Close Your Eyes And Hold Out Your Hand

In last weekend's downpours I continued my ongoing research into mapping the dodgy paving stones of Manchester by stepping on various wrong 'uns, and getting splashed up to the knee. My umbrella may be a bit bent out of shape, but I was almost home and dry(ish) when I hit another bastard just outside the Bayhorse. Other recent offenders include just near the taxi rank at Piccadilly Station and the entire pavement across the street from Kim By The Sea.

So it was on Saturday that I arrived at the Chinese Arts Centre with jeans glued to leg and soggy rancour in my heart. All this was soon forgotten however when I sat down and got to work with some double-sided stickytape.

The Folk Arts Series: Cockroach making workshop, formed part of their current exhibition The Pivotal Decade: Hong Kong Art 1997-2007. Artist Luke Ching Chin-Wai, took us through step by step, as we twisted, tweaked and eventually painted our nasty looking roaches. BBC Manchester gives some context, or scroll down for your own how-to video here.


to scale


belly up (with a tuft of embedded blu-tac)


not everyone's so keen

After a week of disappointing cinema, ranging from minor grumbles (Tell No One), to "Why did I expect anything more?" (Grow Your Own) to "What the hell were they thinking?" (Oceans 13), a bit of craftwork really raised my spirits. A while later I strolled over to the Manchester International Festival Pavilion to have a snoop. The usher told me that if I hung around there would be some room at the free Manchester Dines event, which Mancubist reports was pretty tasty. Perhaps it was fortunate that I'd only just had a feast at Barburrito, or the temptation to slip my newly created insect friend onto a plate may have proved too much...

and then the world’s greatest living cinematographer popped by, which was nice

It was the cinematic equivalent of the day the Up The Racket boys walked into Piccadilly Records to overhear a guy at the counter asking “’Scuse me guvnor, you know where the nearest needle exchange is?” and then bagging Pete Doherty to play a set at their club that night.

Last week Sarah Perks, Cornerhouse Education Director and aficionado of all things cinema and South East Asian, , walked into the Cornerhouse cafe for a meeting and saw a distinctive figure stood at the bar. The meeting was quickly rescheduled as she drew up the pluck to approach. After some starstruck introduction action, much to his own befuddlement (“why would you recognise me?!”), he agreed to pop in and speak for a few minutes at an evening course she was running on Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema. I got the tip off and went along to take some photos.

It turns out that Christopher Doyle (if you have to IMDB him why are you reading this blog?!), is working across the road at the Palace Theatre on the lighting design of Monkey Journey to the West. So with no prior warning, the evening class were treated to 15 minutes of ramblings from the man who’d shot many of the films they’d been studying.

It was a strange and compelling encounter. What he lacked in lucidity he made up for with some inspirational rallying cries and a wickedly offbeat sense of humour. Doyle’s reputation as a raconteur is legendary and he was candid and self-deprecating, “I make films the way I do because of how I live. I wouldn’t recommend that. Hahaha!” Rumours from MIF spies suggest he was the only person whose contract stipulated that he must have alcohol available on set.

The evening course and many of Doyle’s films are playing as part of the excellent Made in Hong Kong: A Decade of New Cinema season, that Cornerhouse currently has on. I’m off to the experimental shorts tomorrow and I heartily recommend Dumplings if you missed it last year. Meanwhile here’s a short and philosophical guide to Hong Kong from Mr Doyle.

Daniel Johnston, madness, home movies

On Monday I passed a willowy man stalking toward deansgate locks wearing a Hi, How Are You? t-shirt, reminding me that Mr Johnston was in fact in town on Monday/Tuesday playing The Comedy Store. I've already made a conscious decision not to see him live, as I think I'd be uncomfortable with the ironic faction who fete mental illness and faux naivety as some kind of droll authenticity. I know that that is not how all of the audience connect with Johnston's live appearance, but I can't really face it nonetheless. Besides I had other gigs to attend (new favourite band = XX Teens).

However, it did remind me that my favourite film of last year was Jeff Feuerzeig's most excellent documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. At the time of its release I wrote some accompanying film notes about Johnston's music/impact that can be downloaded here. I also gave a spoken introduction to the film at Cornerhouse, which got me thinking about the use of personal archive footage in the depiction of psychosis/mental illness on screen. I never published it, so now would seem to be the time...

The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Short introduction, 6.05pm Monday 15th May, Cinema 3, Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Hello!

