Australian filmmaker Rolf De Heer has been the recipient of much love here at Spout. Just a couple of weeks ago, Paul devoted an entire episode of FilmCouch to De Heer, calling the director “the most inspiring filmmaker alive.” I haven’t seen any of his films, but that podcast alone has me convinced that Rolf De Heer is some kind of cinema god.
So it’s with grand excitement that I learned, via Twitch, of the website for Rolf De Heer’s latest project, titled Dr. Plonk. It’s a black-and-white silent comedy set in 1907, about a scientist who invents a time machine in order to prove his theory that the world will end in the year 2008. The website boasts a trailer which, if in any way representative of the film as a whole, indicates that de Heer and crew have masterfully mimicked the look and feel of silent comedies of the early 20s. His protagonist seems to be semi-Chaplin-esque, but the antics remind me more of Fatty Arbuckle.
Not only is there a trailer, but the website also offers a amazing 40-page press kit (which you can download as a PDF) describing, in minute detail, Dr. Plonk’s conception and de Heer’s filmmaking process. The tome begins with a quote — “A good press kit is a pre-condition to a successful moving picture show” — attributed to Dr. Plonk himself. Page 10 outlines the process of buying a 90-year-old, hand-cranked camera, and how through trial and error, “slowly all ideas of precisely duplicating the past are consigned to the rubbish bin.” Page 11, titled “The Sound Recordist in Silent Film”, reads: (this page has been intentionally left blank). And so on.
After premiering last spring at the Adelaide Film Festival, Dr. Plonk will open in Australia later this month. It seems to have no U.S. distributor as of yet, but hopefully it will pop up at another festival or two this fall.
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