
Ward writes a series of angry letters and makes emotional phone calls to Gibson, upsetting Santone. As the Gulf War unfolds on TV, Gibson compares Ward to a Scud missile: "She came out of the heavens from nowhere, she was not very accurate, but she was, morale-wise, psychologically devastating."
While Santone works as a radio newsreader at the ABC, Gibson maintains a full-time career in film editing. Gibson suggests they become a "multimedia couple." He proposes marriage to Santone, which she accepts. Santone takes Gibson to her family home and introduces him to her parents. At a later party, a friend of Gibson talks about earlier sexual experiences involving Gibson, including a foursome. Santone watches, looking uncomfortable.
Gibson buys Santone a $4,000 engagement ring, but then a woman he identifies only as "Katarina the Black Queen" convinces her not to marry him. Santone tells Gibson she's sick of "receiving obnoxious letters from your 'Scud missile' friend." Gibson is able to talk her back around, and plans for the wedding continue. They visit the Queen Victoria Building as a potential venue and fill out paperwork at the Births Deaths and Marriages NSW office.
Santone is upset that Gibson has not taken down photos of Ward from his apartment, and upends a box of her possessions that Gibson has been packing up. "I hate myself", Gibson muses to camera, "but I like myself at the same time." Gibson also wants to plan a trip to Nepal, but Santone is not interested. He tells her they will meet under the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but she is skeptical. Gibson then attends a sperm bank to freeze his sperm, and masturbates on camera to obtain the sample.
As life goes on, Santone grows increasingly irritated with the presence of Gibson's camera. He insists he wants their relationship to become a "media event" and that the resulting film will win festivals. She tells him that the project has no structure, just as Gibson has problems structuring his thoughts. An unnamed filmmaker comes to dinner and calls Gibson's footage "ugly pornography." Gibson and Santone then go out for yum cha, and he attempts to reconstruct her reaction after failing to capture it on film. In another argument, she says she wants to go to Paris just for its own sake and not to make a film.
Santone begins seeing another man. When she tells Gibson, he reacts aggressively. In a diary entry to camera, Gibson discusses physically grabbing and confronting her on the streets of Kings Cross as she attempted to run away and withdraw money from an ATM. This is not fully depicted, but in one shot, she is seen running away from behind. She later returns to his apartment to gather her possessions, but he locks the door and refuses to let her leave until she agrees to return the engagement ring, calling her "goods and chattels." Eventually, he is persuaded to let her out by a friend of Santone's outside the apartment.
In a montage, Gibson begins to reflect on his memories with Santone and process the breakup. As Roy Orbison's "Crying" plays on his stereo, Gibson breaks down in tears.
Two years later, Gibson has met another woman, Cindy Carpenter. Together, they travel to Nepal, Machu Picchu, the Amazon rainforest and Tierra del Fuego. In the final shot, Gibson uses a remote to direct a camera as it films them kissing on a park bench from a distance, and Gibson remarks that they are about to leave for Paris.
Gibson edited various Australian films and TV productions since the 1970s, including The Dirtwater Dynasty , Flirting and Daydream Believer . In 1983, he began keeping a "video diary" with a camcorder. "I was always shoving the camera into people's faces at parties, family occasions, at work, everywhere I went", he later told The Toronto Star. "At first, people thought I was a dork. But eventually I found if you had a video camera with you in your life, people would be unusually frank and open, without the stigma of having a crew and lights, which tends to make people act out." [3]
Gibson met George Miller while sitting in on the editing process for Mad Max and pitched various ideas to him over the years, including a screenplay entitled Carpark Freaks. Miller became interested once Gibson mentioned that he had exhaustively documented his relationship with Gianna Santone on video, including the moment they first met, various arguments and moments of intense passion. Viewing the footage, Miller was impressed at the lengths Gibson had gone to. [4] Feeling that Gibson's vulnerability "made Woody Allen look like a dinosaur", Miller agreed to produce a feature film compiled from this footage through his Kennedy Miller production house. [5]
Santone signed a release allowing her name and image to be used in the film, and rewatched all of the footage with Gibson to help catalogue it. This process, which Gibson described as "a psychological challenge", took six weeks. [6] Despite the real-life nature of the film, Gibson insisted it was not a documentary and withdrew it from the AFI Awards when they refused to classify it otherwise. He considered it a drama, "an almost farcical love story... trying to find the drama or comedy of a situation." [7]
The film screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1995. [8] In 1996, it ran theatrically in Australian arthouse cinemas and was released on VHS. It also opened the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in 1999. [9] The film has never been reissued on DVD or on streaming platforms.
