Formidable New Zealand three piece High Dependency Unit grace us with their presence for a rare live performance this coming long weekend. Reforming especially for St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival on 1 February at Auckland’s Silo Park (heading towards a sell-out, but tickets still available from Ticketek), they’re a ferocious live act. As anyone who’s attended their live shows will attest, they skew towards the cinematic (if not cosmic), making the band a no-brainer to talk to about their fave films. Dino Karlis took time out from New Zealand summer holidays to serve up five of his fave pics.
Stalker
“Mystical and trancelike. Amazing sound.”
I discovered Tarkovsky when I was still at university and we had an amazing film lecturer that got us into Solaris, and I immediately fell in love with that. And then some years later I was living in Melbourne and there was a Tarkovsky film festival on, so I got to watch everything, which was [chuckles] quite an endurance test, but really worth it. I remember the flyer describing Tarkovsky’s films as “stylistically rigorous”!
I already knew I loved Tarkovsky. I’d read him in my 20s; didn’t really understand it, but made an attempt. And it just instantly caught me. I mean, I already loved Solaris, and it had this similar vibe, a similar kind of “sentient places” kind of theme. Unless you pay attention, nothing really happens. I mean, when you focus in on it, you realise there’s so much going on, but the pace is massively slowed down. He brings to life the idea of the sentient place, the zone, or the sentient sea in Solaris. And he takes on very natural aspects of a place – a river, or a mountain range, or some grass rustling – and imbues them with personality and kind of – I’ll stop at saying spirituality, but definitely something mystical.
The Cremaster Cycle
“Mythical, bombastic, achingly beautiful.”
The links between all the things in the list were, I guess, a kind of sense of scale and hinting or very much referring to things outside of what you’re looking at right now. That’s what draws me to that set of films. Matthew Barney’s films are, kind of opposite to the others, like maximalist, absolutely jampacked with outrageous colour and characters. The thing that really draws me to both ends of that spectrum is the sense of scale, achieved through very different means, I guess. He brings the horrible, the horrific, and the beautiful together so wonderfully. That tall, flurry hat, and the beautiful tartan kilt, and the bloody, mutilated mouth – they sit so well together. It is pretty. It’s essentially an aesthetic experience, right? But I know plenty of artists who hate his guts. [chuckles] Just because they think he’s a rich kid playing around.
But I enjoy it, you know. I don’t claim to get a whole lot of it. I get some of it, and since having seen it about eight years ago, so much of it has stuck with me. And I keep going back to Dave Lombardo playing in the recording studio to the sound of bees, and– oh, I can’t remember what the singer’s name is [Morbid Angel’s Steve Tucker], is singing into the telephone. That and the demolition derby on top of the Chrysler Building have just always stuck with me. They’re really powerful [chuckles] – powerful and kind of silly. Dreamscapes are hardly ever completely serious; they’re always at least a little ridiculous. So I think it’s required I guess in what I think he’s trying to do anyway.
La Jetée
“Wonderful science fiction short with no effects.”
Someone gave me a video cassette probably when I was 25. And then I just watched that thing again and again and again, just digging into all the little crevasses. It’s a little bit hokey in a way, I guess. I mean, the concept’s a bit silly, but I quite like the way they did this science fiction film. At least in my memory, there were no special effects, really. Conceptually, they put a man back in time through administration of some kind of serum, which means he wasn’t physically transported, but– how does that work [chuckles]? I always liked that idea. It seemed quite opposite to other representation of time travel. It looked really awful, too, because it was really painful, by the looks of it, and they said many attempts had failed because the people that tried to do it died because it’s such a horrific experience, travelling through time.
So that one is very strongly a sci-fi film and it takes quite a lot of suspension of disbelief in terms of narrative. But I don’t know. I don’t know what it is about it beyond that. It looks great. The story’s kind of cool. It’s a little bit hokey. There’s some kind of slightly syrupy love sentiment in there as well. But again, it’s nicely removed and it stands out in the genre.
The Idiots
“Cringe inducing, hilarious, painful.”
You can’t watch it and not cringe, and it’s pretty hard to watch it and not laugh, and it’s absolutely horrible in places. I’m slightly at a loss with that one. Beyond these sort of extremes of reaction to it, I kind of– I don’t really know what to say about it! Just again, it’s something that’s really just stuck with me. Yeah, and every time I think I might watch it again, I change my mind at the last minute. I don’t know if I can do it again [chuckles]. But you could say that a lot of Dogme films. Celebration‘s another one which is brilliant, but it’s just– oh, it’s painful and so revoltingly cringe-inducing and heart wrenching, and covers really, really serious subject matters with sometimes a irreverently sort of light touch.
I mean, it takes a certain appreciation of like darker things, right? You have to be able to laugh at misery from a certain angle. True misery is nothing to be laughed at, but at some point you see the absurdity of – I don’t know… God, I sound like a wanker. [chuckles] Just the absurdity of the human condition or whatever, you know? That all our lives and meanings and loves and lives and wants are kind of insignificant in the greater scheme of things. And we can laugh at that.
The Empire Strikes Back
“The bad guys win. The future is uncertain.”
I’ve loved Star Wars, the whole lot of it, since I was a kid. The Empire Strike Back, just always felt like the most, I don’t want to say serious, but it seemed like the most complete within itself film out of all of those that have been made, including the new one. It didn’t seem to want to pander to any audience; it just told the story. And I always liked the fact that the end was pretty hollow and basically the bad guys won after such a triumphant ending on the original Star Wars film.
I’ve got two young children now and I’ve been hanging out with them and some of their friends a lot, and they’re really interested in the dark sides of life. You know, they talk about stuff like death and injury and loss, and they speak about it like they’ll talk about anything else in life. They’re actually quite frank about it. I don’t know if that’s because they haven’t really experienced it directly yet or what, but they seem to be able to deal with it at least on that level very clearly, very rationally.
We were actually debating it – my oldest son really loved David Bowie and we were sort of debating whether to tell him about David Bowie’s death. And then I was taking him and one of his friends for a ride in the car today and his friend just blurted out, “David Bowie died the other day. It was cancer.” [chuckles] I just had to laugh, you know.
High Dependency Unit play at 4:25pm on the Cactus Cat stage at St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival – Monday February 1st at Auckland’s Silo Park.
