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Filmscribble Quarterly Review

2010-04-24T12:28:00.009+01:00

Published Writings January to March 2010

Going Underground
The Daily Tiger, International Film Festival Rotterdam
A short 'My Rotterdam' style guest column in the festival's daily newspaper.

Music and Rebels at Rotterdam 2010
Electric Sheep
A festival report focusing on a punk-infused programme selection, leading on Simon Rumley's Red White and Blue.

Short Cuts: Redmond Entwistle’s Monuments
Electric Sheep
A short profile on the most excellent short film Monuments, and its director Redmond Entwistle.

Asses' Den
Sight and Sound online
Coverage of the premiere of Four Lions, Chris Morris' debut feature, at the Bradford International Film Festival.

An ornament of grace

2010-03-21T19:03:00.003Z

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her and she shall promote thee; she shall bring thee to honour when thou dost embrace her, she shall give of thine head an ornament of grace, a crown of glory she shall deliver to thee.
Proverbs 4:7

This text lines the ceiling of the inner dome of the Great Hall of the Central Library in Manchester. The library will be closing for refurbishment on 1st April, so following a groovy reading event last night, thought I'd remind everyone to go and take a walk around this beautiful space - it will be a few years before it reopens.

Image by Perla Negra

Three Horse Songs

2010-03-21T11:56:00.002Z

For James and Lesley at the horse sanctuary benefit gig

Collision

2010-03-09T23:24:00.002Z

Over at Electric Sheep I recently wrote a short profile on experimental animator Max Hattler. I’ve spotted that his breakthrough short Collision is showing in Middlesbrough this week as part of the AV festival. A good excuse to rewatch it here.

Collision (by Max Hattler) from Max Hattler on Vimeo.

Who’s Got The Kraak?

2010-03-09T22:45:00.005Z

So until I get me a new blog I’m going to squat my old one, unloved since 2007.

Aware that proclamations of future direction are many a blogger’s downfall, I’ll start with links and footnotes to some recent writings, adding video or context, and take it from there.

The post title comes from the Dutch word for squat, Kraak, which also happens to be a new gallery space in Stephenson Square. This Friday sees the opening of an exhibition there by Steve Gullick, the music photographer who shot iconic images for folk such as Melody Maker and NME in the nineties, including some of the most memorable portraits of Kurt Cobain.

When Cobain died, Gullick realised these pictures would be in high demand, and set the money aside. This was used later to fund Careless Talk Costs Lives, a music magazine co-founded with Everett True in January 2002, which started at issue twelve and counted down, stopping at a dozen, and spawning Plan B and Loose Lips Sink Ships as its legacy.

Kraak seems like a good thing to be happening in Manchester now, where many institutions feel staid, and the city centre seems so developed there are few spaces with much crackle to them. Gullick's photographs always hold the attention for a beat longer on magazine pages, so it will be great to see them exhibited as portraits. He will be leading an exhibition tour on March 27^th, and if you fancy seeing his band The Tenebrous Liar (and you really should), they’re playing The Bay Horse this Thursday night.

Image of Royal Trux - London 1999, Steve Gullick.

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

2007-07-07T18:03:00.003+01:00

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, 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

2007-05-24T00:37:00.002+01:00

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

2007-05-11T23:54:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-11T23:02:00.001+01:00

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

2007-04-29T10:16:00.001+01:00

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

The Future of Short Film

2007-04-28T19:35:00.001+01:00

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

2007-02-06T20:19:00.001Z

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

"Fuck the audience"

2006-02-23T00:07:00.001Z

Just got back from introducing the Liverpool Film Night at FACT, and performing the Q&A sessions with local filmmakers after their shorts. Not much contentious was stated, bar Graeme Cole's above comment, following a pointed question from the audience to all the filmmakers as to whether they ever considered the audience at all when making their films.

Certainly from watching Cole's shorts, (and A Case of the Knife Fitting the Wound has a particularly oblique approach to narrative), it is clear that he is making the kind of films that he wants to see and can actually be designed to wind audiences up (the totally un-PC Pilot for a 22nd Century Sitcom, or the mean spirited Blip). But there is something in the tone and atmosphere and even (especially?) their antagonistic edge - a black humour and offbeat nastiness - that marks him out as a distincive voice, and for my money possibly the most interesting filmmaker in the North West.