There is much in The Devil and Daniel Johnston that is a pleasure to behold. This short introduction will focus on one element of the filmmaking that I found particularly interesting. That is the elegant way the film is constructed and in particular the creative incorporation of Daniel Johnston’s own personal filmmaking, illustration and recordings.

Use of archive moving image material in documentary film is common practice, and in artists film and video, the term ‘found footage’ is used regularly in the magpie-like collection, appropriation and reinterpretation of existing material.

Where The Devil and Daniel Johnston sits in a distinctive group of emerging documentaries is the abundant usage and emphasis placed on amateur production, with home-movies coming directly from the subject of the documentary. I’d like to relate it to a couple of other successful feature-length documentaries of recent years; Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation and Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans, both from 2003.

When embarking on the making of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, director Jeff Feuerzeig, who was a big fan of Johnston’s music, was faced with communicating the talent and inspiration of a subject whose mental illness means he is no longer fully lucid. Feuerzeig spent two and a half years in the editing process, and the result is a film that uses Johnston’s material in a particularly engaging way to tell the story so the narrative unfurls and the audience is introduced to Johnston’s burgeoning creativity and bizarre life story simultaneously.

While from the beginning of the film we see glimpses of Johnston, as he is now, it is his voice as self-recorded since childhood that speaks to the audience. So when we see him aged 44 dancing around in a Caspar the ghost suit, we can relate it to the fantasies that he has harboured throughout his life.

Tarnation is an experimental documentary, where filmmaker Jonathan Caouette used 19 years of snapshots, Super-8, answering machine messages, video diaries, and early short films to form a montage depicting his own life with his mother, who suffers from schizophrenia. This collection allows storytelling over a period of time that is not usually accessable to a documentary film crew, and intimately illustrates the messy development of personal relationships over an extended duration.

Capturing the Friedmans, has a more common contemporary documentary structure, mixing home recordings with talking heads, and a clear distinction between the past and present. The story is of the dissolution of a family after father Arnold Friedman and son Jesse Friedman were convicted in the 1980’s of sexual assaults on children. The film makes much of the contrast between the coverage and reaction to these crimes, and how normal and regular the Friedman family seemed in their upper-middleclass surburban American existence. This is illustrated by the many family movies Arnold Friedman made – Super8 postcards of domestic bliss featuring his smiling children. The Friedman sons continued to make video diaries during the trial, and Capturing the Friedmans allows audiences to see family members looking back as they are now, and as they felt then, when they were inside the eye of the storm.

Each of these films deals with a form of psychosis, with the first two dealing more explicitly with mental illness. Their use of home movies is a compelling strategy as it gives a voice, or the echo of a voice, to the imaginary world that the subjects inhabit. It also suggests a certain mania in the obsessive recording and collecting such things, alongside the narcissism and vulnerability of the person needing constant trophy’s of their own existence.

The notions of objectivity and subjectivity in documentary filmmaking are constantly being contested, but these films which are concerned with familial relationships do allow subjects an active role in the depiction of their personal histories. In these films all the persons depicted (apart from Arnold Friedman) are all still living and this gives a poignancy as we see young men talking to their older selves and vice versa. There is also a certain emotive quality inherent in the different non-professional formats, from the nostalgic grain of Super8, to the low-level hum of cassettetape audio – which in the case of Daniel Johnston is also part of the lo-fi charm of his music and artwork.

We are now in a time when it is easier than ever to record and review our own moving image material. Tarnation was famously made for $218 on a desktop editing package, and with the digital revolution now more and more people have access to equipment that can manipulate material once it is transferred to digital format.

I think a nice thought to leave on would be to imagine all the shoe-boxes in attics around the world that will be sources of future filmmaking wonder…

Thank you. Enjoy the film.

Fire, Part Two

In which everyone feels displaced and anxious and the rumours fly round. Different degrees of destruction; the sprinklers went off, the fire spread, the smoke damaged, just looks like someone had a really good party, smells a bit, needs demolition, the chimney’s unstable, the roof might cave in.

Timing rocks – one week later and our new book would have been in the store room that caught light. Timing sucks – our international festival starts next week.

You’ll be let in next week, you won’t get in for a fortnight, closed for three months, you have half an hour to go in and grab your stuff. Dramatic access by torchlight up dark stairwells flanked by fire officers. The woman who has to store so much office equipment in her tiny flat that she sleeps with her clothes on the bed.

