Yearly Archives: 2009

Festivals, Short Cuts

FLATPACK FESTIVAL

Megunica

Birmingham, UK, various venues

11-15 March 2009

Website

Do you remember receiving your all-time favourite compilation tape? It’s the middle of a never-ending suburban summer and you’ve just been presented with a freshly biroed track-list: an enticing roll-call of little-known B-sides and bootlegs; an exotic list of unfamiliar names and titles. Looking down at the carefully considered recommendations, you might not be able to sing along just yet but instinctively you know you’re going to love it. I’m reminded of this feeling when I meet Pip McKnight and Ian Francis, the organisers of Birmingham’s Flatpack film festival. Sitting in a café near New Street station, I’m looking through copies of their exquisitely designed festival programmes, all lovingly put together by their designer, Dave Gaskarth. They read like beautiful fanzines about rare internet shorts and breakthrough animations, about lost figures from cinema past and surreal vaudeville cabaret acts. The choices can be obscure but, like a finely crafted mixtape, there’s an inclusive and infectious enthusiasm: like friends itching to share their latest find with you.

Film graduate Ian and ex-community worker Pip first started out six years ago, putting on local film nights under the name of 7 Inch Cinema. The nights continue across Birmingham, filling pubs with eccentric bedroom animation, music video mash-ups and vintage newsreels. Building on the success of these screenings, they started to make guest appearances at festivals, showcasing their unique cinematic discoveries. Over the past 12 months, gigs have ranged from the esoteric, such as a weekend of knitting-related shorts at Warwickshire gallery Compton Verney, to mass shindigs at music festivals, including Supersonic and Green Man.

Having dipped their toes into the world of festivals (Ian also did a stint at the Birmingham Film Festival), setting up Flatpack seemed the next logical step. The somewhat unusual name came from a desire to show that ‘putting on a film show or making your own short film is not rocket science’ but, as Ian attests, organising a festival can also be bloody hard work: ‘If this festival were available to buy as a build-it-yourself cultural happening, it would come in the kind of kit that has instructions in Swedish and several vital components missing’. Working most of the year as a two-person-band from Birmingham’s cultural hub, The Custard Factory, Pip and Ian dedicate a huge amount of energy into making Flatpack a success. They certainly achieved their aim with the first two editions of the festival: a wonderfully eclectic blend of film shows and live acts, which attracted audience members from as far away as Israel. However, after the second festival in 2007, Pip and Ian grew fed up with ‘hand-to-mouth funding’ and made the ‘big decision’ to take a year out. Ian tells me that they concentrated their energies on finding some stability and creating a ‘three-year plan’ for the festival. Having secured UK Film Council funding during their break, 2009 sees the return of the festival and what Ian describes as a ‘step up in ambition’.

Although pleased to have safeguarded the festival, Pip and Ian are keen to keep it as ‘un-schmoozy’ as possible. They seem refreshingly adamant about not compromising their vision or falling into the trap of becoming too industry-focused. The tenacity of Flatpack is much needed at a time when so much festival and cinema programming is dictated by distributors. Ian and Pip want to move beyond the usual festival-going demographic and love the idea of people stumbling across the screenings by accident. They have planned installations in shops throughout the city – a paper trail of screen-based artworks – that aim to draw in unsuspecting shoppers, workers and tourists.

Given this dissident streak, Pip and Ian are particularly attracted to the eccentric entrepreneurs of early cinema. The patron saint of this year’s festival is Waller Jeffs: Birmingham’s answer to Mitchell & Kenyon. A cinematic impresario, Jeffs staged a series of film seasons (1901 – 1912) at the city’s Curzon Hall, with live sound effects and a menagerie of novelty acts (‘Unthan, the Armless Wonder’ and ‘Cyrus and Maud and their Educated Donkey’). Flatpack will kick off at Birmingham’s town hall with a selection of Jeffs’s films, accompanied by a 15-piece gypsy folk band, The Destroyers. Throughout our conversation, Pip and Ian speak excitedly about the ‘Wild West atmosphere’ of early 1900s cinema: a time when everything was new and anything was possible; a time when the audience had no boundaries and would openly react to screenings, rather than sitting in reverential silence.

This sense of drama and interaction crops up throughout the selection for Flatpack 2009, particularly in the children’s programme. Inspired by the surrealist Exquisite Corpse (‘cadavre exquis’) game, there will be a chance for groups of children to make and pass on short segments of film for others to complete. Pip and Ian themselves are particularly looking forward to Paper Cinema, a live-action treat that sees illustrator Nic Rawling moving paper cut-outs in front of a camera, making fairy tale films before the viewers’ very eyes. After Flatpack, the children’s programme will be touring Midlands schools in an attempt to move beyond the limited pool of children attending art-house cinemas.

Setting is a vital component of the Flatpack experience and Pip and Ian have devoted a lot of energy to finding exciting new venues for this year’s festival. Bringing in local set design students, they are currently decking out a dilapidated warehouse and hoping to commission murals to complement their street art film strand. This includes the award-winning Megunica, which follows Italian artist Blu; In A Dream, a portrait of legendary Philadelphian mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar; and Who is Bozo Texino?, a film about railroad graffiti that was an impressive 16 years in the making.

Pip and Ian evidently have big plans for the festival, hoping not only to raise the cultural profile of Birmingham, which, they say, needs to be better at ‘shouting about its achievements’, but also by creating a gathering point for people to experience film in a new and exciting way. And yet, when I ask them to sum up Flatpack, it’s not easy to get a direct answer. As Ian says: ‘We’ve had a job explaining what this festival is, even to ourselves at times’. It cannot be neatly encapsulated in a ‘marketing speak’ sentence. The programme is radically eclectic and, simultaneously, pleasingly cohesive. Like the perfect mixtape, the choices jump from era to era and genre to genre, yet perfectly segue into one another. You’re not quite sure how or why the selection works, but that is what makes it precisely so magical.