Image of Graeme Cole (left) with Mick Sugden of L'Institute Zoom, by sharon keighley at CFF 2005

Whiskey Day Cancelled

2006-02-22T00:01:00.000Z

Monday was due to be whiskey day in honour of Ryan Adams. As I am too skint to afford tickets to his Bridgewater Hall show, I planned to casually hang out in any place a self-respecting rock star visiting Manchester might go (last time he was around he went to Piccadilly Records and the Koffee Pot), and should I casually bump into him, use any wit and charm at my disposal to get guestlisted for the gig. Well the plan was mainly to drink single malts at the Temple and Britons Protection with the excuse that he might pop in.

Alas my plan was thwarted by an e-mail Monday morning, “And now the bad news: The deadline for the next issue has been brought forward to this Friday.” Rubbish. So I have been chained to my eMac ever since, Ryan on the stereo and a consolotary sip of Springbank passing my lips for every 200 words written.

Some thoughts on Urban Screens

2006-02-21T23:25:00.000Z

My first academic paper, the not-so-snappily-titled 'Programming video art for urban screens in public space' has this month been published online at First Monday, a peer-moderated journal, in a special issue on Urban Screens. I spent Christmas and New Years cramming on social theories of the public sphere, trying to re-find my academic mojo, and reverse engineer my practical experience of the last couple of years with some form of theoretical basis.

There’s lots of interesting stuff in the Urban Screen special issue, but perhaps the best entry points for those interested in the potential for art on Big Screens are Scott McQuire’s paper with its prescient theory on public space, Anthony Aeurbach’s paper which flags up some valid concerns on the way these screens operate with regards to artists and content producers, and Raina Kumra’s paper which looks at art ‘hijacking’ urban screens in quite a commercial context.

Less Film, More Cinema

2006-02-21T21:51:00.000Z

I have a new role as film editor for a new listings magazine, which means conversely I'll be able to write less here about films (especially new releases), but perhaps will focus more on the experience of film going, and festival coverage for films that aren't about to be released.

The first issue comes out on Thursday and I can't wait to see how it looks (I've not seen any of the design and am pretty nervous/excited). Feature-wise I've written about the 10th Kinofilm International Short Film Festival which is starting on Friday and I'm looking forward to seeing how this installment of the fest pans out. I volunteered on the fest in 1999, nearly everyone involved in film in the city has been through that office at some point - and most have the scars to prove it. From what I've seen of the programme so far there are definitely some great shorts to be seen, its just that the level of anarchy and panic you get in any film festival always seems to be turned up to 11 where Kino is concerned...

Flatpack Film Festival Day 2

2006-01-31T01:03:00.001Z

Starting the day with porridge and honey I am whisked to chez 7Inch to lend a hand print-chasing for an errant feature – grappling with courier companies for an overnight London to Brum delivery on a Saturday – big props to Parcelforce!

Flat Black Films

The first programme of the day at the gorgeous Electric cinema was Flat Black, the films of Bob Sabiston. Most widely known from his work animating Richard Linklater’s ‘Waking Life’, and currently working on Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K Dick’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’, Sabiston has developed software that does very strange and beautiful things to live action footage. The programme was a mixture of MTV stings, travelogues and mini-docs mainly revolving around interviews with people sourced (it would seem) from the streets and diners of Austin, Texas, and beyond, offering their life philosophies as the animation stretches, contorts and playfully transforms their faces.

Although its rather film-geeky of me, the films also had the most beautiful Universal Counting Leader I’ve ever seen. However, my favourite film was probably Yard, which I first encountered at onedotzero a few years ago. Almost entirely without dialogue it aims its camera at Sabiston’s back garden; the bugs and foliage and wind sounds and the highway in the distance, a film that has a sense of wonder in the minutiae. Nature ist rad!

