Mike's Documentary Work.
Films discussed.
1. True source of Knowledge. 1965
2. Sad Song of yellow Skin 1970
3. Persistent and Finagling 1971
3. The man who can't stop. 1972
4. Waiting for Fidel 1974
5. Solzhenitsyn's Children are making a lot of noise in Paris. 1980
4. Daisy, story of a face lift. 1982
5. Margaret Atwood, Once in August. 1984
6. Little box that Sings.2000
7. Race Around the World.
8. Much ado about Something. 2002
9. My Dear Russia. 2003
10. Our little Treasure 2004
11. All About Olive 2005
The True Source of Knowledge.
Mike's first documentary was made at Stanford as a graduate film project . The true Source of Knowledge was a half hour short in black and white, shot around the time John Kennedy was killed. It featured material on campus life, comparing the relatively apolitical Stanford with the much more active Berkeley campus where historic free speech riots were erupting. Mike managed to get some powerful footage which lifted this shoe string student film to a higher level of social commentary. TheTrue Source of Knowledge became his calling card to the National Film Board of Canada where he was determined to work, having as a student, seen classic NFB documentaries like Lonely boy and City of Gold. (True source is no longer available. But Lonely boy and City of Gold are available from the NFB http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en
Sad Song of Yellow Skin.
For 25 years he indeed worked at the National Film Board directing over 40 documentaries and winning numerous prizes. His first important work was ‘Sad Song of Yellow Skin’ (1970) The title comes fom a Vietnamese folk song of the time. The late Sixties found Mike in Saigon, the hottest time of the hated war. Sad Song tells the story of young Americans underground journalists who've come to Saigon to tell the other side of the war story.
Amongst them is John Steinbeck Jr. the son of the famous author. John leads the film maker to a strange island of peace in the Mekong Delta, presided over by the Coconut monk. This saffron robed monk, a Ghandi like figure, in photo to the right, trys to bring peace to his country by manipulating war symbols, mortars made of coconut trees and palm leaf grenades in some sort of positve magic. Mike is the same age as his American guides and to some extent the film is his story too, a journey into strangeness, but not, as far as he sees, the heart of darkness.
Mike's film narration is very personal, he reports details like the theft of his camera by the shoeshine kids, and intrudes into the tale in a way which had not been done before. Without knowing it, he was trialling a style of documentary in Sad Song, a self reflexive cinema, that was to become a major genre and world famous in the hands of practitioners like Michael Moore, where the hero's journey is that of the film maker. Mike had very much admired the personal narration of Pierre Burton in the classic NFB film, City of Gold (1960) he saw at film school, and may have been inspired by that example.
Sad Song won the British Flaherty award and a Canadian Ertrog. The film was much used by anti Vietnam activists. In a bit of agit prop presentation , it was projected as a protest on the exterior walls of Richard Nixon’s Republican convention in Miami, to no noticeable effct, one must add. . Mike himself was active against the Vietnam war, camping out for two weeks at 20 below zero in a small tent at the foot of the Canadian parliament in Ottawa in protest against the war. Sad song is available from the NFB. http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en
By the way, Michael Moore is supposed to have admired one of Mike's later films, Waiting for Fidel, (1974) and been inspired to make Roger and Me because of it. But before that came Persistent and Finagling.
Persistent and Finagling.
This one hour Black and White Doc. tells the story of a group of women, at first merely timorous housewives, who decide to take on the air polluters, the companies with the big smoke stacks, in Montreal.
It'ss interesting to see that grass roots environmental battles began quite long ago. While Mike hardly features in this story himself, he is there as a rather skeptical off camera voice, a slightly patronizing male observer, one must admit, who watches the women muster courage to confront various arrogant men who frustrate their path. There is a memorable sequence where a radio journalist they are asking to help, harangues the women with blackboard diagrams and pompus bromides. The film was very fresh for its day, stylistically. Again, Mike was not aware of breaking new ground. It just seemed to him the natural way to work. Persistent and finagling is available from the NFB. http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en
Perhaps it was no accident that his next film was also an environmental subject. He was back in Australia on a teaching assignment and managed to persuade Film Australia, then a pale shadow of the NFB, that a co-production with its illustrious Canadian cousin would be a good idea.