Eleanor McKeown

Film Jukebox

IPSO FACTO’S FILM JUKEBOX

Ipso Facto

Photo by Pavla Kopecna

London four-piece Ipso Facto have been described as ‘monochrome psychedelia’ due to their stark, dark take on garage rock and their distinctive, retro black and white image. Having recently toured with The Last Shadow Puppets, they also scooped the coveted support slot for the seminal post-punk band Magazine’s reunion tour in February 09. Their single ‘6 & ¾’ is out now on the Mute Irregulars label. Rosalie Cunningham (vocals / guitar), Cherish Kaya (keyboards), Samantha Valentine (bass) and Victoria Smith (drums) offer up some of their cinematic highlights. For more information visit their MySpace. LUCY HURST

SAMANTHA:

1- Irréversible (2002)
In Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, the events of one traumatic night appear in reverse chronological order. It is one of the most horrifically brutal and memorable films I have ever seen – never before has a film made me physically sick. The first half hour has a background noise with a frequency of 28Hz (low frequency, almost inaudible), which causes nausea, sickness and vertigo in humans. The underlying theme of ‘le temps détruit tout’ (time destroys everything) is eerily present and a constant reminder that you should be grateful for everything you have, love and cherish. A lot of the film was improvised, which gives it a real edge, especially the 13-minute rape scene, which I still have not been able to watch the whole way through.

2- Cry Baby (1990)
I love anything by John Waters but the fact that this stars Johnny Depp swung the vote! Set in Baltimore (as always) in the 1950s, it is a classic struggle between the rebels (Drapes) and the Squares, with the Square Girl wanting to become a Drape. The film provides a cheeky two fingers up to the closed-minded prejudices and attitudes that pervade society, whatever the era. TRIVIA: Waters originally wanted Tom Cruise for the lead role, but let’s all thank god he changed his mind.

ROSIE:

3- Inland Empire (2006)
I love all David Lynch films – I love the themes, the surrealism, the way they are shot, the actors and Lynch himself. Inland Empire is my favourite, even though I had to watch it three times before I got past the first half hour, which is incredibly dark and unsettling. People try to guess the meaning and the secret behind the film and Lynch feeds this by giving out ‘clues’ in press releases, which confuses people even more. I find this hilarious – I think he enjoys winding us all up.

4- Adaptation (2002)
In a way, this film is quite similar to Inland Empire; both are set in Hollywood and merge the imaginary with reality. This film was made by the same writer/director team (Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman) as Being John Malkovich (another favourite of mine) and shares the same strange humour.

CHERISH:

5- American Psycho (2000)
I love this controversial film, based on the Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, which shows the protagonist Patrick Bateman’s spiralling descent into madness. The contrast between his day-to-day working life and his foray into gruesome murder after nightfall is acted brilliantly by Christian Bale (one of my top 10 actors). My favourite quotes in the film are the opening and closing sentences: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ and ‘This is not an exit’.

6- Eraserhead (1977)
David Lynch, a favourite of mine, directed this baffling surreal horror film. It troubled me, yet I felt the need to watch it over and over again. The lighting and setting alone made me feel uneasy but I still felt sympathy for each character.

VICTORIA:

7- Gummo (1997)
This was the first script written by Harmony Korine after Kids in 1995, allowing him to explore alternative cultures further. Although Gummo‘s vignettes defy a linear plot, the depiction of small-town isolation and surreal abnormalities is disturbingly enthralling. The unique costume design by actress Chloí« Sevigny and the film’s comment on the weird and wonderful ways of small-town life make Gummo unforgettable.

8- Donnie Darko (2001)
This cult classic fascinated me from the first time I watched it at the tender age of 15. I was a bit of a geek and a science fiction fiend at this point, so I found the intertwining cause-and-reaction that created the possibility for time travel amazing. It’s the story of an intelligent, frustrated schoolboy who, after a near-death experience, starts to see something dark in his future through a series of vivid, surreal dreams. As a result, every subsequent event is connected to the premonition of his death and his inevitable fate. There are many ways to interpret the ending, all of which are fascinating.

Features

THE WEST LONDON FANTASTIC FILM SOCIETY

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The Colossus of New York

The West London Fantastic Film Society

Thursday 5 February 2009

Panic in Year Zero + The Colossus of New York

AVCOM Preview Theatre, Shepherd’s Bush, London

Four days into the worst snowfall London has seen in a generation and I found myself slip-sliding my way down an insalubrious street in a dark corner of Shepherd’s Bush. The end of the street led to an unlit car park and if it wasn’t for the groups of twos and threes that were also making the same journey – a casual observer might have thought we were convening for a swingers’ party – I’d have wondered if Google maps had taken me on a wild goose chase.

On the first Thursday of most months, The West London Fantastic Film Society meet in the preview theatre of a cinema equipment company in W12 to show double bills of classic and not so classic B-movies. The first screening of 2009 included Panic in Year Zero (1962) and The Colossus of New York (1958), two films I’d never even heard of before and enjoyed considerably. Previous screenings have ranged from the ridiculous (The Creature Walks among Us) to the sublime (The Exorcist) and it is this disparate programme, which mixes forgotten gems with masterpieces of the genre, that guarantees that a small but loyal membership keeps returning.

As the number of art-house and niche cinemas continues to dwindle throughout the UK, and in London in particular, clubs like the WLFFS provide the only opportunity for fans to see older movies that are not considered worthy of showing at the venerable BFI. While the internet (both legally and illegally) has made thousands of forgotten films available again, watching a DVD at home, no matter how impressive your home cinema system, is not quite the same as seeing a celluloid print of an obscure movie projected with a group of like-minded individuals. It is this, as well as the eclectic programme, that will ensure the club’s survival.

Neither Panic in Year Zero nor The Colossus of New York is a cinematic masterpiece. The former contained about 20 minutes of monotonous footage of cars on tarmac and a soundtrack of relentlessly cheerful lift music that might drive casual viewers to distraction. But the gonzo pairing of teen idol Frankie Avalon and B-movie stalwart Ray Milland in a film that has a nuclear war going on down the road while the cast goes camping made for diverting viewing. The latter film – a fun robotic take on the Frankenstein myth – was far more engaging and had a terrific mechanical monster that shot beams out of its eyes. However, The Colossus suffered from the same problem as the risible Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989): New York was represented by a few brief shots of stock footage and anyone expecting a space age thematic sequel to King Kong got their monster movie thrills in word rather than deed. But where else could you see these films projected on a cold dismal night in February while being able to buy popcorn and hotdogs for less than a pound?