Anna Lee, live events manager from Halloween, had hopped the £1 Megabus from London to come to the festival for the day, so her, Vladimir and I bolted for a quick lunch by the rag market and settled on the (perhaps misleadingly titled) Arts Café. Once inside and seated we realised we were probably the only women in there under 60, and it was in fact an annex to a church with proceeds going into the coffers. But the food was good, large windows had light streaming in, and we had a marvellous live piano accompaniment of the songs from old musicals such as my fave Top Hat, so in all it was quite a cheery experience. On the way back I bought a red dress for 50p from a strange shop under an archway near the cinema.

Hollywood Flatlands

Hollywood Flatlands was a talk from Esther Leslie on animation and the avant-garde, exploring the subversive nature of early cartoons as championed by Walter Benjamin and derided by Theodor Adorno. Starting with Man Ray’s quote that “New York does not need Dada. All of New York is Dada.” Leslie charted the elasticity of early animation as a utopian form, irrational and anti-fascist, before a move towards more realistic character depiction with traditional narratives literally introduced gravity to the scene, and all the rules and physics that go with it.

Illustration came courtesy of Winsor McCay’s 1911 short Little Nemo in Wonderland (especially cool as a group called Little Neemo are currently the best band in Manchester), some great Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat footage and then moved through the endless ridicule and humiliation of Donald Duck in a museum of innovation before settling on the dewy fairytale cause-and-effect world of Snow White, which irreversibly changed the face of popular animation.

In his essay ‘Death to Animation’ Dick Arnall of Arts Council/Channel 4 funding scheme animate!, states that he now finds ‘animation’ an unsatisfactory term, it’s associations with children’s blockbusters, Disney and Pixar too much of a stranglehold for it to possess the power that the medium potentially holds. As an alternative he admits that ‘mediated moving image’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and is seeking a replacement. Leslie too seems concerned with redefinition. A new label that spans everything from motion graphic hybrids, to animated threads in film such as American Splendor, to the computer programmed contortions of Bob Sabiston or Chris Landreth’s work on Ryan or the proliferation of live VJ-ing or the CGI in every Hollywood film, may be impossible to find. But it is ultimately an optimistic impulse to engage with the diversity of the form and harness its power for a liberty of moving image that informs the call.

I found it interesting when Leslie spoke of how the city itself is animated, by “the rocket fire of neon signs”, as the remit of the art projects exhibiting on Urban Screens (such as The Bigger Picture) is to screen video work that will captivate and enthral, bringing people to the area in which the screen is situated and essentially ‘animate’ the city. The dynamics of public movement influenced by temptations of spectatorship. I would suggest that the promise of animation’s presence on these screens has barely begun to be realised.

It was also fascinating to hear how animation has often led commerce for technical advances, such as colour Disney cartoons helping to sell colour television. More recently it was Finding Nemo that was used to show off various cinemas’ digital projection facilities, and I believe that animation remains the most effective content for mobile phones, evidenced with the 3 network launch of its video services with Aardman’s Angry Kid films.

This was a brain stretchingly smart talk from an engaging speaker, and for those interested Leslie's book can be bought from Amazon here.

animate! awards haul at Rotterdam

2006-01-30T23:25:00.000Z

Congratulations go to a couple of gems from last year's animate! scheme, RABBIT by Run Wrake and WHO I AM AND WHAT I WANT by David Shrigley & Chris Shepherd both picked up Tiger Awards for Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) today. Both shorts are sick and twisted and most excellent. The former feels like the most perfect manifestation of Run Wrake's usual jolty collage style, using found cutouts from a Fifties comic book, while the latter is a funny poke in the eye as Shrigley and Shepherd's filthy sides run riot. For those unaware of Shrigley's moving image ouvre, try downloading the multi-award winning music vid to Blur's 'Good Song' he made with Shynola, available here.

Somewhere Else - shorts programming

2006-01-30T23:09:00.000Z

Spent today pulling together the programme for the second of Cornerhouse’s new bimonthly experimental screenings, which will be a selection of short films and artists’ film and video. I have bizarrely named it after a Razorlight song that I don’t like, but mainly because the themes I’m working on; geo-politics, dislocation, landscape and urbanism, seemed to suggest it.

While the screening is not taking place until March, today was brochure copy deadline for the Cornerhouse’s listings print. So a couple of paragraphs were duly despatched, summing up the themes and nature of the programme. Next I will need to confirm remaining films and provide Manchester City Council with preview DVD or VHS copies so they can confirm the certification of the programme.