And kind offers of hot-desking and flats with broadband and a benefit concert and borrowed equipment and foraging for wi-fi hotspots and deadlines that won’t wait and not really feeling like doing any work at all. A fortnight of shifting ground.

Fire, Part One

It is the occasion of champagne that gives it its appeal and the same is true of sugary tea. Normally she wouldn’t touch the stuff, but sat in Caffe Nero on Piccadilly Gardens at 7.20 in the morning she mused that it did seem to do the trick.

Maybe shock was too severe a description, but she certainly felt stunned, and shaken, and cold. And off-kilter in the way that staying up all night, self-caffeinating to write a funding application probably doesn’t help.

Just before 6am the Ladies toilets had been very noisy. A few feet away from the frosted window was the scaffolding of another block being renovated and the builders were always shouting, amplified in the industrial bathroom with its shiny tracing paper bogroll that no one believed still existed. It would sound as though the workmen were very close to the glass.

And now, she thought, kids have got up there and are knocking poles together and letting off bangers. She was dopy and the realisation was slow. The lights beyond the window red and yellow, the insistent crackle, the smoke starting to thicken in the air.

She returned to her desk, an indignant inner voice proclaiming that she had worked all night (goddamit!) and she must e-mail the documents over to her London colleague. With the header ‘my building is on fire’ she attached the first files and sent. Midway through the second e-mail however, a different inner voice piped up, “What the hell are you doing? There is smoke in your building. Drop everything and leave.”

The fire engines were arriving as she descended the three flights and stepped out onto the street. The blaze was mighty and the sight of the men battling it was compelling. She stood feeling stupid for taking photos on her camera phone, like a competition winner at a gig. She considered sending them to the BBC or Channel M but didn’t know how, so she texted them to her sleeping colleagues. She continued to stand and watch and shiver and smoked a cigarette.













Where do you go at this time of day, when you’re wired awake and exhausted? Then the sugary tea thought occurred. So here she was, a free drink secured by a fully stamped loyalty card she saved for rainy days between rent and paycheck. And this is what she saw.





The ash had sprinkled all the way onto Piccadilly in black blocks the size of your fist, but squidgy under foot, like a flaky polystyrene. And the smoke too had drifted in the wind, people crossing the gardens briskly with hands over mouths because of the smell. A young guy in a hi-vis vest picking litter didn’t bother with the ash as it unendingly reappeared, instead following coke cans in the wind. And off above the buildings to the north east of the square you could see the black plumes from the site, tinged red on the skyline.



Then for a moment, further east, through clouds and soot, a sun appeared and sent beams through the haze to the scuttling workers traversing the gardens and the Queen Victoria statue, and the moment was beautiful awesome and a bit religious (or on reflection a bit John Woo), and she thought no one will ever believe this.

and swans and spiders and police horses

I was washing up and saw the fox from the kitchen window. It seemed very long and pointy, as if it had been squashed into the wrong aspect ratio and sharpened like a pencil. It prowled first toward and then away from the opposite neighbour's yard.

The yard has no gate or fence, it just gapes onto the street, with its abandoned heap of bricky rubble and the obligatory soggy mattress. The first and second floor were having work done months ago, but the builders seem to have filled a couple of skips and given up. You can still see the timber leaning against the first floor window. The whole place looks decrepit and unstable and is covered in the shit of the dozens of pigeons that perch on the roof.

But there is someone living there. On the ground floor, with curtains perpetually drawn, lives a woman with grey hair. And she has chickens. Cats and chickens.

For a few hours in afternoons the yard has a strange (unnatural?) harmony. The chickens will be pecking at the ground (only their lack of curiosity to keep them from walking straight out into the road), the pigeons will join them, a squirrel will scuttle in, and the cats will saunter past. And none pays the other any mind at all.

I take pleasure watching this scene and enjoy the recent arrival of the chickens. But I still wanted the drama of the fox disappearing into the black of the yard and returning to the street light with a twitching bloody hen in its mouth.


nice image of scuzzy mattresses by icathing

then smiling at the man reading American Psycho on the bus

I think I just saw a shooting star. But I was stood at Piccadilly bus station at 11.30pm on a Saturday night so it felt a bit unlikely. As if cosmological sightings only happen in more romantic or remote locations. It could have been a flaming projectile, but it did seem very high up and there was no fireworks sound. And if they can have earthquakes in Kent...