The man Who Can't Stop.
The film was to be a portrait of Mike's Uncle, Francis Sutton. (seen in photo in his early nineties) Francis had given up a safe advertising career to fight for the preservation of his bit of the Australian coastline. The local authorities had just put a sewage outlet into the sea next to Francis' favorite beach, and he was incensed, not only at the pollution of the swimming spot, but at the wast of reusable water. So began a thirty year campaign by Sutton, of which Mike catches the first stages in this very sympathetic film, The Man Who Cant Stop. Francis got a standing ovation in 1974 at the Sydney Film Festival when he came on stage after the film. (The Man who cant Stop is avail. From NFB. http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en)
But, as in the case of Persistent and Finagling, Mike seems more interested in the characters and their foibles than he is in the issues they fight for. This is a trait of all his films. He is not a propagandist for causes but rather a student of human nature with a camera.
Waiting for Fidel.
Waiting for Fidel is a curious piece of story telling. A small band of Canadian VIP's, Joey Smallwood the colorful ex premier of Newfoundland, and Goff Stirling, a media mogul from the same island, fly to Cuba as guests of the Government. They claim that they are there in order to score a historic interview with the reclusive Fidel Castro, hoping to act as go betweens with the US, and thus help lift the US Embargo on Cuba.
This highly improbable goal and the eccentricity of the travelers, is well caught by Rubbo who soon finds himself part of the action. Mike takes his personal approach one step further in that he appears on camera this time, acting as a referee as his two companions spar over what they think of socialist Cuba. Joey Smallwood tends to admire everything he's shown on the guided tours, while Geoff Stirling remains deeply cynical, un-seduced by the society of Fidel. From the left in the photo, Stirling. Smallwood and Rubbo, arguing about a model high school they've just visited.
Virtual prisoners in a Havana Mansion most of the time, the team waits a week for Fidel to drive through the massive iron gates of their private palace. He never does, and this doc is about what you do when what you are supposed to film, does not happen. It has stood as a classic for all those film makers who have found events letting them down. How you make your film anyway, and have it be much better than if the hoped for event had had actually happened, is the lesson of the day. This has made Waiting for Fidel an enduring classic.
Putting Waiting for Fidel together convinced Mike that documentaries are as much about story telling as fiction films, though the nature of the stories, more elusive and ephemeral, is rather different. It is also proof that in documentary, larger than life characters such as Stirling and Smallwood, are a great asset, even essential one might say. Years later, Mike developed a list of six vital ingredients for a successful documentary. It starts with these two essentials, intriguing story threads and strong characters.
Waiting for Fidel is part of the collection of MOMA, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and is in film school libraries around the world. Mike has been honored with retrospectives of his documentaries at the Sydney Film Festival, at New York's Film Forum, at the Chicago Art Institute and in San Francisco art the Pacifica Film Archive, Berkeley. (Waiting for Fidel is avail. From NFB. http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en)
‘Solzhenitsyn’s Children
In 1979, a strange thing was happening in Paris. French intellectuals, who had been such big fans of the Soviet Union, of Cuba and China, had begun to read Solzhenitsyn's books and were changing their minds. Being French, this became a very public process with famous intellectuals like Bernard Henri levy and Andre Glucksmann, not only confessing they'd been wrong to be Marxists, but doing so in best selling paperbacks. Mike found this intriguing since he too, while very attracted to Cuba, had seen the fatal flaws in a society which does not allow the correcting powers of dissent and the ballot box. Very much attracted to Utopian dreams himself, he was fascinated by those who had become disillusioned and were now cofessing their errors so publicly.
Mike went to Paris to find out what was happening and, guided by a French Canadian Journalist, Louis Bernard Robitaille, they raced around Paris on Robitaille 's motor bike accosting the changeling intellectuals, and managing to eat very well at the same time.
