Photo: Billy Childish
©Tate Media

TateShots

Release date: 21 January 2010

Watch on TateShots Website or download from iTunes.

TateShots is an ongoing podcast series produced by Tate Modern, and the latest six films in the series investigate the links between music and visual art through interviews with musicians who are also artists. Even though they’ve been well-researched and curated, watching five-minute podcast films on a cinema screen is disconcerting. Because the podcasts are meant to be watched in short online bursts, teased out over a few weeks, the artists are asked many of the same questions. This probably helps give the segments cohesion when watched in chunks over time, but it grates when all are watched in one sitting. The Flip Cam wobbles of some interviews sit uneasily with archive footage, concert images, and extracts from other interviews shot from many angles, with tricksier shots. (The series is funded by big media corporation Bloomberg so it’s hard to tell if the low-budget feel of some of the filming came from financial limitations or was a deliberate choice to replicate a YouTube DIY aesthetic.)

The artists interviewed – Lydia Lunch, David Byrne, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Billy Childish, Jeffrey Lewis, and Mark E Smith – are all safe choices. Most of these artists came of age during punk and post-punk (with the exception of Lewis, whose work owes such a stylistic debt to Daniel Johnston that he might as well have done). All are established as having been cool. But what about some interviews with musician-artists whose work in one or both fields is a bit naff, or awkward, or embarrassing? It might have been more interesting to hear someone like Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, say, talking about his collection of sexy Polaroids.

What we get is a lot of talk about art school experimentation and subversion in the 1970s, which is fine – but it’s nothing new or unexpected, and not terribly illuminating. Shock has an increasingly short half-life. For Lydia Lunch to explain how she loves Goya’s devils or Duchamp’s Etant Donnés (an installation that lets viewers look through peepholes in a barn door to see a faceless naked woman) will surprise no one. Though she gives an intelligent and impassioned explanation of her choices, her segment makes those works, and the dark, violent sexuality of her songs, all seem oddly quaint.

Mark E Smith, on the other hand, sinks into self-parody in his segment. He talks about painters who work while listening to his music, and about hitting Damien Hirst in the face at a long-ago Fall gig. Mostly he’s just swinging a bottle of beer around, picking his nose and gurning like the old drunk priest in Father Ted. His segment will probably go viral because it’s so obnoxious – and good for the Tate if it can trawl some hits in with this for bait.

Billy Childish’s film is the standout of the bunch. Childish dresses in his onstage clothes and in an exaggerated painter’s smock and neck scarf so that the ‘artist’ and ‘musician’ can interview each other, and both characters play with the questions, pulling faces while joking about the Beatles, punk and Edvard Munch. He’s funny and charming, and his interview shows what the format can do. If the series continues, the curators would do well to try more such experiments.

Emily Bick

This TateShots series of films can be watched on the TateShots Website or downloaded from iTunes from 21 January 2010.

7th London Short Film Festival

8-17 January 2010

Rich Pickings Presents: Lolita Complex

Date: 10 January 2010

Venue: Shortwave Cinema, London

LSFF website

‘A mini, weird conference of ideas’, as festival programmer Carla MacKinnon describes it, each Rich Pickings event takes a single theme and explores the issues involved through a combination of short film screenings, discussion, live music and art performances. The aim is to get people engaged with a particular topic and draw in crowds who might not usually attend film festivals. As MacKinnon explains: ‘A lot of the festivals that I work with are designed to showcase good new short film work and provide a path for filmmakers to get into the industry… which is good and really necessary, but I suppose there was this whimsical side of me that wanted to do something slightly more exploratory.’

The first-ever event, focused on translation and adaptation, took place earlier this year at the Shortwave Cinema in Bermondsey, London. With literary readings and even a game of Chinese Whispers to illustrate how narratives break down, the central focus was a back-to-back double-bill screening of GW Pabst’s 1931 French- and German-language versions of The Threepenny Opera, which aimed to highlight the differences in these translations.

Another literary classic, Nabokov’s Lolita, is the starting point for the second Rich Pickings event, due to take place at the London Short Film Festival on January 10, 2010. Tackling a tricky subject area, the programme will take a look at teenage and adolescent sexuality in all its forms – ‘imposed, real and perceived’. MacKinnon admits that it’s not an easy theme to curate: ‘What really appealed to me about it is that it scared me because it’s not something I’m comfortable with, and it’s not something where I know what I think about it.’ MacKinnon has decided to kick off proceedings with the rarely seen adolescent films of video artist Sadie Benning: ‘I wanted to start out with the voice of a teenager, but a teenager who kind of knew what she was doing.’ As the daughter of filmmaker James Benning, Sadie was a culturally astute adolescent, and her low-fi, Pixelvision films create a certain voyeuristic discomfort, as she explores her sexuality in intimate detail.