The main films, one of which is occasionally swapped for an episode of The Twilight Zone or a related documentary, are accompanied by support material. When I attended, the strange double bill of caravan apocalypse and robot brain transplant was preceded by an old newsreel documentary about kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. Later, and better still, the interval was prefaced by old 1950s and 1960s cinema adverts that were terrific to watch for both nostalgic reasons and for the juxtapositions of theme and product that seem both charming and strange to modern eyes. The WLFFS experience also involves a swap shop for Italian exploitation DVDs (starting at £2.50) and a lovingly produced programme full of stills and original poster art that even includes a reproduction of the original foyer material for one of the films, printed on card as a brilliant keepsake.

The WLFFS is attended by both fans and retired film directors. It was fantastic to have my hotdog served by Norman J. Warren, the director of Satan’s Slave (1976) and Inseminoid (1981), and his apology that Panic in Year Zero was being shown in the wrong aspect ratio was both charming and unnecessary. Norman and host Darren Perry source the films from collectors’ fairs and in fact had shown both of these titles in ‘inferior’ prints at screenings earlier in the decade, but finding better 16mm copies and an increase in members’ numbers justified a repeat showing. Another, equally unnecessary apology came from the woman sitting behind me who said, ‘the interval can tend to go on a bit long as everyone likes to catch up, but Darren does try to make sure everyone is able to get the last train home’.

I first met Darren and Norman at another small film club in Croydon, which was in a cosier venue still, as the host projected films from his kitchen (through a hole in the sliding doors) into a screen in his living room and served nibbles in the garden. If Mike Leigh had directed an episode of Spaced, I suspect it would have been not dissimilar. At one of these nights, as the interval’s cheese and pineapple on sticks was followed by a darker horror film for the second part of the double bill, the host suggested to his aunt who was sitting in the back row that she might ‘want to sit that one out as it was a bit bloody’!

Darren also volunteers as the projectionist at the Gothique film society, which meets once or twice a month at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square (next screening: Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter) and attracts some of the loyal band of WLFFS aficionados. However, there is nothing cliquey about these affectionate, welcoming groups, which are always delighted to have new members. Film journalists at major publications regularly bemoan the disappearance of the cult screenings at the Scala in King’s Cross, but these screenings are still taking place. These days you might have to travel outside of zone 1 and wrap up warm in a cold warehouse in Shepherd’s Bush or squeeze into the front room of a semi on the A215 to Norwood, but that’s a cinematic experience as worthy as anything mainstream critics remember with rose-tinted spectacles.

The next WLFFS offers the unexpected juxtaposition of Yoko Tani as ‘the Leader of the Lystrians’ in Invasion (1965) with David Cronenberg’s perennial head-exploding classic Scanners (1981). Freak weather notwithstanding, I for one will happily be making the trip.

Alex Fitch

Contact Darren for more info about the WLFFS – £6.50 for guests / £15 membership and £4 tickets if you join – on filmhorror (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk. For The Gothique film society, visit thegothiquefilmsociety.org.uk.

Interviews

The Good, The Bad, The Weird: Interview with Kim Jee-woon

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 February 2009

Venues: Cineworld Shaftsbury Av (London) and key cities

Distributor: Icon

Director: Kim Jee-woon

Writers: Kim Jee-woon, Kim Min-suk

Original title: Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, Jung Woo-sung

South Korea 2008

120 minutes

After the intelligent psychological horror movie A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) and the noir-inflected A Bittersweet Life (2005), Kim Jee-woon returns with an Asian take on the Western. The Good, the Bad, the Weird is an uproarious action-packed romp with more than a nod to Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), from the gunslingers’ supremely cool attitude in the face of death to the nonchalant whistling on the Ennio Morricone-inspired soundtrack.

Virginie Sélavy talked to the director during the London Korean Film Festival in October 2008.

Virginie Sélavy: You seem to tackle a new genre every time you make a film: you did comedy horror in The Quiet Family (1998), horror in A Tale of Two Sisters, film noir in A Bittersweet Life and now you’re taking on the Western. Is this deliberate?

Kim Jee-woon: I don’t know yet which genre I’m best at so I have to try lots of different ones! I don’t want to repeat a genre that I’ve already done because working with a variety of styles inspires me and gives me more cinematic energy. The genre I choose for each film is directly related to the theme. For example, when I chose horror, the theme of the film was the fear of things that you can and cannot see. Action films are about violence. With film noir it’s about the point at which people will break. And with a Western, the theme is revenge; it’s about strong male characters competing about who’s the best; and it’s about chasing and being chased. So when I choose a genre I choose a theme.

VS: In the credits, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is labelled an ‘oriental Western’. In what way is it different from a traditional Western?

KJW: Traditional Westerns have a low-key construction, a slow pace and simple action. I wanted to appeal to a more modern audience by making the action more powerful, by speeding up the pace and by having multi-dimensional characters, rather than just good and bad characters. Rather than just say ‘oriental Western’ I prefer to say that it’s a ‘kimchi Western’. Kimchi is a Korean dish of fermented cabbage, it’s very spicy and very hot. I like to call it that because the film reflects Korean people, who are very dynamic and spicy, just like kimchi.

VS: The Good, The Bad, The Weird was clearly very strongly influenced by Sergio Leone. Do you see your film as a homage, a parody or a re-invention?

KJW: All of them (laughs)! It started as a homage, but I tried to make it fun, with lots of humour, and I believe that there is some re-invention. It’s all of them.

VS: Why replace ‘The Ugly’ with ‘The Weird’?

KJW: Because when you call a character ‘Ugly’ it’s very limiting. But when you call a character ‘Weird’ it triggers your imagination, it makes you excited and it makes you expect more.