The Future of Short Film

Last week my Halloween comrade Philip was on a panel at the ICA, titled "What is the Future for Short Film?" He asked me for some input so I sat down for half an hour and bashed out a few thoughts. Some of its stuff I've been considering for a while, other points still need a lot of thought...

• A reaction against the mass content of YouTube et al will lead to an increased conservatism, as some try to reclaim short film as something superior. A definition will be sought of what constitutes a “quality” short leading to lots of cynical and formulaic films. There will be an increase in Bafta-chasers, a brief attempt to standardise short film “values”. Luckily however, this is doomed.


• There will be a big reduction in funding to shorts as each of the regional screen agencies vies for their own Micro-budget feature film scheme. Bowing to pressure from producers, and dazzled by the chimera of ‘market value’, funders will dump shorts for a few years before realizing their folly. A few micro-budget features will be brilliant, most will not. Maybe some will be distributed.


• The Underground and short films made outside of the funding system will flourish.

• People will escape the ghettoes of categorisation created by the split between Film Council and Arts Council. The arts world and film world will communicate and learn a lot from each other.

• These changes will happen at an accelerated rate in film communities where people can readily identify talent and people are willing to collaborate - ie. cities in the "regions". Then London will have its own renaissance and believe that it is the first. Again.

• Increased access to viewing shorts means that people (who aren’t chasing Baftas) will stop making the same films as each other - same titles, or narratives or twists etc. There will be an increase in adaptation - poem films, short stories, literature, theatre and other sources. Increased diversity in the workforce will result in new stories and new voices. There will be an increase in personal visions from perspectives that haven't been seen yet.

• A new generation of programmers will crop up, with loads of cool new ideas that we haven't thought of yet. There will also be an increase in "labels", recognised and relied upon tastemakers who pull out the best content from multiple platforms.

• Creative use of archive footage will flourish and an open source philosophy will be embraced by many, with a creative commons approach, err, common. Use of VJ-ing tools will present different formats for production and exhibition.

• Collaborative working via broadband will increase international co-productions and develop new production methods for shorts.

• Big telecoms companies will continue to exploit filmmakers’ ambitions and talents with "competitions", stifling creativity with thinly veiled adverts for their own brand identity. Some will jump on the micro-budget film bandwagon.

• There will be an increased level of academic research into short films, continuing to validate shorts as a unique format, worthy of serious attention. Great writers will emerge.

• Every council borough in the UK will have its own film festival, showing shorts because they are cheap.

Dick Arnall

Got some sad news yesterday. Dick Arnall, producer for the animate! scheme has died. I didn’t know Dick that well, but I consider him a highly inspirational figure, whose enthusiasm for moving image and its potential, was married to a remarkable track record of producing some of the finest short films in the UK.

As a personality he was intelligent, funny, sometimes rogueish and always charming. A compelling talker, he seemed to prize conversation (it was impossible to ever have a short phone call!), in a way that emphasised how much he valued dialogue and was open to new ideas, with that listener’s knack of recalling points you’d made in conversations years before.

He was also perpetually curious – recent events at Halloween included a project where Sea Buzzard performed a live remix of the animate! back catalogue, and at this year’s fest, following Arnall’s wondering at the possibilities of Tarnation-style autobiographical montage, animate! presented animators Max Hattler and Run Wrake, VJ-ing personal home movie footage from their pasts – which was both rousing and poignant. I remember hearing that Dick was excited by YouTube before I’d ever seen what YouTube was.

This hunger for innovation led to the risk-taking that manifested itself in the slate of projects he produced, including remarkable works from so many essential filmmakers, including Jonathan Hodgson, Matt Hulse, Chris Shepherd, Ruth Lingford, Devlin Crow, Tim Hope and Andrew Kötting. It is a privilege to have known someone with such energy and passion about moving image and I am immensely grateful that these qualities were able to flourish and inform his work as a funder. Arnall’s legacy, as well as providing encouragement and inspiration to many filmmakers, programmers and writers, is a great contribution to film culture.

Image by jon jordan from Halloween 2006

no comment

Blimey, I've just discovered that some people have left comments. Apologies in the delay on publishing/responding, I had yet to fathom that I had to go to my 'Moderate Comments' bit to view and publish them.

Right, now I've got the hang of that I'll think about sorting out some photos, and maybe a bit more going on in my blog roll. No hurry, mind.