Film: Warning, feature may contain medical procedures

‘It is kind of like a pretty grotesque gallery of horrible diseases,’ laughs Australian filmmaker Kriv Stenders, talking about the ‘The Illustrated Family Doctor’, the 1920’s classic medical journal and the title of his debut feature film. Stenders does not spare the viewer any gory details either. Much of the film is devoted to the diseased body of Gary Kelp, played by Samuel Johnson, who, as an employee of ‘Info Digest’, is faced with the task of condensing the IFD. This is a task so overwhelming for Gary that the diseases he is reading about start to inhabit his body.

The idea of condensing presented in Info Digests battle cry, ‘straight facts. Cut and paste’, emerges as a theme central to the IFD. Says Stenders, ‘I think we live in a world where, in a society where, everything is being dumbed down. Everything is being homogenised and streamlined for easy consumption…more and more we are forced not to think for ourselves and to not question ourselves or our culture. The film is really a reaction to that.’

This in mind, it was important to Stenders that IFD became a stimulating cinematic experience that engaged the audience so he set about creating a film that looked and felt different to other films. His approach was to strip back rather than embellish or dramatize. Stenders describes it as a film ‘made in a minor chord not a major chord’.

The spacious and minimalist electronic music score, crafted by Tom Ellard from Severed Heads, carries this feeling. It is music that has been in Stenders head a long time. ‘The film itself is about modernity and the modern world, and about those kinds of environments and atmospheres that right from the beginning, even before I started writing the script, I knew that it would be an electronic score.’

Consequently, the soundscape was largely finished before shooting the film. Ellard, however, continued to collaborate with Stenders throughout production. ‘Tom was a great person to sound ideas off. Not just the sound but the film itself – the edit, the construction of it, the ideas in it. He is an all rounder, he is a great person to talk to and have deep discussions with, and that is what you want, that is a true collaborator.’

Stenders had been a long-term fan of Severed Heads admiring their ‘visual and incredibly atmospheric sound’ and regarded IFD as a ‘perfect platform for Ellard and ‘Severed Heads’ to do the music.’ Ellard needed convincing. ‘When I asked him to do the film, he said ‘ah, I don’t know if I’m right. I’m not a film composer, and I said, that is exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want a film score, I want a whole complete sort of soundscape, sound design sort of stroke, music approach.”

The result is a very different sounding movie. Ellard’s ‘disease symphony’ really captures the sense of Gary Kelp’s diseased head overloaded with anxiety and sickness and out of sync with the emotionless silence of his surroundings. A silence further compounded by the intermittent bleeps and hums of living machinery. It is a very different looking film also. The emotionless spaces like Gary Kelp’s office building are not only enhanced by the sound design, the colour scheme has been chosen from a palette inspired by pharmaceutical packaging. This kind of detail is evident throughout the film.

Just talking to Stenders you get a feel for what an incredibly detailed and visual person he is. Discussing the process of adapting David Snell’s novel, ‘The Illustrated Family Doctor’, to screen, Stenders throws out all sorts of imagery, likening the procedure to ‘sucking a steak through a straw’. He takes it further; reaffirming his point by saying it is not unlike ‘making perfume, distilling the essence’.

This visual sense is something people who love film have in common. But to be able to make films and to be funded to make a feature is really not very common at all! The release of IFD marks somewhat of a graduation for Stenders. ‘Features have always been the goal, a dream.  You know, it has taken a long time to get here but hopefully I can keep on making them (laughs)’.

Furthermore, seven years of trying to get IFD up and out there, Stenders says, ‘You definitely don’t do it for the money (laughs), there is no two-ways about it. It is not a money making venture, it is very much, it is something I love. I love films. To me it’s like food. I need to watch films to be replenished and I need to make them to be alive. So, they are very much apart of my life, and you take the good with the bad. There is a lot of bad and a lot of good.’

Despite film making being a challenging venture, Stenders still remains optimistic about the future for filmmakers in an increasingly difficult and creatively stifled marketplace. ‘I think it is a very exciting time right now. I think in the next 10 years we are going to see a revolution in the way films are not only made but in the way they are going to be seen. I think once films can become more broadcastable and accessible, say through platforms like the Internet, you know, there is going to be a revolution in the way you can reach your audience, that excites me incredibly as a film maker’.

For those who are on the outside of the industry trying to get a look in, Stenders offers, ’...think outside the square and think for yourself because I think ingenuity and originality will always be rewarded and always be sought after because essentially, that is always the thing that pushes any kind of artform forward, is progressive risk taking and thinking outside the norm.’

So, what sort of remedies does The Illustrated Family Doctor offer? Says Stenders, ‘I think this film is for an audience that craves something different and who are becoming increasingly apathetic about the state of films and the kind of films being made today, especially by Hollywood. And, I think, it is for people who want to engage their minds as well as their eyes and ears.’

The Illustrated Family Doctor is in cinemas now, check local guides for locations and session times.

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