This fast paced journey film of dashed ideals, is set again the backdrop of the 1979 French elections. The most memorable moment comes when Bernard Henri Levy, still a star today, and dubbed by Mike “the Mick Jagger of the brainy bunch” for his smoldering good looks, tells the camera in the most patronizing way why he's switched sides. It is a tour de force which leaves Mike and Robitaille speechless. You can see Levy in the photo to the right, in full declamatory flight. The Levy scene belongs on
In Solzhenitsyn's children, Mike takes the personal journey a step further with problematic results. He brings his own musings into the debate and feels now that they were not of such a caliber as to warrant conclusion. If the film maker is going to be in the film, he or she must earn a place by the same rigorous standards that apply any other character, shoving for a place onthe screen, must meet. Robitaille easily earns his screen time. Mike is not so sure about himself. (Solzhenitsyn's Children is available from NFB. http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en
Daisy; Story of a face Lift.
In 1981, Mike's work colleague at the NFB, the gravelly voiced, Daisy De Bellefeuille, announced very publicly that it was time she had a face lift. Moreover, she believed her proposed lift to be so interesting to a wider public, that a film should be made about it. Further still, she wanted Rubbo to make the film. “Why me?” he asked desperately, repelled by the vanity of Daisy's plans . “Because it is the last thing you'd normally want to film” Daisy answered clinchingly. To salve his political conscience, the veteran of Vietnam and Cuban topics, expanded Daisy's story into an essay on appearance, on the way we judge each other, instantly it seems, by the way we look.
Daisy turned out to be right about her screen worth. She is a touching protagonist who candidly gives her all to this portrait of a woman dealing with getting older. Feminists at the time hotly debated the film and only just let Mike off the hook, probably because he is as tough on male vanity in the film, as he is on the female variety. Like many of Mike's coming films, there is much at stake here. Will Daisy look any better, will the face lift fill the void in her life? Having something at stake, becomes a key element on mike's documentary checklist. Does it work for Daisy? You'll have to see the film. It's is available . From NFB http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en
Margaret Atwood, Once in August.
This portrait of the famous writer follows “Peggy” to the secluded family island in Canadian lake country, way north of Toronto. It's a place the Atwood family goes on holidays. Mike is privileged to meet the author's gentle parents, partner Graham, Daughter Jess, and discover some of the place based inspiration for her writing. It was on this tiny island that Atwood set he famous first novel, Surfacing. In the photo the right, Margaret walks the dock of the family Island. The Filmmaker has his back to her for some reason. Mike's strategies to get his subject into revealing situations, largely fail, faced with Atwood's determination to control the situation and protect her privacy. Something revelatory emerges perhaps, but only just. Margarent Atwood, Once in August is available from the NFB. http://www.nfb.ca/nosproduits/index.php?v=h&lg=en
Race around the world.
In 1996. Mike returned to his native Australia to be head of documentaries at the ABC, the national broadcaster. He heavily promoted so called veritie documentaries in the two years that he filled the post, but is most proud of having brought the show, Race Around The World to Australia. This contestant based show chose 8 young aspiring film makers through an exhaustive selection process, and then sent them around the world to make ten films in 10 countries in ted days for each country. The audience followed the contestants journeys at the rate of four short films per week, the short documentaries being judged by a panel of documentary practitioners, those seasons in the craft.. Race around the World was a a hit with a younger audience, bringing status and fascination to documentaries, and also gave profile to the film makers, like Bob Conally, who were regular judges on the show. Several of the contestants went on to illustrious documentary film careers. Probably not available. Contact the ABC. http://shop.abc.net.au/
Little box that sings.
As he was leaving the ABC, Mike collaborated with his wife Katya Korolkevich Rubbo to make a film about violins, their magic and their making. In Little Box that Sings, they contrasted emerging Australian violin makers with their counterparts in Cremona, Italy, the home of the master makers. As Katya supplied the background knowledge, her faimily were distantly violinists, Mike applied his checklist to the making process, insisting on the six points he'd promoted to the contestants of Race around the world. Namely, (1) there must be something at stake. There must be (2) strong story elements. The characters brought to the screen must (3) be fascinating. The material (4) must be touching. There must (5) also be food for thought, in other words larger issues at play, and finally the whole must be (6) strangely compelling.
Little Box that Sings did indeed bring remarkable characters to the screen, especially the Cypriot/Australian violin maker, Harry Vatiliotis, the speedy Gonzales of the violin craft. Harry's a man with an incredibly deft touch, able to craft a fiddle in a week which'll perform well against the million dollar Stradivarius that we see played in the film. Touching story threads richly interweave this film as Harry, for example, works on an old violin that Ron Fagg has found in his attic. Harry repairs the fiddle, and, after 70 years, the old man hears his grandfather's violin sing again. The film was very popular on the ABC. Hopefully, Mike will soon have it available on DVD. mike@mikerubbo.com
Much ado about Something.