Video Fool for Love was a controversial film that met a divisive reception.
Sandra Brennan of The New York Times called the film "narcissistic and sometimes painfully analytical." [10] Adrian Martin described the film in The Age as a "witless farrago" that is "simply hideous... simultaneously banal and spectacular, not to mention excruciatingly painful to watch." He was also shocked by the fact the Video Fool for Love press kit identified Gibson as "the first (filmmaker) to put himself between the camera and his subject" as he felt similar concepts had been done many times before to greater effect, giving examples such as Corinne Cantrill's In This Life's Body and Ross McElwee's Sherman's March . [11]
The Sydney Morning Herald called the film " Muriel's Wedding for men... 87 minutes of riveting cinema verité", adding that it "revealed much that is embarrassing and true about the way men and women fantasise about true love." [12] Margaret Allen in the Green Left Weekly called the film "an intimate and sometimes sexually explicit home movie", adding that "the most unsettling aspect... is that every 10 minutes or so, there is the shock realisation that what you are witnessing actually happened. The fact that it is not acting makes it strangely intriguing and appealing." [13]
In Canada, The Hamilton Spectator called the film "hilarious and irritatingly honest, an exploration of love gone wrong in the 90s that unabashedly documents the politics of romance." [14] Antonia Zerbisias in The Toronto Star wondered whether or not Gibson and his subjects were "playing to the lens", but concluded: "It doesn't matter. Turn on Video Fool for Love and you won't be able to turn it off." [15]
Jennie Punter, also of The Toronto Star, saw the film in the context of the global proliferation of CCTV. [16] Elizabeth Lopez in The Age compared the film to infamous hand-held video footage from the Tiananmen Square protests and the assault of Rodney King, observing that "the grainy, hand-held look is in." [17] In a review of Channel Nine's reality TV series Weddings, Sacha Molitorisz saw Video Fool for Love as part of a legacy of Australian "warts and all" documentaries including Sylvania Waters and RPA . [18] Reflecting on the film's legacy in 1998, Lisa Mitchell of The Age also felt that it and Race Around the World "may have lulled (the Australian film industry) into a false sense of technical breeze and convinced too many that their view of the world deserves an audience." [19]
In 2007, Gibson released a prequel entitled Death of a Chook that consists of footage shot in 1982. [20]
George Miller is an Australian filmmaker. Over the course of four decades he has received critical and popular success creating the Mad Max franchise starting in 1979 with two of the films having been hailed as two of the greatest action films of all time. He has also earned numerous accolades including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
Hal Hartley is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and composer who became a key figure in the American independent film movement of the 1980s and '90s. He is best known for his films The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, Amateur and Henry Fool, which are notable for deadpan humour and offbeat characters quoting philosophical dialogue.
Margaret Gibson was a Canadian novelist and short story writer who lived in Toronto, Ontario.
A camcorder is a self-contained portable electronic device with video and recording as its primary function. It is typically equipped with an articulating screen mounted on the left side, a belt to facilitate holding on the right side, hot-swappable battery facing towards the user, hot-swappable recording media, and an internally contained quiet optical zoom lens.
Flirting is a 1991 Australian coming-of-age comedy drama film written and directed by John Duigan. The story revolves around a romance between two teenagers, and it stars Noah Taylor, who appears again as Danny Embling, the protagonist of Duigan's 1987 film The Year My Voice Broke. It also stars Thandiwe Newton and Nicole Kidman.
The PXL2000, or Pixelvision, was a toy black and white video camera, introduced by Fisher-Price in 1987 at the International Toy Fair in Manhattan, which could record sound and images onto inexpensive Walkman-style compact audio cassette. It was on the market for one year with about 400,000 units produced. After that one year, it was pulled by the market, but rediscovered in the 1990s by low-budget filmmakers who appreciated the grainy, shimmering, monochrome produced by the unit, and the way in which its lens allowed the user to photograph a subject an eighth of an inch away from the camera, and pull back to a long shot without manipulating a dial, while keeping as the background and the foreground in focus. It is also appreciated by collectors, artists, and media historians, and has been used in major films and spawned dedicated film festivals.
Sienna Rose Diana Miller is an American-born British actress. Born in New York City and raised in London, she began her career as a photography model, appearing in the pages of Italian Vogue and for the 2003 Pirelli Calendar. Her acting breakthrough came in the 2004 films Layer Cake and Alfie. She subsequently portrayed socialite Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl (2006) and author Caitlin Macnamara in The Edge of Love (2008), and was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2008. Her role as The Baroness in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) was followed by a brief sabbatical from the screen amid increased tabloid scrutiny.