Many of the other films being screened present teenage sexuality from an adult perspective: Girl like Me (Rowland Jobson, 2009) follows a middle-aged man as he mistakenly ends up on a date with a young teenage girl; and Little Red Hoodie (Joern Utkilen, 2008), a disturbing take on the familiar fairy tale sees an adolescent girl crossing the Scottish highlands in a provocative red T-shirt as she delivers a television to her grandmother’s house. In addition, a child psychologist will talk about Nabokov’s Lolita, bringing a voice from outside the film industry and an important ‘dose of reality’ – a refreshing characteristic of Rich Pickings.

During our conversation, MacKinnon tosses around all sorts of intriguing options for the programme, from Japanese animé to Kenneth Anger’s fetishisation of youth and a late-night screening of Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (1970): ‘It’s like anything with programming, you go down a lot of different, interesting routes and beautiful by-roads before you hit the highway.’ She reveals she has hundreds of themes she wants to work on in the future, ranging from the serious (visions of the end of the world) to the fun and silly (‘monkeys versus robots’). With MacKinnon’s energetic programming, there should be many rich pickings for audiences at LSFF.

Eleanor McKeown

Max Hattler is refuting my observation that he’d like to transcend gravity. ‘Animation has become a sub-category of film, but I think film is a sub-category of animation.’ The intent in his work, he states, is not a matter of escaping the rules of physics, as in cartoons, but has more affinities with the beginnings of the cinematic form itself – origins he is keen to reclaim: ‘I don’t really like animation. People go in for the wrong reasons – because they like cartoons. I like abstraction and graphic design. I like early animation. Artists like Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger saw it as an extension of painting. Celluloid was a way of making paintings move, and that was the beginning of film. Then came narrative and Hollywood and telling stories with people in them. Now, animation is dominated by Disney and funny stuff – why do we have to live with that?’

If this talk of history seems irregular for such an avowed innovator, the confrontational stance does not. Hattler’s breakthrough film, his Royal College of Art graduation short film Collision, literally burst onto the scene in 2005, with a whirl of flags and a deft political kick. To date, Collision has notched up 209 international screenings, winning a clutch of awards and establishing Hattler as one of a wave of design-savvy digital moving image wunderkinds that include David OReilly and (sometime Hattler collaborator) Robert Seidel.

I speak to Hattler on the eve of his trip to the Fredrikstad Animation Festival in Norway where he will serve as a jury member, and perform a new live set with Japanese artist Noriko Okaku, cryptically titled /\/\/\. A curly-haired dynamo, Hattler is a regular presence on the festival circuit, his films constantly touring evocatively monikered events such as Optica, Cream, Exground and Encounters. Most recently, his short film Aanaatt has received special mention ‘for the art form’ at the No-Festival of Video Art and Animation in Chelyabinsk, Russia.

His latest work, Spin, is produced and distributed by edgy Parisian outfit Auteur de Minuit and extends the concerns of Collision. ‘With the mediatisation of war, you have embedded journalists, and it’s twisted. War is constructed as a narrative for news entertainment,’ Hattler explains. ‘Collision has a very specific take on conflict. It’s sexy and seductive and pretty to look at. It draws you in and halfway through you see horrible things.’

The development of Spin has led to Hattler researching political parades and mass rallies, alongside kaleidoscopic Hollywood dance routines: ‘I’ve been looking at work by Leni Riefenstahl, and the escapist vision of Busby Berkeley. I’ve also been considering Fordism and the division of labour, where individuals create a bigger pattern. I’m interested in the human as ornament. What happens when you replicate a figure a million times?’

With this correlation of dance troupes and military troops, Spin presents a constantly self-replenishing supply of plastic toy soldiers, whose uniform movements shift from dizzying eye-candy patterns into increasingly threatening displays, all to a soundtrack of 1940s big band music. This symbiosis of geometry and bodies is an emerging tendency in Hattler’s work, including currently touring live AV set Oh Yes, another collaboration with Noriko Okaku, featuring a YouTube-infected array of Olympian athletes and roller coasters. Contrasting with the painstaking and time-consuming nature of his film work, the live audiovisual performances offer a sense of catharsis: ‘It’s definitely a relief. An ad-hoc, random, uncontrollable adrenalin-based thing.’

Spin revels in its toys’ plastic shininess, mixing 2-D After Effects wizardry and 3-D scans, extending Hattler’s technical vocabulary and involving a small team of animators. While he regularly collaborates with other artists and musicians, Hattler confirms that his next work will be a solo piece: ‘It’s a luxury to get other people involved, but now I’m excited at just being able to tinker.’