So far I have confirmation on COLLISION by Max Hattler, which won the Lux Award at this year’s Halloween Fest, HOLOCAUST TOURIST by Jes Benstock and PLEASURES OF WAR by Ruth Lingford. I’m waiting for responses for at least 8 more films, but everyone is at Clermont Ferrand or Rotterdam at the moment, so responses are delayed.

While I am of course very pleased about Collision and Holocaust Tourist which are both from last year I am super-excited to show Pleasures of War which is from 1997 as I haven’t seen it in years. It is an animation masterpiece, a visceral and graphic meditation on sex and conflict and was one of the first shorts I saw (at 17!) that blew my mind. Lingford is a lecturer at the Royal College of Art and is thanked on about every cool student animation’s credits (and co-animated Shynola’s awesome ‘Eye for an Eye’ video for U.N.C.L.E.), so I gather must be an inspirational tutor, although I hear she is living in Boston for a year so unfortunately won’t make it to the screening.

Flatpack Film Festival Birmingham - Day 1

2006-01-25T22:52:00.000Z

Well this festival left me totally reinvigorated for what a film fest can be. Excuse me if I spiral off into hyperbole, but the programme, the people and style of fest just don't seem to fit in with the way that everything else seems so hyper-defined and funding-box-ticking, it was just programmed really imaginatively and diversely. It felt instinctive and well informed. In short, totally fucking cool.

I was invited to talk on a panel at Unpacked on Thursday, the first day of the fest, and I found the day genuinely interesting and refreshingly well attended too. It all took place at VIVID, which is housed in a converted MOT garage in the Digbeth area of Birmingham. The first panel I caught was 'The Joy of Limitations' on people who use obsolete technology, including a skate filmmaker/VJ called Chris Keenan who uses Super8 and Lomo (not exactly obsolete but we'll let that pass), Mike Johnston who programmes video using a ZX Spectrum and Vladimir, an artist from Portland Oregon who creates stories for 3-D Viewmasters. The talk reminded me of the equally cool Low Grade symposium at last year's Futuresonic in Manchester.

Next up was a session on 'Reusing Archive' with Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), who uses loads of material from free sources such as Rick Prelinger and spoke inspiringly about the nature of creativity and how you shouldn't start from a perspective of what is not possible/legal, "Artist dictates culture, commerce follows." Next was Nicky Smyth from the BBC Creative Archive project, which I think is pretty cool (or at least has the potential to be). It's like there is a radical philosophy change happening in some parts of the Beeb, and I hope it spreads to further reaches of the organisation some time soon.

The final panel 'New Forms of Distribution' was Ian Francis (one half of 7Inch Cinema who organise the fest), Jamie Eastman from Plexi who was laidback and cool, and myself. I was a bit hyper and basically unleashed a torrent of disconnected theories and sources, spoke about festivals, DIY screenings, trains, exploitation, Big Screens, mobile phone companies and video iPods and cooler stuff like Emma Hedditch's And I Will Do (Anything To Get Girls In My Bedroom) project.

After the panels I met Sara, a festival associate (who's going to demolish a towerblock - brilliant!) who had kindly agreed to let me crash in her spare room for a couple of nights. We went back to hers and met her fella Mat and cat Victor and ate anchovies on pizza.

The opening nite party was at The Rainbow pub which I gather is a regular 7Inch venue. Some shorts were screened (including Run Wrake's genius animate! short 'Rabbit'), some yodelling records were played and I drunkenly chatted to various filmmaker artist dudes. On the bus home we met the two very cool ladies from Capsule who run the Supersonic new music festival and have just confirmed Liars for a February show.

Phil Collins Tuesday Talk 17 Jan 06

2006-01-25T21:17:00.000Z

For those with time available on weekday mornings (freelancers unite!), Cornerhouse’s series of Tuesday Talks is something of a hidden treasure. In collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University, the venue offers term-time seasons of artists’ presentations and Prof Pavel Buchler’s sonorous tones all for just £2 a throw.

