PNFS: Woodenhead

Directed by Florian Habicht
New Zealand, 2003, 90mins, M - sex scenes

Trailer: http://www.flicks.co.nz/trailer/woodenhead/751/

Could this be New Zealand? Gert, “an innocent dump hand”, is ordered by the dump owner (an imperious Warwick Broadhead) to deliver his beautiful mute daughter, Princess Plum, to her wedding. Like a jaded, over-age Hansel and Gretel, the two trek through forest and glen coping with numerous bizarre characters that cross their path. Could this be a fairy tale then?

Florian Habicht describes his gregariously eccentric feature as a “celebration of the sad, strange and beautiful, and a cross-pollination of Kiwi and Germanic culture, echoing my experience as an immigrant to Aotearoa”.

What’s distinctive about Habicht’s hybrid is the way he’s turned the ungainliness of transplantation into a personal style. When we’re told, for example, that Gert believes he’s the luckiest man under the sun, it’s the sheer improbability of the notion that is striking, not any insight into the significance of the slender, solemn lummox before us. The mythic force of fairy-tale may be cut up and mocked, but it still kicks around in Habicht’s picturesque frames.

Disjunction is accentuated by his method of first creating his final soundtrack and then directing the film to play against it, in synch and out. Kiwi-accented refugees from a kitsch European carnival world stutter sing and lollop their way around a New Zealand landscape of almost ethereal, black and white beauty. There are moments Fellini might have envied when Habicht’s carnival beings and his landscape coalesce in ‘sad, strange and beautiful’ florescence. – Bill Gosden, New Zealand International Film Festival 2003

“Reminiscent of Dead Man or Eraserhead-on one part valium and one part (even stronger) LSD- this startling, funny, irritating, disconcerting and moving film takes Sam Neil’s notion of the 'Cinema if Unease' both to heart, and to the tip. Eschewing traditional filmic-narrative sense for the densely surreal and often poignantly revelatory possibilities of silent film-making Woodenhead dwells, sweating and filthy, in a realm of mangroves, pine forests, demonic children a malevolent half-witted-man-servant, a mucus-frothing hobo, erotic dancers, circus freaks and fornicating innocents.” Josh Hetherington – Groove Guide

Did you know?
The film was shot in Northland, the childhood stomping ground of (Berlin born) director/writer/producer Florian Habicht.

Screenings 5.30pm and 8pm at Downtown Cinemas.

Members only. Palmerston North Film Society Membership is available at the door before each screening and lasts for one full year.