Mark Cherry filmography

PRESS:

The Real Thing: Review of Duchenne Smile (dir Mark Cherry 2006) by Therese Davis

FlickerFest 2007 featured a special program of surf films called Endless Summer Shorts. The standout entry was Mark Cherry (writer/director) and Amy Frasca’s (producer) Duchenne Smile. Its intriguing title takes us back to the work of Duchenne de Boulogne, a French neurophysicist from the mid 19^th century. These days Duchenne’s name is most often associated with his controversial methods of investigating human expression, including the use of electricity to stimulate facial expressions in live subjects. He is also remembered for the infamous collection of photographs of these experiments – a series of images of simulated anger, fear, surprise, and so on (Pultz: 1995). But as the discoverer of the physiological basis for distinguishing between genuine, involuntary smiles and those which are fake or posed, his name has also been given to those moments of joy expressed in a smile that makes the sides of our mouths involuntarily turn upward, our eyes crinkle.

Like Duchenne, Cherry, uses film as a medium for exploring the expression of happiness. But unlike Duchenne’s work, this film takes a very gentle indirect approach. There are no representations of smiling faces (simulated or otherwise). Instead, Duchenne Smile imaginatively engages the problem about expression of happiness that Duchenne once struggled over with the history of the surf flick. Just as Duchenne set about to distinguish between genuine and artificial smiles, Duchenne Smile is an intimate and compelling alternative representation of surfing to the highly produced ‘clean edges’ of contemporary digital surf flicks and the grand-scale of 35mm, big-surf films.

Duchenne Smile’s alternative vision involves a very loose staging of the workings of involuntary memory: images randomly accessed from a lone surfer’s vast bank of memories of a life time of surfing. In contrast to the spectacle of the big-surf film and its monster waves, Duchenne Smile’s surfer remembers the simple, everyday joys of surfing. The waves recalled in this film are not always perfect. Many of the locations are well-known surf breaks but because they are often shot in diffuse early morning and winter light, they appear mysterious, re-enchanted as hidden or treasured places. The film also recalls random images of the everyday objects and textures of surfing life: a rusting push bike casually dumped on its side on a grassy bank, a beat up four-wheel drive, dirt roads, dust, bush, makeshift paths through sand dunes, foot prints in dry sand, wet sand, and so on. The memory-like quality of these images is enhanced through the film’s mix of super-8 film and video and its digital replication of the screen dimensions of super-8 projection and the particular instability of the super-8 image. In turn, this technique intensifies the fugitive nature of these images - they flicker and fade, disappearing just as we grasp them, timely reminders of what is rapidly slipping away.

This visual association between super-8 film and the memory-image is not new. But what’s really fascinating here is that the film uses this association to not only represent a series of personal memories but also to prompt viewers’ memories of a particular history of film and surf culture. Duchenne Smile consciously invokes the 16mm and home-movie style of 1970s surf films. This is an aspect of film culture that Cherry has been interested in for a long time, as both spectator and critic. In his writings and again here in this film he pays particular homage to George Greenough. (Cherry 2003) Greenough is known internationally for his innovations and inventions in surfing, from board design to innovative surf photography (such as in-the-tube water photography). Greenough also has a long list of credits as director, writer and cinematographer in world surf flicks, including his own The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970), the Australian surf classic Crystal Voyager (David Elflick, 1973), as well as big Hollywood flicks, such as Big Wednesday (John Milius, 1978). In this film, Greenough appears only briefly. We see a fleeting image of him outside his home in Byron Bay. Facing the camera, he bares his Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame Award. He’s not smiling. In fact he appears reticent, reluctant, perhaps, to publicly display this mark of his place in surfing history. But this is not an act of self-effacement. There is a certain pride expressed in his face, the way he holds himself. It is, I think, a look of contentment. And it is precisely this quality that underscores this short film, shaping its distinct look and sound, making it a lasting work of homage and respect to both Greenough and an earlier spirit of surfing culture

In the digital age the surf flick is all spectacle. Or, as Cherry says, all ‘hard edges’. His contemporary style of surf cinema recalls a different way of making films, a different mode of expressing the experience of happiness surfing can produce for surfers and cinemagoers alike.

References:

Cherry, Mark. The Great Unknown, Inside Film, IF53 April 2003

Pultz, John. Photography and the Body. Calmann and King, London, 1995.

Therese Davis is a senior lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. She is author of The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship (Intellect, 2004) and co-author, with Felicity Collins, of Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge University Press, 2004)