Kate Taylor

London International Animation Festival

27 August-6 September 2009

Various venues, London

LIAF website

The London International Animation Festival, now in its sixth edition, brought a treasure trove of animated wonders to the capital from August 27 to September 6. One of the most interesting programmes was their selection of highlights from the 2008 Siggraph Asia festival, a yearly event that showcases the most innovative computer graphics from around the world. The films were a mixture of music videos, ads, technical demonstrations of animation processes as well as narrative shorts to reflect the variety of material presented at Siggraph Asia. The more corporate or technical films were the least interesting, but the others demonstrated a breadth and richness of vision that impressed this – until now – CGI-phobe writer.

There was a number of Gothic-toned films in the selection, starting with the predictable but enjoyable Emily by Kim Leow (Canada), which told the story of a girl who seems to have the ideal parents because she can do everything she wants, until a dark twist reveals why at the end. Guy Bar’ely’s Cycle (USA) told the surprisingly affecting story of a father dealing with guilt, remembering the events leading to a terrible tragedy as he sits on an underground train. The winner of the best film award at the Siggraph Asia festival, Smith and Foulkes’s This Way Up (UK), which follows the misadventures of two undertakers as they try to take the coffin of a grand-mother to the cemetery, was funny, deliciously macabre and brilliantly animated – it was not hard to see why it won the award. This Way Up, Cycle and Emily all used the conventional type of CGI character that we have become accustomed to, but The Horrors’ video for She Is the New Thing by C Hardy (UK) used a completely different style: messy, scribbled animated drawings depicted the band being attacked and torn apart by a ghoulish woman. It was a great horror short, dark, bloody and with a suitably gruesome ending.

Also different in style was F Dion and R van den Boom’s Monsieur Cok (France). One of the longest films at 9’45, it was a satirical denunciation of the connection between war and big industry. Seemingly set during the First World War, it shows how the egg-shaped Monsieur Cok substitutes robots to the workers in his factory, who are then picked up and placed onto the conveyor belts to be turned into soldiers. But the chillingly well-oiled system is threatened when an angry, straggly, bearded former worker comes back from the war with both legs amputated, determined to make his protest heard by Monsieur Cok. Inventive, detailed and using all shades of grey to create the oppressive atmosphere of a world where beating the system seems hopelessly impossible, Monsieur Cok was one of the most accomplished films in the selection.

At the opposite end of the chromatic scale, Taku Kimura’s Kudan (Japan) was a colourful and super-quirky fable illustrating the necessity of communicating with those nearest to us through the tale of a bonzai-obsessed father who pays no attention to his son. A mysterious bell-shaped hat is delivered to their house and when the father puts it on he is taken to another world where people grow in glowing plant pots. Strange tentacular creatures float around armed with scissors, ready to sever the plants, killing the humans connected to them. As his son’s plant is about to get cut off, the father manages to save him and they both find themselves safely back home, pink letters excitedly coming out of their mouths, the father having finally learnt the joys of talking to his son.

Another outlandish delight came courtesy of the Croatian T Jantol. Wizard of OS: The Fish Incident presented itself as the remaining footage of an experiment called the Fish Incident. A golden-eyed man in a metal body hanging from a bizarre implement attached to something resembling a computer menu bar seemed to be having an ongoing battle with a fish adorned with the design of an ancient map, the various episodes taking place in different fantastical environments. It was strange, enigmatic and fascinating, and the opacity of the meaning only made this writer want to watch it again.

Finally, Martina Stiftinger’s Onde Sonore (Austria) was one of the true gems of the programme. A film she made for her thesis, it showed fish floating to the sound of music, which are left stranded as if out of water when the music stops and have to find some ingenious way of starting the gramophone again. Playing with circularity, mechanical devices and repetitive cycles, it was beautifully animated, poetic, original and quite magical.

Virginie Sélavy

London International Animation Festival

27 August-6 September 2009

Various venues, London

LIAF website

Expectations were high for Don Hertzfeldt’s one-night-only appearance in London, billed as ‘the animation event of 2009’. Part of an extensive international tour, the show at the Curzon Soho cinema not only boasted the first London screening of his new short, I Am So Proud of You (2008), it also gave fans a rare opportunity to hear the man himself. And when I say ‘fans’, I really do mean ‘fans’. Over in the States, they turned up tattooed with Hertzfeldt characters, queuing up to get pieces of clothing signed. While there didn’t appear to be any tattoos in London, there was a definite sense of excitement as people filed into a slideshow of Hertzfeldt’s storyboard scribbles.

It’s easy to see why Hertzfeldt’s early shorts have garnered such a cult following. With their deadpan timing and macabre wit, they have that alternative sense of humour that immediately makes you feel that you’re a part of something special – you’ve passed into an exclusive club of people ‘who get it’. The Curzon audience certainly welcomed the early works like old friends. Two particular favourites were Rejected (2000), Hertzfeldt’s deranged assault on the commercial side of animation, and Billy’s Balloon (1998), a skewed re-imagining of The Red Balloon (1956), in which a flock of balloons terrorise some unfortunate stick-children.