The talks are a serious affair with a rigid format; the artist briefly presents some of their own work and approach and then shows and discusses what has inspired them. This week it was Phil Collins, an artist who works mainly with video. Much of Collins’ interest is in how the camera constitutes a person as a subject, understanding the precarious balance between the potential for grace and transcendance in the glare of the lens and the simultaneous exploitative nature of film and video.

While his work is undoubtably political, Collins hits you sideways and asks questions in a frivolous, camp or oblique way. Eschewing an absolute perspective (“I’m a political lilo in a storm”), his disco-dance marathon in Ramallah and Smiths karaoke in Istanbul (“I think about the Smiths twenty times a day”) both offer a view of cultures off-kilter with mainstream, often militarised, representation. Yes Palestinian kids know the words (and moves) to Beyonce. Yes a pretty girl in Turkey dreams of a rainy London WCA.

There is an element of subversion and pleasure in Collins’ work and this was a through-line in the video piece’s he presented as his inspiration.

The selection started with a clip from ‘Superstar; the Karen Carpenter Story’ by Todd Haynes, a cult re-enactment of the singer’s life using Barbie and Ken dolls. Banned by the Carpenter estate, Collins enthused that alongside the film’s lo-budget wit and kitsch is an ear for human dialogue and an incisive political critique of the values of the time, expressed in the montage footage of Nixon and 60s/70s Americana.

In Kenneth Anger’s ‘Rabbit Moon’, footage of Michael Clark dancing bare-arsed in Leigh Bowery costume to The Fall, and David Bowie’s late nite New York stroll in music video ‘DJ’, it was easy to empathise with Collin’s take on the joy of identification, and how it is offset with an engulfing envy, the desire to murder the subject, to be them, to replace them. Troubling but hard to resist.

A fantastic clip from Arena in 1980 showed Jean Genet, in one of his last interviews. Having only previously encountered Genet via Todd Haynes’ beautiful early film ‘Poison’ and name drops from the Manic Street Preachers and Placebo this was a treat. Genet upsets the whole interview by asking the camera operator, sound recordist and crew members why they did not revolt and overthrow the ridiculous situation of a man being interrogated – why do they not react if they consider him a boring man and take over? Collins, who possesses a sharp, measured intellect, and grew in confidence throughout the talk, took a similarly seditious approach to being on stage, flirting with the projectionist and approaching the audience Q&A by batting back questions and remarks “who’s your favourite Celeb Big Brother?” he asks a front row inquisitor, “I bet its Chantalle.”

Yet Collins remained an engaging and insightful speaker. He doesn’t care much for galleries, finds them “too Gucci shop”, requiring a wardrobe to be bought before you can even step in, and “the only place you can give away free drink and no one turns up.” He has a love/hate relationship with pop music – an artform that trades on revolutionary culture, offering a fleeting sense of collective connection, yet offers little beyond that connection. And his next project is working with people in Turkey whose lives have been ruined by reality TV.

Topped off with some vintage Corrie from 1973, I found this Tuesday Talk a gleeful experience, way more fun than is usual before 12.30pm on a Tuesday and enjoyed seeing clips from some really cool films. Collins’ work will be showing from Friday at Manchester Art Gallery as part of the British Art Show 6. And if anyone in Manchester has a copy of Superstar they can lend me please leave a comment.

DIY Teletext

2006-01-15T06:48:00.000Z

I'll try not to post too much stuff here that I already send out in the Northern Film Network newsletter, but this one looks like fun for everyone (unless you have a Mac like me - boo!).

Lektrolab presents Microtel, Teletext TV station for the 35th International Rotterdam Film Festival

Microtel is a teletext [minitel / teletekst / ceefax] TV station Lektrolab are
presenting at the35th International Rotterdam Film Festival [IFFR].

Everybody is invited to express themselves by making teletext pages featuring graphics and/or text. They can be anything: portraits, tags, shout-outs, ads for bands or CD’s, investigations in narrative minimalism, recipes, comics, fantasy pieces, operating instructions, an SOS, your hi score results, what you wanted for Christmas and what you really got, everything you own from IKEA, conceptual work, funny work, minimal pieces, maxed out pieces.

Then the teletext artworks are broadcast on Microtel which will run from 25 January - 5 February 2006 exploding across televisions in Netherlands on NOS [Dutch TV] and included on a DVD with cool digital arts magazine SCEEN.