VS: The character of Tae-goo/The Weird, played by Song Kang-ho, seems to be the most different from the characters in both Leone’s films and in spaghetti Westerns in general. He seems closer to the type of character that Song Kang-ho also plays in The Host (2006) and in Memories of Murder (2003). At first, he seems to be a fool, but in the end he is revealed to be the most complex character in the film. Was he the character that you found most interesting?

KJW: The Tae-goo character is closer to human nature. You can identify with him. The Good and The Bad are very conventional characters, so without The Weird this film would only be entertainment. That’s why I wanted The Weird to lead the whole story, so human life was reflected through his character – it’s about how it can get complicated and how things can go wrong.

VS: You’ve said before that no one is meant to be just The Good, just The Bad or just The Weird, but Do-won seems to be the one with more good in him, Chang-yi with more bad in him and Tae-goo with more weird in him.

KJW: Initially they’re all good, bad and weird in their own way. Do-won is good, Chang-yi is bad and Tae-goo is weird, but to make things more complicated, I gave a different mission to all the characters. I told The Good that his mission was to do super-spectacular action, I told The Bad to express emotions and sensibility and I asked The Weird to lead the story and the pace of the film.

VS: There are many references to the Koreans no longer having their own country in the film. How important is the historical background to the story?

KJW: I chose that period and that place because that’s probably the most suitable time for a Western, so it’s the other way around – the story came first. But because the historical issues were very heavy during that period, whether I intended it or not, people always say there are political issues in the film.

VS: Why do you feel that this was the best period for a Western?

KJW: First of all, to make a Western it’s very important to have a place where you can ride a horse, and as you can see in the film, the endless landscape in Manchuria is perfect. There were all those countries, China, Japan, Russia, fighting for control of Manchuria at that time, so there’s this atmosphere of lawlessness that is very suitable. It also means that there are lots of different people there for different reasons and I was interested in showing this multicultural situation. And then, there are a lot of bandits, which was also perfect for a Western and I wanted to show that very rough, wild time.

VS: You say that political issues are not important, but the idea that the three main characters are free but don’t have a country comes back several times. Is the film about Korean identity in some way?

KJW: The scene where Do-won and Tae-goo talk under the moonlight is about identity and for that reason probably appeals more to Korean audiences than to Western audiences. It’s about a certain Korean sensibility.

VS: There is also a very spectacular scene in which Do-won single-handedly inflicts some serious losses on the Japanese army. It’s a great action scene but I was wondering if it was also a way of expressing some kind of anger at Japan in a humorous way?

KJW: I guess you’re right (laughs). Er… (more laughs). Yes, but it is only in a humorous way, it’s not a political statement.

Features

REALITY FICTION: Japanese Films Based on Actual Events

Who's Camus Anyway?

6-12 February 2009

Venue: ICA, London

ICA website

TOUR DATES:

7-21 February

Watershed, Bristol

2-5 March

Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

11-19 March

Filmhouse, Edinburgh

9-19 March

Showroom, Sheffield

The Japan Foundation is returning to the ICA for a second year to present its new touring film programme, ‘Reality Fiction’. Featuring six films, the season explores the way Japanese directors have used actual events as the source material for their work. While the selection of films is not entirely devoted to crime drama, murder is definitely a popular theme.

Picked from the archives, the 1965 film A Chain of Islands (Nihon retto) begins with the discovery of a drowned US Army Sergeant, found floating in Tokyo Bay; the 1970 film Live Today, Die Tomorrow! (Hadaka no Jukya-sai), directed by Kaneto Shindo, probes the background and motivations of 19-year-old Norio Nagayama, who murdered four people between October and November 1968 using a gun stolen from US troops; in Junji Sakamoto’s 2001 Face (Kao), mild-mannered Masako, who kills her sister in a fit of rage, learns to live on the run in the aftermath of the devastating Kobe earthquake.

In Who’s Camus Anyway? (Kamiyu nante shiranai, 2005), Mitsuo Yanagimachi uses the motiveless killing of an elderly woman by a teenager in 2000 as the basis for a clever film-within-a-film that owes as much to pop culture and teen movies as it does to the crime genre. An impressive long take introduces us to the main characters as the camera tracks around the sunny campus of an arts college: the young, charismatic director, the cool, good-looking cameraman, even the film geek, who enthuses over the infamous opening shots in Touch of Evil and The Player. Their student project is to make a film based on the murder, but their attempts to get into the mind of the killer (which include the obligatory reading of Camus’s The Stranger) lead them into dangerous situations of their own. Yanagimachi could have done more to ramp up the suspense throughout the film, but the terrifically shot, well acted bloody ending leaves the audience unsure of where the boundary between reality and fiction lies.

A much more modest, but powerful film is Yasutomo Chikuma’s Now, I… (Ima, Boku Wa), made in 2007 with a budget of less that $5000. Chikuma, who also wrote and directed the film, plays Satoru, a 20-year-old NEET (‘not engaged in employment, education or training’) who virtually locks himself away in his bedroom in self-imposed isolation. His distraught mother stages an intervention in the form of an acquaintance who offers Satoru a job, but his refusal to engage with the outside world is virtually insurmountable. Chikuma’s sullen, monosyllabic Satoru is both infuriating and strangely endearing, while dramatic moments (which initially seem outsized for such a low-key film) make his exile all the more disturbing.

The Reality Fiction season spans a variety of budgets, eras and genres (historical drama gets a look in with Chosyu Five, about a group of samurai who travel to Europe in the mid-19th century in a bid to master Western technology), but the films all have one thing in common: a desire to understand what drives people to extreme behaviour, whether it’s murder, self-imposed seclusion or sailing halfway around the world.

Sarah Cronin

Festivals, Short Cuts

LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL 2009: Club des Femmes

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k

6th London Short Film Festival

9-18 January 2009

LSFF website

‘It seems cinema and politics don’t go together anymore’, said Sarah Wood of Club des Femmes as she introduced the Body of Work section at the London Short Film Festival. She and her colleague Selina Robertson, whose mission as CdF is to provide a ‘positive female space for the re-examination of ideas through art’, chose their return slot at the festival to look at female nudity on camera, screening a programme of films selected from the archives to demonstrate Wood’s point.