Although amusingly scripted and beautifully paced, these YouTube hits are eclipsed by Hertzfeldt’s latest works. Typically self-effacing, Hertzfeldt himself described the chronological development of his films as going from ‘sucking to not sucking’. While it’s widely inaccurate to say that any of Hertzfeldt’s films ‘suck’, there is a marked difference in the scope and visual imagination of his last three shorts. They really are breathtaking.

Building on his technique of using simple hand-drawn stick-figures shot on a 1940s 35mm camera, Hertzfeldt has added new elements of photography, creating an intensified atmosphere of dark claustrophobia. The earliest film to demonstrate this new aesthetic is The Meaning of Life (2005), which opened up the Curzon Soho programme. Described by critics as an animated version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film depicts the changing fortunes of our solar system to a soaring Tchaikovsky soundtrack. As stick-people fill the screen, neurotically repeating lines of dialogue ad nauseam (‘Does this look infected to you?’; ‘I know he’s cheating on me’; ‘Give me your money’), Hertzfeldt shows us the absurdity and futility of existence in a beautifully amusing and poignant way.

This ability to simultaneously sweep across the entirety of human life and focus in on the minutiae of human anxiety is evident in Hertzfeldt’s most ambitious project to date. A trilogy-in-progress (I Am So Proud of You is the follow-up to his 2006 work, Everything Will Be OK), the films focus on Bill, a stick-man diagnosed with an unidentified disease, spiralling into mental illness. With Hertzfeldt’s quick-fire voice-over recounting the history of Bill and his family, both films play like hypnotic, mysterious literary vignettes. Indeed, Hertzfeldt’s work has been compared to Raymond Carver and Kurt Vonnegut (although interestingly, Hertzfeldt said that he rarely reads fiction and more commonly finds inspiration in philosophy, psychology and real life). Despite their brevity, these strange visions leave a long-lasting sense of bewilderment and awe, demanding contemplation and requiring repeated viewing. The frenetic atmosphere of the Curzon bar and clamouring autograph queues felt quite incongruous after such complex, beautiful, introspective pieces of work.

Eleanor McKeown

An Evening with Don Hertzfeldt was organised by the London International Animation Festival and took place at Curzon Soho, London, on June 25. The event also screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June. The LIAF’s 6th edition runs from August 27 to September 6 at various London venues. For more information about the festival, visit the LIAF website.

Still from This Way Up

Soho Rushes Short Film Festival

27-30 July 2009

Various venues, London

Festival Website.

The opening night of Soho Rushes Short Film Festival started off rather unexpectedly with a 105-minute film. Having shown various shorts at Rushes over the years, director Jan Dunn was in attendance at Curzon Soho to discuss her new feature-length film, The Calling. Having moved into features, Dunn described shorts as an excellent opportunity for filmmakers to ‘exercise their muscles’ and show what they can do. In this light, shorts are seen as a stepping-stone to other projects. This attitude could be detected in some of the films showing at the festival. With glossy productions and an animation category that included two commercials, sometimes screenings felt more like showcases for insiders to spot and hire new talent. This year saw a concerted effort to bring in outside audiences with new screenings at the ICA but there is no escaping the fact that RSSF, based in Soho at the epicentre of London’s creative industries and production companies, is essentially an industry-focused festival. This can be a little distancing for those less commercially minded. Indeed a day of seminars and master classes at BAFTA was fantastically interesting for burgeoning filmmakers wishing to hear about funding opportunities and technical developments but not quite so exciting for those interested in seeing the works themselves.

That is not to say that there isn’t a need for this type of festival. The capital has alternative calendar fixtures, such as London Short Film Festival, which cater to public audiences. It is great that this type of focal point for the industry exists, but at the same time there is a sense that if an event is too introspective, the professionals won’t get an outside perspective on the works and the general public will miss out on some of the gems in the programme. And there were gems to be seen.

Introduced as one of the strongest categories in the festival, the animation screening at the ICA had some excellent works and was also nicely eclectic, with a mix of stop-motion, cartoons and 3D work. Particularly inventive was Txt Island, which showed the development of a beach resort on an unspoilt desert island, using only plastic lettering and a peg signage panel. There were lovely touches as swimming alligators and leaping fire were created out of the simplest typography. Photograph of Jesus, which took a look at the work of a picture library, also used stop motion to enchanting effect. Based on an interview with one of the picture researchers, the film visually represented some of the more ridiculous requests received at the library (photographs of Jesus, a picture of Hitler at the 1948 Olympics in London). Origami Yetis swung between filing cabinets as Jack the Ripper tore paper cuts into the bodies of his victims. The overall winner of the category, This Way Up, involved a similarly charming physical type of comedy as two funeral directors struggled to carry a coffin back to their parlour. Echoing the comic choreography of silent cinema, the timing was spot-on and the 3D animation had a beautiful Gothic quality as the two figures made their way across swampy moors.