After leaving the ABC, Mike spent a year in researching for ‘Much Ado About Something’ This film on the Shakespeareauthorship mystery, explores the proposition that Christopher Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare's works. Again, the structure is that of a personal journey as Mike first seeks out the rather eccentric members of the Marlowe society in Britain and then puts their theory about Marlowe to the test with traditionalist scholars. The Marlowe society yields rich characters, most notably Dolly Walker Wraight who, now old, has spent a life time having her Marlowe theory ridiculed by scholars. It is touching that now in her final months of life, along comes a film maker to give her a fair go.
There is much at stake in this story, since the film questions the reputation of Shakespeare and that is profoundly upsetting to many people. As on informant says in the film, “We take in Shakespeare with our mothers milk.” She could have added, “ and we want him left alone.” The film was two years in the making and selling. Eventually over coming huge obstacles, Mike managed to sell it to the BBC Storyville and to Frontline, the flagship PBS documentary program, as well as the ABC which originally commissioned it. The film has so far returned approx $200,000 in sales. Much Ado is avail. from the film maker. mike@mikerubbo.com
My dear Russia
In 2004, Mike, with the help of editor colleague, Henion Han, Mike , made, ‘My Dear Russia’. Yet another journey film, it's about his wife, Katya Korolkevich-Rubbo, going home to Russia. (her photo is the the right) She returns to solve family problems and rediscover the country she left when it was the Soviet Union. The film is a vivid picture of contemporary Russia and also an exercise in partner appreciation. It delves into what happens when a film maker turns a reverential camera on his spouse, someone he thought he knows so well, but who turns out to have many secrets. Katya, who is more and more Mike's collaborator, co wrote this film. My dear Russia has not found a broadcaster. My Dear Russia is available from the film maker on DVD mike@mikerubbo.com
All about Olive
Two years ago in 2005, Mike made a film on Olive Riley, then 105. Called; All About Olive, it's a touching portrait of someone who is living life to the full to the very end. It is also the story of Olive going back to her native Broken Hill where she was born in 1899. Mike gives Olive a co director's credit, making her the oldest director in the world.
All about olive carefully exploits Mike's documentary checklist. Olive is an amazing screen character, a key point on the list. The story elements too are very rich and carefully nurtured. Viewers will see story threads brought in early in the one hour program, and then paid off gradually during the film in a process of progressive revelation as we find out more and more about Olive's long life.
For example, there is the story of Emma the sister who died young and was so loved by Olive. There is the story of her father's arm, lost in an accident, of the uncaring mother, and many others, all interwoven into the overall journey structure. The material is also nurtured for its touching aspects and tears are shed by audiences as the Emma story concludes. Food for thought is there as well in that one thinks about getting older as watches Olive's story, and one revels in how she proves that you can life life to the fullest to the very end. Originally to be an essay on centernarians, Mike with encouragement of editor colleage, Henion Han, threw out the essay and gave the screen to Olive. Neither he nor Henion have ever regretted doing so. She is one in a million. In fact, since she's now 107, and there are only about 1000 people of that age in the world alive, she's one in 6 million Available from Ronin Films.http://www.roninfilms.com.au/
Mike has recently helped Olive set up a blog as a continuation of the film. www.allaboutolive.com.au She has become the oldest blogger in the world, and on google, are currently revealed over over a million citations for her blog, or blob as she calls it.
Our Little Treasure
Mike has also made a film for his community to help save the Avoca Beach Movie theater from over development. Our Little Treasure tells the story of what is presently a charming single screen cinema, the prettiest in Australia, and how the owners want to turn it into a lumpish convention complex. Mike has worked very hard. along with Henion Han, to make this half hour film persuasive but fair. He drew upon what he'd been taught at Standford by fondly remembered Henry Breitrose, almost 40 years before to achieve this end.
The film, made without any broadcaster funds, has been used in fund raising and to alert politicians and planners. Available to students only for issues study from the Film maker on DVD. mike@mikrubbo.com