Marina Abramovich & Ulay’s 1977 film Imponderabilia features a naked man and woman standing opposite each other in the narrow doorway to a museum. As swathes of people cross the threshold, only a handful turn to face the man. The rest – both male and female visitors – choose to face the woman as they squeeze past, revealing the dynamics of power relations and gender roles simply and visually.

A striking sequence in Jayne Parker’s black and white film K (1989) shows the director standing naked in an empty room, pulling a long internal organ out through her mouth and knitting it into a cloth-like structure with her hands. ‘I bring into the open all the things I have taken in that are not mine and thereby make room for something new. I make an external order out of an internal tangle’, Parker said of this work. Indeed, there is something satisfying about seeing the grotesque and abject woven into a symmetrical dress-like structure – which Parker then holds up to shield her nudity – taking on myriad meanings in a feminist context.

Parker uses the female body to awe-inspiring effect in Almost Out (1982), a film that rarely makes it on to the big screen. At 112 minutes it defied the ‘short’ remit of the festival, but was a key part of the CdF Body of Work programme. Self-consciously breaking the taboo of maternal sexuality, Parker films her mother Joyce naked, while asking probing questions such as, ‘Can you see yourself being penetrated?’ Intercut with this footage are scenes showing the filmmaker naked in a similar set-up, being interviewed by a disembodied male who is credited only as ‘Camera-man’. ‘I don’t know what I can do to get you to see me more. I’m sitting here naked and willing to talk’, Parker tells him, before she concedes that, as the film’s scriptwriter and editor, she ultimately is in full control.

Joyce has no such power. Her scenes are seemingly unscripted and she tells her daughter she is taking part only because of the absolute trust she has in her: ‘If you love someone you wouldn’t make them do something they didn’t want. You wouldn’t put them in that position of having to refuse.’ At her daughter’s request, Joyce talks about body image, sex, motherhood and family. Her open and loving manner is at odds with the mode of questioning which is, comparatively, intrusive and confrontational. She fulfils all of Parker’s wishes, apart from explicitly showing her where she came from, whereas her one request – to know if her daughter thought she was a good mother – goes unanswered. But the power imbalance is rectified by comments made by Parker in her own interview: ‘I’m cross with my mother because I depend on her and she sees that I do.’ She claims she wants her mother to desire her. In turn, Joyce wishes she looked young, slim and beautiful – as Parker does. In this way, the cycle of wishes between mother and daughter, and the push/pull dynamic of their exchanges become as fascinating as the taboo-breaking nudity of the piece.

Measures of Distance (1988) is another example of maternal nudity caught on camera. Director Mona Hatoum contrasts the emotional closeness between mother and daughter with their physical distance, brought on by war and exile. Still shots of her mother taking a shower dissolve over images of letters they wrote to one another. A voice-over ties the two together by reading out the text of the letters, which describe the moment the photos were taken, and their repercussions. In Almost Out, Joyce reveals that she was pleased to stop breastfeeding, as it meant her body was her own again and, similarly, Hatoum’s mother describes how her husband feels betrayed by the photos of her taken by their daughter – as if she belonged to him alone.

Body ownership is also the theme of Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977). In the first part of what she describes as an ‘operatic work of three parts’, filmmaker Martha Rosler depicts herself stripping off before being examined by a man in a lab coat. As he reads out every conceivable weight and measurement, such as ‘sitting spread girth’, another man annotates an anatomical diagram in the background. A trio of women signify whether each measurement is above or below average by honking horns, or ringing a bell if the measurement is spot on. She is then made to dress up in ultra-feminine clothes, style her hair and apply make-up before being dismissed. This sequence takes up the best part of the film’s 40 minutes. It is a noble idea, demonstrated well, but the message is repeated to the point of tedium and beyond, and while the political message is urgent the filmmaking certainly is not.

Better filmmaking was seen during the ‘Femmes Fantastique’ programme, which featured new shorts with interesting and original female characters. They tackled a far more wide-ranging and political variety of topics than last year’s selection, and issues such as miscarriage, sexual dysfunction, prostitution and old age were treated with verve and sensitivity. Clare Holman’s winning film, The Escort (2008), showed a woman trying to balance family life with her job as an escort for young people confronted with the police and social services, and the struggles faced by the teenage girl she is currently escorting. While not as explicitly political as the archive films, it demonstrated that women’s issues and spiky storytelling are not mutually exclusive, and that CdF’s call for political filmmaking is not falling entirely on deaf ears.

Lisa Williams

Film Jukebox

EUGENE MCGUINNESS’S FILM JUKEBOX

Eugene McGuinness

The purveyor of an energetic, playful pop, Eugene McGuinness has made a name for himself creating rich melodies, complex harmonies and odd lyrics. Signed to the Domino label at the age of only 22, McGuinness has helped design a sound for young Britain, with influences that go from Scott Walker to his label mates Franz Ferdinand. Perhaps in an effort to be the coolest guy in the room, Eugene McGuinness releases a single entitled ‘Fonz’ on 23 February 2009. He will be playing live throughout January and February, including a London show at White Heat at Madam Jojo’s on February 10. More details on his MySpace and on the Domino website. Here are some movies that have helped shape his life. LUCY HURST

1- Rope (1948)
There are a couple of Hitchcock films that I’ve seen recently, but this one blew me away the most. It felt like I was watching a play in a grand theatre. It is set entirely in a character’s flat and the simplicity of the story only further demonstrates how wonderful the script is.

2- A Room for Romeo Brass (2000)
I’m a massive Shane Meadows fan. Paddy Considine is easily one of the best British actors at the moment. It’s a pretty dark film but its depiction of childhood, friendship and day-to-day adventures in the English suburbs rings true to me.

3- The Last Waltz (1978)
I first saw this when I was about 17 and I’ve barely stopped playing the DVD since – I’ve played it to death! I know every word, solo, facial twitch off by heart. Bob Dylan and Neil Young make appearances, but Rick Danko and Levon Helm are the heart and soul of the film.

4- The Godfather (1972)
It’s the best one, even though Sonny dies. Sonny is easily my favourite character but Al Pacino is a master in the Italian restaurant scene.