These films, and many more throughout the festival, were carefully considered works that wonderfully fitted the definition given by actress Pauline McLynn at the Q&A that accompanied The Calling: a successful short should be a ‘beautiful sonnet’. RSSF screens some fantastic work and it deserves to be visible to those both inside and outside the industry.

Eleanor McKeown

Format: CD + DVD

Release date: 2009

Distributor: Mute

Directors: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

Titles: From Her to Eternity; The Firstborn Is Dead; Kicking against the Pricks; Your Funeral, My Trial; Tender Prey

Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work is showing in the BFI Southbank Gallery until 11 July 2009.

To mark the re-release of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ entire back catalogue, the band commissioned artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard to make short films to accompany the albums. Each film consists of interviews with people who worked on the recordings, music journalists, fellow musicians and fans, edited into a structured monologue. From Her to Eternity, The Firstborn Is Dead, Kicking against the Pricks and Your Funeral, My Trial were released in March 2009. Next up is Tender Prey, which was screened at a special event at the BFI on June 17, followed by a Q&A with Forsyth, Pollard and Nick Cave. Virginie Sélavy talked to the filmmakers about the ideas behind the films and their connection to their art work and their installation Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work, currently showing in the BFI Southbank Gallery. For more information on Nick Cave’s re-released albums, please visit the Mute website.

Virginie Sélavy: How did the project come about?

Iain Forsyth: We met Nick (Cave) through doing a little bit of work for Dig, Lazarus, Dig!. Nick asked us if we would do the videos for that album, and whether we could do something in a slightly different way to the way music videos normally get done because he got a bit bored with spending an awful lot of money on those big-budget promo videos, which then never get really shown anymore. So we did four videos for the album with the budget that was set aside for one video.

Jane Pollard: The whole thing came about from that first meeting and from Nick and Warren (Ellis)’s idea that we might be able to approach video making in a different way as the landscape for music videos and what they mean for a band’s album campaign is changing very quickly. We started with this little set of one-minute clips for YouTube, which were really good fun to do and were real ice-breakers in the project. But we also started talking about the reissue collection. Mute wanted to have some sort of video content for each of the albums and Nick said, ‘What would you do? The last thing I want is a standard music documentary’. We told him about this way of working that we’ve been using in our art work, this kind of head-and-shoulders, straight-to-camera, very engaged, very conversational, kind of stitched monologue way of working. So we did a test shoot with about five of our friends who were Bad Seeds fans. We didn’t know if it would work. Most of the work that we make is about a much more abstract sense of what music means to people, so it’s more unusual and surprising and vague, and we weren’t sure whether we could tie it down this particularly, but it worked really well. We showed this five-minute example film to Nick and Warren and they said go for it. I think their fears were that it would seem too self-congratulatory, they didn’t want anything that seemed like they were giving themselves a big pat on the back. People are incredibly passionate about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds so we have hours and hours of footage of people simply saying, ‘they’re the best band in the world!’

VS: How did you select the people that you interviewed?

IF: It rippled out in a way. We started with what was closest to us, people that we knew were big fans. We spoke to the band and they pointed us towards people who worked on the records, they gave us a starting point, and we asked those people who we should be talking to, so that rolled out and out and became this absurdly long list of probably about 500 people in the end.

JP: It’s like a chain letter. We wrote an invitation letter and it was really anybody who had any connection, it could be one song or it could be with a whole album, it didn’t matter to us as long as there was this passionate connection. And for some people, it was because they’d worked with the band so it’d become part of their story as well. Then we put out a call to fans as well, we did that through the forums, using a web page. We got thousands of responses and we were looking for the way in which someone presented themselves in writing to get a sense of whether they would be able to tell their story in an interesting way.

IF: I think also that one of the unique things about the band is that they’ve been to so many corners of the world over the years that almost everywhere you go there’s a pocket of people connected to them in some way – people who knew Nick when he was living in Brazil, people who hung out with the Birthday Party in Australia, people who were in Berlin when Nick was there and were in bands that played with the Bad Seeds. It’s like a weird sort of social network. There’s a lot of really weird connections.

JP: We’re always looking for those kinds of connections. When we’re telling a story in this way, in this abstract, disjointed kind of monologue, it feels to us like a single head, rather than the 40 heads that it actually is, a single voice that is actually a bit schizophrenic.

VS: That really comes across in the Tender Prey film. The way you edited the interviews together makes it feel like all the people talking are having a dialogue with one other, and that there’s one thread of thought that runs through the interview. Was that one of your rules in constructing the films?

