Teresa Peters and Florian Habicht
Feature
Fairy-tale beginning
by Philip Matthews
Inside the odd and distinctly German world of local film-maker Florian Habicht.
Florian Habicht was born in Berlin but raised in the Bay of Islands – his German family emigrated when he was seven – and that shift might account for the bizarre sensations of his film Woodenhead. Here, the New Zealand landscape is the setting for a dark and surreal fairy-tale – there are circuses, magic beans, accordions, a cottage hidden in the woods – rendered in black and white at a dream-like trance speed. The German magic realism of The Tin Drum was a big influence – Habicht remembers seeing that video a lot as a kid. "Having a European aesthetic in a New Zealand film is something that came about quite naturally," he explains.
Shy, funny and enthusiastic – "Yeah, yeah, super," he says, grinning and nodding when complimented – 27-year-old Habicht is about to spring his strange movie on an unsuspecting world. Woodenhead has its premiere in the Auckland International Film Festival this week – bookings are so heavy that two more dates have been added to the original two. Habicht must have a lot of friends. "Everyone’s known about this film because …"
" … We’ve been making it for such a long time," says Habicht’s partner and collaborator, Teresa Peters. "We’ve definitely been rarking people up to come."
Besides playing the New Zealand festivals, Woodenhead has – along with their friend Gregory King’s low-budget feature, Christmas – been accepted into this month’s Melbourne International Film Festival. Habicht expects that a Woodenhead posse of about five or six may go to Melbourne with the film.
Most of the film’s core group are, like Habicht and Peters, products of Elam Art School. Even, they note, the eccentric busker, masked jazz singer and cult figure Killer Ray, who appears in the opening credits and was the subject of an earlier Habicht film. "Killer Ray did drawing and painting. In his lunch hours, he used to visit jazz bars on Queen St. He didn’t graduate."
Habicht studied intermedia, which incorporates video and performance. "It has a strong experimental emphasis," he says. "It’s not film school, it’s art school where you learn through your mistakes." Peters studied painting and besides being the film’s co-star, she is its art director. At Elam, Habicht began making experimental short films, including one in which his cast – friends, artists and performers rather than actors – had their voices post-dubbed. "It had that feel of a foreign, badly dubbed film, which had a humorous effect as well. I think [disgraced lip-synchers] Milli Vanilli were an inspiration! Remember how the world was so angry at Milli Vanilli?"
After that, some people told Habicht that he ought to use proper actors next time. Naturally, he did something else: he recorded Woodenhead’s soundtrack before shooting the film. He wanted to use Peters and his friend Nicholas Butler as the film’s central, Hansel-and-Gretel-like couple, Gert and Plum, but neither had voice training. So the film was recorded with different performers – singers Steve Abel and Mardi Potter – and then shot with the finished soundtrack as a guide, much like other directors might use a storyboard.
To say that this is an unusual approach is an understatement – animated films aside, Habicht knows of no previous examples in which the soundtrack was made first (a possible exception is Derek Jarman’s Blue, which had a full soundtrack and a blue screen, but no filmed images). This innovation enabled Habicht to cast for faces and there are some memorable ones in the film. Tony Bishop, an Elam graduate and trained clown, plays a barnyard maniac called Geordel – he has the look of Quasimodo from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "I wish Lord of the Rings had more people like him, more interesting faces," Habicht says.
"Florian likes to celebrate the quirks of humanity," Peters says. "So many people don’t read that as a language, but his films are full of that. Documenting craziness or idiosyncrasies …"
"And they’re all my friends, the people in the film," he adds.
"WE’RE LUCKY," Peters says, "because we’re partners and we also share, not quite the same aesthetic, but we understand each other on that level. Reality and fantasy are part of our being for both of us – we love a gritty raw reality and a contrived one at the same time. That’s what Woodenhead was trying to achieve."
"Is achieving!" interjects Habicht, laughing.
"Is achieving," continues Peters, "in, hopefully, an unpretentious way."
Ask what other films have achieved this mix, and the answer is immediate: Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, a musical suffused with dread. "We were both affected really deeply by that," Habicht says. Woodenhead has songs, too – Gert’s one, sung by Abel, is about being "the luckiest man under the sun".
Page 1 2 