You may submit as many teletext pages as you like provided they fit within Microtel's tech requirements. Your work will be credited to you. See the website for more info, technical support and free Teletext editing software!

Rings and Circles

2006-01-15T04:55:00.000Z

Thursday night was the preview party of a short film called Ring Road, which took place at the Circle Club. An eight minute short that had screened for the first time in December's Filmonik, it starred Revolution FM DJ (and former member of the Inspiral Carpets) Clint Boon.

The film followed an overly familiar man-meets-himself cyclical short film structure, aiming at spookiness, but was a little too clumsy to be uncanny and mis-timed it's own punchline. It was also an addition to the 'trapped man in suit' short film genre common of young male filmmakers - particularly graduates who perhaps want to rail against the perceived evil torture that wearing a suit and working for a living inevitably brings. Still, the film was at least well shot, it looked good, had ace fake injury make-up, and featured some lovely footage of a Ford Capri.

It is difficult for short filmmakers to bring an insightful twist when they don't watch other short films. While previously there may have been issues of access to shorts screenings, in Manchester with Filmonik, Futureshorts, exposures, Kino and the Commonwealth Film Festival (plus err, the internet) this is no longer an excuse. I have seen three films near-identical to Ring Road in the past year (and many more before that), and all pale before What About the Bodies?, Simon Ellis' mini road movie masterpiece that remains compulsory viewing for any filmmaker with their eye on the road.

Tsotsi preview at Cornerhouse

2006-01-13T17:30:00.000Z

Pulling in to Manchester Piccadilly in the afternoon on Tuesday, it was straight back into the swing of things with a preview of Tsotsi at Cornerhouse that night. A South African film that has won audience awards at most of the festivals its played at including Edinburgh, Toronto, and the AFI in LA, it was followed by a Q & A with director Gavin Hood.

Set in a shantytown of Soweto, a crew of small time gangsters scrape by, pulling in money from violent muggings on trains. Then a nasty car robbery shakes and twists the film's momentum, as Tsotsi, the film's inexpressive antihero, discovers the gurgling baby in the back seat.
As a catalyst the child sets Tsotsi on a painful journey, tussling with the discovery of a conscience.

The film is harsh. And brave too. For the first twenty minutes you do not sympathise with Tsotsi, the film's inexpressive gangster antihero, at all. In fact, you get so pissed off with him that you're tempted to give up. Hood is well aware of this and claimed that in screenings it is at this moment he prays that people won't walk out.

Luckily they don't as in the following five minutes some dim rays of light emerge, offering a little more illumination on Tsotsi's character, history and circumstance. The light grows through some superb performances, especially Terry Pheto as Miriam, a single mother who offers a dignified and believable counterpoint for Tsotsi's angst, and Rapulana Seiphemo as John, the baby's father who has to maintain calm as the desperate circumstances escalate.

Combined with Presley Chweneyagae's compelling performance as Tsotsi, the audience is drawn in and the film's climax is genuinely moving. Everything is played for unflattering honesty and the film constantly avoids straying into overwrought or sentimental territory. With a difficult conundrum of how bleak a picture to paint at the end, the film leaves both an imprint of violence and the possibility of redemption. I wept in the dark (well I was a bit tired) and it's clear to see how it has become an audience favourite.

Goodbye Halloween

2006-01-13T17:16:00.000Z

Got back on Tuesday from running the 3rd Halloween Short Film Festival at the ICA and Curzon Soho in London. Over four days this year was definitely the most relaxed and fun to run for me and co-director Philip, even tho' we had to leg it between venues, running through the crowds of Piccadilly Circus and Shaftsebury Avenue to make sure we could personally introduce every screening.

I might post some more about the different elements of it later, but pictures can be viewed here and here.

Rip it up and start again

2006-01-13T17:05:00.000Z

Time for a blog rebirth. I have wiped the slate clean, deleted all old posts, obsolete reviews and half thoughts - soon to be replaced, no doubt, with more of the same. Gone are the lists of all the things that fuel my imaginary vision of Canada and gone too the somewhat paranoid ponderings on what would happen if one day all the bars shut and didn't re-open. Time to get cracking on 2006.