JP: Yes, absolutely. It’s a kind of device and structure that we’ve used in our art work before so we’re quite well practised at working with a lot of material. We had at least 40 minutes per person, so we had to go through it all to pick the bits that we liked. It’s quite an intense experience because you have to immerse yourself in all of the footage so that you begin to hear those conversations coming out. When we started making work like this in 2001, we thought it was about finding people saying the same thing. But when you edit it together, people saying the same thing is really dull. What’s much more powerful is when it is about people almost finishing each other’s sentences and taking a point or a word and spinning it off in another direction. So sometimes all we’re doing is listening for the repetition of a particular word or a phrase, like a lot of people would use the word ‘cave’ but as a verb. They would say, ‘it feels like the music is caving in on you’, and suddenly you can go from that to ‘Cave does this and this in his music’, and you’re able to tie stuff together through onomatopoeic and poetic structures.

VS: You’ve had an interest in contemporary music throughout your work. You have recreated musical performances with A Rock’n’Roll Suicide (David Bowie) and File Under Sacred Music (The Cramps). What is it that interests you in creating artworks around music?

JP: I think that our work has always used music as a kind of catalyst, as a device to lead to other things. The reason why we use music is that we think the relationship between the artist and the audience in music is a far more appealing one than the one between the artist or artwork and the viewer in art. That seems quite an odd relationship, it’s often quite distant. But in music, and certainly in the music that we love, that relationship is central to everything. And when we were art students we had this really naive passion about wanting to try and make art that operated in that way. So without becoming musicians or being in a band, without having to deal with what we see as the limitations of that discipline, we decided that we wanted to bring with us in some way the spirit or the attitude or the potential that music has in relation to its audience and the way that the audience takes and owns music and uses it in its life.

IF: We met doing our BA at Goldsmiths in the early 90s and at that time a lot of the work that students were making was quite heavily conceptual. It was just after the Damien Hirst/Frieze generation and a lot of those artists were successful at that time and the students that we were studying with were making work that on the surface we found really uninspiring. But they could talk a good talk. They could talk all day about how the work related to Derrida or another French philosopher. But we were just left very cold. So we’d be going to see our fellow students’ work and being really bored and then going to a gig and being blown away by this most visceral live experience, and there was something about that connection that we wanted to try and emulate in some way.

JP: It was also about understanding that it’s too easy to believe that that connection is about the authentic moment, that somehow that’s more original and more real than the kind of constructed or inauthentic object. It’s not, we all know that bands go out and do the same performance night in, night out, that it is constructed, that it is rehearsed. But there is still something in the way it presents itself that creates an emotional connection with you. Our artwork, at that time, from the mid- to late 90s, looked at that sort of contradiction, and played with it. So we looked at staging gigs in galleries. The thing that interested us the most was the idea of reconstituting something, and the most extreme example of this was the piece we did where we incredibly accurately re-enacted the last ever Ziggy Stardust show from 1973. We did a stitch for stitch, word for word representation, we put together a band, we rehearsed them endlessly. It was about this enormous human endeavour with the absolute understanding that it was going to fail, that we couldn’t transport you back to 1973, that it couldn’t be perfect, that it was going to fall down in so many ways. But there’s something about this kind of endeavour, its earnestness, its craftsmanship in some ways that we hoped would have an immediate and powerful emotional effect on the audience, that it would be like oscillating between this understanding of it being fake, but real, because it’s here, it’s happening, and it’s connecting to you in the moment, and understanding that there’s something nostalgic in it. It was an embarrassing work to make, because it’s also tied up with things like tribute bands.

IP: It was pretty uncool… (laughs)

VS: You’re now exploring similar ideas in your new piece, Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work, which is currently showing in the BFI Gallery. Do you feel your interest has shifted from music to film or is it just a way to explore similar ideas in a different medium?

JP: I think part of it is about wanting to reach more people. By using moving image, it can exist in real time for a long time, rather than in the moment for one night.

VS: What was the idea behind Radio Mania?

JP: It comes in a direct line from the very first bit of work we did with moving image, which was the Cramps piece, where instead of recreating a gig, we attempted to remake a bootleg video, like a video document of that gig. With this piece, we wanted to place the audience right inside a moving image environment. Iain had read about Laurens Hammond, the guy who invented the Hammond organ, who had invented this amazing Teleview 3D system in 1922, which lasted for 24 days in a New York cinema and then was completely ripped out and never seen again. We get really interested in this sort of edge science, weird things that people are doing, whether it’s trying to contact the dead or trying to make a transmitter or a receiver that is able to hear sounds from 100 years ago, whatever it is, we love that sense of pointless endeavour. And it was through looking at this Teleview system that we stumbled onto The Man from Mars in the BFI archive, which was the film that was commissioned to show off the system to everybody, and was the second 3D feature that was made…

IF: …which I think was also appealing, the idea of it being the second ever feature in 3D. It’s such a beautifully tragic thing: that would really annoy you, because I think the first was only literally a couple of months earlier, so it wasn’t like there was a huge gap, so there must have been a point where they thought they were on the verge of delivering the first ever 3D feature, and to be the second must be a little bit frustrating.