5- Get Carter (1971)
I would like a suit like the one Michael Caine wears in this film. I trust it would have the desired effect. There are few cooler scenes than the one in which he walks into a pub in Newcastle and orders a beer, ‘in a thin glass’. The southerner sticks out like a sore thumb.

6- There Will Be Blood (2007)
I watched this in the cinema, drunk. I think that made it even better. It’s a massive film in a very subtle way. Daniel Day Lewis is my favourite actor, I mean you wouldn’t get Mark Lawrenson sporting a moustache in the same way. But that’s beside the point; the cinematography and soundtrack are stunning. Bowling would never be the same again.

7- The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
Another gangster film but this actor, Romain Duris, is brilliant. It’s set in the Parisian underworld and it’s all very gritty and seedy but it’s beautifully shot.

8- Factotum: A Man Who Performs Many Jobs (2005)
There are so many brilliant scenes in this horrifically funny and sad film. Henry Chinaski genuinely doesn’t give a shit; it’s all drink, sex and poetry. There is a moment between him and his father that is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.

9- Jurassic Park (1993)
When I was seven, my dad took me to see Jurassic Park. We’d seen Ghostbusters and Home Alone 2 at the local Odeon in Gants Hill, but as a special treat dad took me to the Empire Leicester Square. It was amazing. Mind you, the scene when the two kids are in the car messed me up a bit.

10- The Deer Hunter (1978)
Chistopher Walken and Robert de Niro are at their very best and the Russian roulette scenes are astonishing. It sends out an extremely clear message about what war actually means. All the characters are so fully formed and real, it gets to the point where it stops feeling like a film and just becomes very sad.

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM

Code 46

Code 46 screened at the Barbican, London, on 24 November 2008 as part of the Architecture on Film series.

Next Architecture on Film screening: Los Angeles Plays Itself

Date: 21 January 2009

More info on the Barbican website

As part of a series of films celebrating architecture on film, the Barbican recently screened the underrated British science fiction film Code 46, which tells a tale of forbidden love in a city that is futuristic and yet very familiar at the same time. Just before he went on stage to do a Q&A following the screening, Michael Winterbottom discussed some of the themes and ideas raised by the film with Alex Fitch.

Alex Fitch: With Code 46, did you try to capture a particular architectural aesthetic that hadn’t been seen on film for a while?

Michael Winterbottom: No. When we were thinking of making the film it was much more about what the characters were doing, what the society was like. So it wasn’t so much about trying to find a look for the buildings or a style of architecture, it was about the function of the buildings and how the city was organised. It was to do with the relationship between the city and what was outside the city, between which spaces were safe and which weren’t, between the bureaucratic controls and complete lawlessness. It was more to do with those kind of ideas, which connect the story and the characters, than it was to do with looking for a particular style.

AF: One thing that’s very interesting about the style of the film – in the programme notes it’s described as ‘an architectural collage’ – is that you mix shots of the Jubilee Line in London with shots of Shanghai and various other cities. When you set a film in the future, predicting what things will look like is very problematic, but making a city that’s ‘all cities’ gives it a kind of timelessness.

MW: Yeah. The idea was that we’re in the future, but we’re not that far in the future, so we weren’t trying to imagine a society that had no connections to today’s society. Between starting the idea of making Code 46 and actually filming it, we did In This World, which is a film about refugees, and to a certain extent, some of the ideas about the landscape and the organisation of the story came from working on that. Also, a huge percentage of buildings in London were there 50 years ago, so if you’re talking about a film set 50 years in the future, a large number of buildings from now would still be there. There’s more continuity than there is change in that respect. I wanted it to be very familiar, very recognisable, very real, and not a created world on a stage or on a set, but at the same time feel like you couldn’t quite pin down that it was like any particular kind of place that exists right now. That was the criterion: to find things that were interesting and made sense of the story and gave it a context, but were one step away from the real.

AF:With that sort of retro-futurism, you seem to be following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott somewhat, by retrofitting buildings and predicting things that almost seem old the first time you see them in the film.

MW: Yeah, to a certain extent, although this is different from Blade Runner. I think Ridley Scott’s a brilliant filmmaker but he was looking for an image and a style and we weren’t. We had the experience of doing In This World with the refugees that we had to get papers for – it was incredibly hard to get them across any border. So, the idea is that although things are difficult, and the environment is harsh, and the ozone layer is depleted so people don’t want to go out in the daylight, and it is very crowded, the city kind of functions. Outside, you have a chaotic desert, and all the outsiders are trying to get into a city, so instead of having the difference between different countries, you have just ‘the city’ and ‘outside the city’ replicated in lots of different places. So it was about looking for places that made sense of that idea and the specifics of the story, rather than looking for a retro style. What was brilliant about Shanghai as the core of the city that’s in the film is that you have a whole section that’s only really gone up in the last 15 years with a determined effort to look towards the future and then you have bits of Shanghai that look like they’ve been there for a century and haven’t changed. You have that density of population and therefore the sense of how a society organises itself when it’s packed together – Shanghai is an incredibly crowded city, incredibly full of energy, incredibly full of work; it had the sort of energy you would have if you were in the city that we were imagining.

AF: What was the genesis of the project?

MW: I’ve worked with (writer) Frank Cottrell Boyce quite a few times and with Andrew Eaton, the producer. Andrew, Frank and I were talking about things to do next and I liked the idea of doing a simple love story set in the future. The starting point was that it would be very simple and have a kind of mythic connection or fairy tale feel to it. By being in the future, you would strip out the specific reality of this year and this time and have something more generic, more universal optimistically, or more detached from a social context. That was the original idea but when it came to developing it, it became weirdly more than we were expecting. By the time we sent the script to actors, the actors were talking about what they thought were the politics of the script in relation to the future world, what it was saying about ‘the state’ that they were living in. They took it in a much more overtly political or social way than they would have done if it had been set in a real city. It was almost the fact that it was fictional that made them question ‘is that good or bad?’ – the fact that some people had freedom to move and others didn’t, for instance, which, in a film set today, everyone would accept as ‘that’s how it is’.