Road Trip is a 2000 American road sex comedy film directed by Todd Phillips and written by Scot Armstrong and Phillips. The film stars Breckin Meyer, Seann William Scott, Paulo Costanzo, and DJ Qualls as four college friends who embark on an 1,800-mile (2,900 km) road trip to retrieve an illicit tape mistakenly mailed to a girlfriend. The film gathered a cult following over the years.
Samuel Henry John Worthington is an Australian actor. He is known for playing Jake Sully in the Avatar franchise, Marcus Wright in Terminator Salvation, and Perseus in Clash of the Titans and its sequel Wrath of the Titans.
The Gleaners and I is a 2000 French documentary film by Agnès Varda that features various kinds of gleaning. It screened out of competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and later went on to win awards around the world. In a 2014 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted The Gleaners and I the eighth best documentary film of all time. In 2016, the film appeared at No. 99 on BBC's list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century. The film was included for the first time in 2022 on the critics' poll of Sight and Sound's list of the greatest films of all time, at number 67.
Babalon A.D. is a DVD single by Cradle of Filth, released on 3 March 2003 by record label Sony.
The Ward is a 2010 American supernatural psychological horror film directed by John Carpenter and starring Amber Heard, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura-Leigh, Lyndsy Fonseca and Jared Harris. Set in 1966, the film chronicles a young woman who is institutionalized after setting fire to a house, and who finds herself haunted by the ghost of a former inmate at the psychiatric ward. As of 2024, this is Carpenter's most recent film as a director.
Shock Video is a series of hour-long documentaries that aired on HBO between 1993 and 2004. They were produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato through their company World of Wonder. The first installment examines the rise and effects of camcorders and video surveillance. The 1995 sequel focuses on graphic footage shown in criminal trials. Both were aired as part of HBO's America Undercover series. Subsequent installments of Shock Video serve as compilations of clips from around the world which are typically sexual in nature.
Kennedy Miller Mitchell is an Australian film, television and video game production house in Potts Point, Sydney, that has been producing television and film since 1978. It is responsible for some of Australia's best-known and most successful films, including the five Mad Max films, the two Babe films, and the two Happy Feet films.
V/H/S is a 2012 American found footage horror anthology film and the first installment in the V/H/S franchise created by Brad Miska and Bloody Disgusting and produced by Miska and Roxanne Benjamin. It features a series of found footage shorts written and directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and the filmmaking collective Radio Silence.
April Fools is a 2007 American slasher film written, directed and produced by Nancy Norman. It stars Daya Vaidya, Aaliyah Franks, Darrin Henson, and Obba Babatundé.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a 2015 Australian post-apocalyptic action film co-written, co-produced, and directed by George Miller. Miller collaborated with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris on the screenplay. The fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, it was produced by Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment and Kennedy Miller Mitchell, and distributed by Roadshow Entertainment in Australia and by Warner Bros. Pictures internationally. The film stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, with Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton in supporting roles. Set in a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland where petrol and water are scarce commodities, Fury Road follows Max Rockatansky (Hardy), who joins forces with Imperator Furiosa (Theron) against warlord Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne) and his army, leading to a lengthy road battle.
Amy is a 2015 British documentary film directed by Asif Kapadia and produced by James Gay-Rees. The film covers British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse's life and her struggle with substance abuse, both before and after her career blossomed, and which eventually caused her death. In February 2015, a teaser trailer based on the life of Winehouse debuted at a pre-Grammys event. David Joseph, CEO of Universal Music UK, announced that the documentary titled Amy would be released later that year. He further stated: "About two years ago we decided to make a movie about her—her career and her life. It's a very complicated and tender movie. It tackles lots of things about family and media, fame, addiction, but most importantly, it captures the very heart of what she was about, which is an amazing person and a true musical genius."
Hangman is a 2015 British thriller film, directed by Adam Mason, and co-written by Mason and Simon Boyes. The film stars Jeremy Sisto, Kate Ashfield, Ryan Simpkins, Ty Simpkins, Eric Michael Cole, and Amy Smart. The film had its world premiere at SXSW on 14 March 2015. The film was released on video on demand and home media formats on 9 February 2016 by Alchemy.
Deerskin is a 2019 French black comedy film written and directed by Quentin Dupieux. It stars Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel. In the film, Georges (Dujardin) becomes obsessive after purchasing a fringed deerskin jacket.