JP: And the film has within it stories of pointless endeavours, like the guy who’s trying to contact Mars through the radio, and the notion of the dream used to allow a whole set of events to happen and then you find out that it was just a dream. It had so much of this in it that we got excited about this theme of the film, and it gave us the device we needed to be able to stage this immersive moving image environment.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

‘I can’t imagine this talk happening anywhere else but Britain’, said Mike Figgis at the conclusion of Bird’s Eye View Festival’s Sex on Screen panel discussion. He had a point, for although the debate had touched on subjects such as sexual taboos, pornography and masturbation, this was executed ever so politely.

Talking about how gay porn had influenced mainstream cinema, the event’s chair, former Erotic Review editor Rowan Pelling, said: ‘The flipside of that is that it makes you think, “if I don’t like it up the back entrance then there’s something wrong with me and I should go and live on a desert island somewhere”’.’

Under The Skin director Carine Adler, who didn’t seem keen to talk about anything – let alone sex – before the debate was in full swing said to fellow panellist pornographer Petra Joy: ‘I would not have the courage to do what you do, I avoided any nudity, I don’t have the guts to do it, I want to stay ‘artsy’. My mother! Oh my god.’

A similar reaction came from the audience, who burst into embarrassed giggles when Joy described the misogynistic sexual acts depicted in mainstream porn – leaving her to joke that she was used to talking at erotic film festivals and hadn’t perhaps prepared herself for this altogether more polite affair.

But thank god for Joy who spoke loudly and proudly about sex on screen, from her unique viewpoint as a female pornographer, and well done to Bird’s Eye View for enlisting her. She raised the night’s most interesting point; distribution of her films, she said, was hindered by a censorship process that made no sense. Both she and Figgis (suitably attired, some might say, in a long, navy Mac) argued that arbitrary censorship meant that graphic violence slipped through the net, while graphic – read realistic – sex, with orgasms and erections, was not able to. ‘What’s the problem with making a film to arouse people? We see lots of violence in films, like Baise-Moi, and [that’s allowed because] they say, “well the sex wasn’t made to arouse”. But that’s the problem because you can’t control what’s going to arouse people’, she said. Pelling summed it up well, saying: ‘Surely the least harmful form of sex on screen is that which is specifically designed to arouse rather than repel or horrify?’

The problem was compounded, Joy said, by porn shops who balk at supplying films that have no big-name stars and no male ‘money shots’ or other such clichés. What’s more, cinemas need licenses to show hardcore porn – her films shown that night at the ICA were cut to comply with censorship regulations – which puts up yet another barrier between the films and their target audience.

Sam Roddick, founder of upmarket sex shop Coco De Mer, said she too had been restricted by licensing laws, which control the percentage of ‘directly sexual’ products she sells in the shop and subject each item to a permissibility audit. ‘They were very very vague about it’, she said, ‘so I had to get a bit more explicit. I said, ‘I’m carrying 18th-century prints, and they’re of two bridesmaids and a bride and they’re going down on her, and they said fine’. She defined erotic cinema as ‘a lot more emotional, more abstract’ than pornography, which she sees as ‘functional’: ‘When people watch porn they are either doing it to have sex or to wank. There is an outcome.’

Joy called for more films to show female pleasure – ‘women are multi-orgasmic and they can keep on coming after the man has but we never see that’ – gay men who weren’t suicidal, positive sexual role models, and the crucial matter of contraception: ‘it’s sex education as well as entertainment’.

It remains true that most films gloss over the use of contraception, unless the matter is overblown into a comedy sequence. Are viewers to believe so many people don’t give it a thought? Or do filmmakers have the right not to be realistic? Possibly, contraception is inherently unsexy and therefore an unwanted distraction to big screen sex scenes.

Realistic sex is not what Adler finds titillating. Discussing the much praised sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, she said: ‘A married couple having great sex is not something I find exciting. Maybe if they’d had sex with the murderous dwarf I would have found it more so’.

For his part, Figgis declared all pornography ‘boring’ and said what really excited him was unexpected erotica cropping up in non-erotic films: ‘I like it in The Misfits when they suddenly start smacking Marilyn Monroe, it’s one of the sexiest things I’ve seen. You can’t keep that woman down, she is so sexy – maybe she insisted on that scene.’

