Lost Weekend: Remembering David Stratton

Australia Broadcast Center

4 hours ago

I sent my email to David Stratton 10 days ago. I was starting to wonder why I had not received a reply.
I sent my note because I was finally making the plan: the plan that David and I had spoken about for years but had never managed to achieve.
I can't remember when David first suggested that I come for a weekend at his and his wife Susie's house in the Blue Mountains, and we would watch all the films of the great 1920s and '30s German émigré filmmaker, Ernst Lubitsch — the director of films like The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be and The Merry Widow, and the creator of the famed, sophisticated sense of humour and wit that became known as "The Lubitsch Touch".
I don't know how David and I shared that we each revered this man's films. We were not close friends; we were not even good friends. I had interviewed David from time to time and over many years had run into him at film events and always enjoyed his company.
But somehow, we had each revealed our private adoration of this clever filmmaker and had discovered the immediate ease that comes from a shared cinematic language — a shibboleth understandable only to us in the form of the name of a German director whose wit and style built the bridge between the old cinema of Europe and the post-war Hollywood auteurs who entranced us both.
Whenever we met, he would remind me: "Now don't forget about our Lubitsch weekend. You must come soon." It was a wonderful idea — I would bring some good food and wine, we would start with Lubitsch's silent films, move through his elegant conquering of 1930s Hollywood and, I quietly plotted, we would finish with a couple of movies by his protege and heir, the incomparable Billy Wilder.
He was unwell when he generously gave of his time and allowed me to interview him about the singular Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton, for my series Creative Types. His high regard for Thornton's lean, powerful filmmaking help make him globally revered and awarded.
As we wrapped our chat, he said again, "Now, we still have to arrange our Lubitsch weekend."
I promised I would. I so very much wanted to.
I sent my email on August 4, naming the month we could finally watch the films. I heard no reply. On Thursday I heard the news of David's death.
I rang the celebrated filmmaker George Miller, another alumnus of Creative Types, to share the sad news together. George told me of his own regret. He visited David three months ago, just as he came home from surgery. David was sharp and on his feet, and he suggested to George that he come back soon, and David would select three films that he thought George should watch. George promised that he would.
"I would love to know what three films he picked," George told me.
He would probably dislike the term, but David Stratton was a true public intellectual. He unapologetically spoke up to his audience. Film is, by definition, a popular art, and to be successful must remain so: a film projected to a crowded theatre is its own reward. David's mission was to ensure that as many people as possible heard of that director, sat in that theatre, noted that cinematographer, heard that soundtrack and was transported and maybe even changed by the experience, as he was.
He was an educator at home and revered throughout the world of cinema as someone who was immune to fashion but excited by the innovation of creativity. He had the catalogued knowledge and the temperament to contextually weigh art against its intent rather than the mood of the day. He knew more than enough about the vagaries of the box office and celebrity to pay them no attention.
"He was a true creature of the cinema," George said. "I would see him at Cannes and other festivals, and he would spend every day watching film after film after film. The cinema was his natural habitat … all that time in the dark."
I have spent countless hours of my life very happily in that dark, and the regret I have about never spending that time with a film sage as wise and generous as David is keen and sharp. And I want to remember it.
I write this to remember David and his incomparable contribution to Australian and world cinema, but also to implore myself and anyone else reading this: don't wait. If there is a conversation to be had, a moment to be shared, a film to be watched with someone you admire and respect, do it now. Don't wait.
There are very few experiences as strong, very friendships that are forged as powerfully as those that are made in the cinema, in the dark.
Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.