AF: I think it’s interesting that a lot of science fiction films set in modern cities seem to have unreliable narrators. Both the two lead characters in this film end up with their memories wiped because they’ve broken the genetic laws and that follows in the footsteps of the replicants in Blade Runner, the multiple motives of Lemmy Caution in Alphaville, Jonathan Pryce’s character in Brazil… Do you think that’s something to do with the multi-faceted nature of cities?

MW: Maybe. I hadn’t thought of it like that. The starting point was a simple love story and then transgressive love. Then you take the Oedipal myth and genetics becoming an issue, which connects the idea of what’s taboo and what’s not taboo. So by introducing an element of not knowing who your parents are, that creates a place where you could break a taboo without being aware of it. At the time, and still now, there was a lot of talk of genetics and artificial reproduction, and how that connects to issues of morality. These are issues that people haven’t had to face before, so it was interesting from that point of view, but as we were making the film it was more about the story rather than any social issue. All the elements, like climate change or population growth or bureaucratic controls, connect to important things going on in the world today, but we weren’t trying to make a film about genetics, it’s more that it just connects into our story.

AF: It’s interesting to see Code 46 again in light of the other films you’ve made recently. In Code 46, Samantha Morton’s character has to be shown the photographs in her album to remind her of what happened, because those memories have been taken from her. In 24 Hour Party People, when the fictional version of the narrator meets his real self, he says, ‘It didn’t happen like that!’ And in A Cock and Bull Story, you have the film within a film and the actors playing versions of themselves. Is that a theme you’ve become very interested in?

MW: It’s an area that’s interesting to work in. In one way, In This World was creating a fictional journey to bring over two refugees, but they were nevertheless real refugees, so we had to get real paperwork to get them across and deal with real bureaucracy on how to get that paperwork. And finally, when we took them back, one of them came back over and became a real refugee! So it’s fun if those areas between the story you’re telling, the world where they are set and the world where you are making them, are integral and complex and have different sorts of connections with reality. It’s done in a serious way in In This World, or in a comic way in 24 Hour Party People, but it’s still enjoyable to play in that area. I like to film on location, and the reason we shot Code 46 that way rather than in a studio is to place characters in real situations and see what happens.

AF: It’s almost like you’re bringing a degree of psycho-geography to the filmmaking process by putting actors in interesting locations.

MW: Completely! You hope the places you take them to aren’t just photogenic or just some kind of background, but if you get the story right you feel you understand the characters because of the world that they’re living in, and you understand a little bit more about the world because of the characters. I remember when I started watching films as a teenager, watching something like Breathless, it’s so great when you see the characters walking down the streets of Paris because on one level you can see people looking into the camera as they walk by, and you’ve got two main actors who don’t, so you can tell the other people aren’t really in the film, they just happen to be there. That makes it more real in a way because it’s really the streets of Paris, and those people are really walking there! It also makes it more fictional because it makes you very aware of the camera; there are your actors pretending the camera isn’t there, and there’s that guy looking at the camera who knows it is there. So in a way it both intensifies the fictional and the real aspects of the film.

AF: Regarding the creation of the futuristic world, I remember when Minority Report came out, Spielberg said something along the lines of, ‘Oh yes, we hired all these scientists to come up with things that would be coming true shortly’, but it all seems absolutely ridiculous. By contrast, your film is spot on with video iPods, etc.

MW: Exactly! Minority Report came out while we were in preparation for ours. At one point, as a joke, we were going to do this big pseudo-scientific document about all the science that we’d drawn on to make our film because Minority Report was completely based on that ludicrous gadget/gimmick thing. For us, it was a question of looking at the way societies work now in different places, taking some of the issues like genetics and refugees and just move one step away from that. In the opposite sort of film, it’s great to watch something like Alphaville and just pan across a random skyline of Paris and that is the future. It’s as realistic a vision of the future as you’re going to get.

The only leap in a science fiction direction was that Tim Robbins’s character – by having this empathy virus – could sense what people were thinking, which I think is probably quite a long time off! Apart from that, it really was quite a retro story, quite a classic, conventional story about a man who goes away, meets a girl and falls madly in love with her. The initial idea for the love story was that you cannot explain why someone falls in love with this person and not that person.

AF: It’s interesting that at the end of the film the other characters try to explain away the love affair by saying, ‘it’s a side effect of his empathy virus’.

MW: It is, isn’t it? A side effect of being empathic! The idea at the end was that it’s about two people who can’t be together. They want to be together, but the reality of their worlds is that they’re opposites and they become victims of the transgression, and as usual as in today’s society, the man’s okay!

AF: Do you have a particular interest in science fiction or did it just feel like the right world for this story?

MW: I occasionally see science fiction films and read science fiction books, but I’m not a science fiction fan in the sense of reading or watching a lot of it. It wasn’t even to do with dealing with issues, it was more to do with it being in a fictional world. The futuristic world allowed us to simplify the story. That was the initial impulse, that it would be nice to do a story that was very, very simple: man meets girl, falls in love, they can’t be together and they end up apart. It was the idea of the fictionality of it that was appealing, and as I said, weirdly, as you go on, that fictionality can get lost in the world that you create. You have the extra problem with science fiction, ‘what are we supposed to understand about this world?’, which is a given when you do a film set now.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Listen to the interview.

Festivals

TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL 2008

Zift

Photo from Zift

Pí–FF: Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

13 November – 7 December 2008

Website

As the guide books are quick to point out, there’s something unmistakeably Disney about Tallinn’s old town – its medieval spires, the charming narrow streets and the perfectly preserved merchants’ houses, all overlooked by the stern towers of an ancient fortified hill, and wrapped, at least during the month of December, in a tangle of lights and tinsel. Market sellers proffer Glí¼hwein and gingerbread, while students dressed in medieval cassocks beckon from the doors of Hanseatic-themed restaurants: it’s all rather twee.