While he praised Joy’s positive outlook, he admitted that he liked miserable things to happen in films, so dysfunctional sex was no problem for him. Looking at his own body of work, this shouldn’t come as a surprise: Leaving Las Vegas, for instance, is a doomed and tragic love story with scenes in which sex is brutal, forced or impossible.

The short films shown after the discussion were nothing like that. A combination of Joy’s own work and Coco De Mer’s collection of erotic shorts, the films were light-hearted, beautiful and – dare I say it – sexy. Joy’s In Her Wildest Dreams was most definitely a porn film. With no plot or dialogue, the film showed a woman being indulged in many sensual ways by an ensemble of men and women. Following the principles the filmmaker had outlined during the talk, it showed the female orgasm, a positive, sexual, female role model, and as Joy put it, plenty of ‘guy candy’. The action took place behind various layers: part of the film was shot underwater, another part was shot through a beaded curtain across the doorway and mainstream porno’s procession of body parts gave way to more holistic shots taking in clothes, setting and some very contented-looking faces.

Clothes also played a big part in Eva Midgley’s Honey and Bunny, which consisted in a series of cheeky vignettes in which the two actors played out various fantasies. Kitted out in lustrous fabrics and beautiful shoes, the women were not passive sex objects but agents of their sophisticated sexuality. Similarly, Midgley’s Erotic Moments showed gentle, loving, consensual contact, such as the striking Footsie, which depicted a man being pleasured by a woman’s foot.

But nothing was more honest or more moving than the sex scene in Top Girl, a film by Rebecca Johnson that screened as part of another shorts programme during the festival. In the coming-of-age tale, a teenage girl, in her effort to become a rapper, finds herself being led to the bathroom of a DJ’s flat where he encourages her to fellate him. Full of adolescent feistiness, she delights in the encounter until she gets taunted for it at school. It succinctly expressed the joy, secrecy, awkwardness and taboo of sex.

Particularly British sex.

Lisa Williams

Watch the trailer for Top Girl.

Still from Love You More

7th Hull International Short Film Festival

21-26 April 2009

Reel Cinema, Hull, UK

Glimmer 2009 website

Short films are often the ideal form for fledgling filmmakers to develop ideas and themes, whilst also honing their storytelling skills, although they are often unjustly overlooked by mainstream audiences. Laurence Boyce, director of Glimmer, insists that ‘Any good film – whether one minute or four hours long – will ultimately justify its running time. We hope that people will find things to discover and enthuse about, and realise that short films are brilliant slices of cinema despite their smaller running times’. Now in its seventh year as an event, and in its second year under the Glimmer banner, the Hull International Short Film Festival celebrates the recent output of the short film community, whilst also providing educational sessions for aspiring visual artists, and a social-political context that is often absent from such events. Boyce believes that ‘shorts are a great indicator of a culture and a time in society, as if they were snapshots of a particular idea or concern’, and by programming films that deal with life in Israel alongside retrospectives of the work of cult animator David Firth and the experimental filmmaker John Smith, who will be on hand to discuss his career to date, the 2009 Glimmer Festival promises to confirm the importance of the short film format.

This year’s line-up of over 200 shorts from the UK and overseas will compete for the inaugural Anthony Minghella Awards for Best UK Short and Best International Short. Appropriately, one of the main attractions in the UK competition is Sam Taylor-Wood’s Love You More, which was produced by the late Minghella himself and screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 before being nominated for the 2009 Best Short Film BAFTA. Written by Closer scribe Patrick Marber, this is an affecting portrait of youth in 70s London, in which two teenagers bond after they find themselves in the local record shop where they both want to buy a copy of the new Buzzcocks single, ‘Love you More’. The coming of age theme is also explored in Muriel d’Ansembourg’s Play, in which children discover what happens when dares are played for real, and Ryd Cook’s Away, which follows a young boy as he runs away from home and spends the night in a decrepit barn. Grisly pleasures are promised by the Yorkshire competition, which offers a girl coming to terms with her transformation into a zombie in Duncan Laing’s Bitten, and a family outing becoming something more sinister with the arrival of a stranger in Matt Taabu’s Into the Woods.

Aside from rewarding the industriousness of short filmmakers, the festival is not afraid of examining pressing issues within the industry itself, and the Pay to Play? section of the programme will discuss the attitude of the business towards its unpaid workers, many of whom make the realisation of both short and feature length projects possible, and the ethical legitimacy of festivals charging submission fees to filmmakers. Anatomy of a Film 2 focuses on the process of developing and making a short film, while a panel of industry insiders will contribute to What Happens Next?, which will deal with the necessity of advertising and the role of film critics in bringing audience awareness to such projects. With a programme that includes such a wide range of screenings and topics, the 2009 Glimmer Festival should prove to be an essential event for anybody interested in the short film sector.

John Berra