So it’s something of a surprise to step out of the cobbled courtyards and into the urban sprawl of the modern city, wherein lies the Coca-Cola plaza, a neon no-man’s land indistinguishable from any other multiplex in the Western world, as well as the sleek surroundings of the Hotel Forum, where director Tina Lokk presided over proceedings for the 12th Black Nights Film Festival (named for the seemingly endless nights that cast the city in darkness from 3pm to 10am at this time of year). Having built the festival up from modest beginnings, Lokk can be credited with hosting one of the most inclusive and (ironically, given the sub-arctic temperatures outside) warmest festivals in Europe, featuring a host of small strands aimed at promoting minor works that might otherwise slip under the radar, and a number of events for students, including a dedicated competition and a Film School connecting future talent with well-known specialists.

The Black Nights’ open-door policy is aimed to some extent at allowing Estonian audiences otherwise starved of international fare access to a selection of world cinema, with the emphasis on European films. The programme mostly comprised the great and the good from this year’s circuit, bulked out with the best of the Baltic’s offerings and spiced up with a regional focus, this year on Turkey (who produced a sadly lacklustre set of films, rife with the melancholic self-indulgence that art-house poster boy Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made his trademark). The weighting was somewhat reflected in the awards, with Jos Stelling’s panel handing out the top prizes to the already heavily decorated Hunger, Genova, Waltz with Bashir and Il Divo. Some plaudits were deserved, others less so; but tempting as it would be to put the Jury’s choices down to jumping on the bandwagon, the general feeling was that after a strong couple of years, 2008’s regional contingent lacked bite: inspiration was thin on the ground this time round, and it was whispered that the winner of the Tridens prize for best Baltic film, Laila Pakalnina and Maris Maskalans’s Latvian documentary Three Men and a Fish Pond (for which Maskalans also won best cinematography), was the best of an undistinguished bunch, despite the Jury’s gracious description of the film as an affecting portrayal of the parallel ecologies of human friendship and the natural world. In fact, it was from neighbouring Finland that the Black Nights’ real discovery may have come – although not from the expected source. Directed with a firm hand by brother of Aki, Mika Kaurismäki, Three Wise Men had masculine melancholia in spades, but served it up with a light touch and a refreshing sense of aesthetic restraint, doubtless in part a result of the younger Kaurismäki’s background in documentary film. The semi-improvised script allowed for superb performances from the three leads Kari Heiskanen, Pertti Sveholm and Timo Torikka, justly rewarded with a joint prize for best acting.

It was in keeping with the kitsch cityscape and the mostly middlebrow tone that the festival’s gala performances and dry-ice-swathed award ceremony were held in the resplendent Russian Vene Theatre, a throwback to a bygone age burnished in red velvet and gold brocade. But a short clatter down the city’s side streets revealed hidden gems tucked in between the city walls in the form of the tiny Kinomaja and Von Krahli theatres. It was in the latter, a black-washed performance space with a makeshift screen, that audiences could discover Bulgarian neo-noir Zift (loosely translated as ‘Shit’), a pounding, putrid pastiche of classics such as Gilda, which made for an exhilarating experience. Admittedly, it was followed by the loathsome Blink, from the Philippines – putrid for altogether different reasons; as is the case with the city itself, you take your chances by venturing off the beaten track, but the rewards may well be worth it.

Catherine Wheatley

Festivals

DISCOVERING LATIN AMERICA 7: FESTIVAL REPORT

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Lion's Den

Photo from Lion’s Den (Leonera)
Discovering Latin America 7

27 November – 7 December 2008

Website

It takes some guts to make a film where the closest anyone gets to resolution is a dead body being re-interred after its 10 years of settled decomposition are interrupted by the lease on the plot coming up. This is just one of the dangling elements that make up Andrés Wood’s engaging and intimate examination of life in the city of Santiago de Chile, The Good Life (La Buena vida).

Even the corpse only gets another 10 years’ peace. There are always negotiations pending for Wood’s characters. They are allowed development but no conclusions, drama but no dénouement. Not that they are casual drifters; their desires and ambitions are concrete forces driving them on but life keeps turning solidity to haziness and even death doesn’t offer finality.

The Good Life was just one notable achievement on display at the 2008 Discovering Latin America Film Festival. As a triumph of imagination and resourcefulness over obvious budgetary limits it is perhaps fairly typical of the best films coming out of South America. Pablo Trapero’s prison drama Lion’s Den (Leonera), on the other hand, could never be described as typical or limited in any way. It’s a film that delivers the best you can expect from cinema, a totally absorbing emotional experience. In contrast to The Good Life, Lion’s Den focuses entirely on one character, Julia, a 25-year-old student who wakes up with blood on her shoulder and two bodies slumped in her flat and proceeds to travel, pregnant, through the Argentine legal system. Martina Gusman’s performance as Julia is astonishing. She begins as a blank and is progressively more vividly outlined as the film unfolds. It’s an emotional journey without clichés or superfluous sentiment. Trapero makes full use of his prison locations, hovering over their spaces, letting the stillness speak for the agonising passing of time and coaxing a curious mixture of cosiness and frustration from the children’s section to which Julia’s pregnancy grants her access. After the birth of her son, we get one magically incongruous scene of the prison’s brightly lit night-time serenity interrupted by the baby’s cries and the consequent howling chorus of fellow infant inmates.

Lion’s Den was the highlight of this year’s DLAFF for this writer. The festival has grown considerably over the seven years of its existence. This year, there were 21 feature films and seven documentaries shown at seven London locations. It is now the most significant opportunity there is to see South American films in the UK, an especially remarkable achievement considering the festival is run entirely by volunteers. They even manage to donate a proportion of ticket sales to a chosen charity each year. This year’s beneficiary was Progressio, a group working with women suffering from AIDS and HIV in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Other notable screenings included the UK premiere of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin cabeza), a film that has divided critics following its appearances on the festival circuit, and Rodrigo Plá’s account of the Cristiada rebellion in 1920s Mexico, The Desert Within (Desierto adentro). I also enjoyed Espectro (Al final del espectro), a spooky thriller from Colombia that cleverly exploits its claustrophobic setting, and A Gastronomy Story (Estí³mago), a quirky and mischievous study of human appetites and weaknesses.

Nick Dutfield