Features, Festivals

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL: RFK MUST DIE

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RFK in crowd

Photo © Evan Freed

RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Robert Kennedy

Director: Shane O’Sullivan

Showing at the East End Film Festival

Date: Wed 23 April, 6:15pm

Venue: Stratford Picture House

Director: Shane O’Sullivan

The East End Film Festival runs 17-24 April

Festival website

On May 18, 1968, 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan sat in his room in Pasadena and wrote repeatedly in his notebook, ‘R.F.K. must die – RFK must be killed Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated… before June 5 ’68’.

JFK’s younger brother was running for President on an anti-war ticket, the great white hope of poor black communities torn apart by rioting in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination six weeks earlier.

On June 4th, Bobby Kennedy won the all-important California Democratic primary and looked set to challenge Nixon for the White House. After a rousing victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, shots rang out in a kitchen pantry. Witnesses saw Sirhan firing his gun several feet in front of Kennedy and he was convicted as the lone assassin. But according to the autopsy, the fatal shot was fired from an inch behind Kennedy’s right ear, suggesting a second gunman was involved.

My new feature documentary, RFK Must Die, explores the controversies surrounding Kennedy’s death. How could Sirhan have fired the fatal shot if he was several feet in front of Kennedy? Who was the girl in the polka-dot dress seen with Sirhan in the pantry who later fled down a fire escape, exclaiming, ‘We shot him! We shot him!’ And why has Sirhan never been able to remember the shooting?

At first, these struck me as intriguing ingredients for a screenplay but during my research, I discovered new video footage of three alleged CIA operatives at the hotel that night – men who had previously worked together on plots to assassinate Castro. I pitched BBC Newsnight and they commissioned a twelve-minute film to find out why these men were at the Ambassador Hotel that night.

So began a long and very odd journey as a first-time investigator into sixties conspiracy. The Newsnight piece and a Guardian article led to a US distribution deal for a feature documentary and a book to be published on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination in June.

At the heart of the mystery is Sirhan himself. At 5’2″, he trained to be a jockey but a bad fall from a horse left him on the dole and increasingly disillusioned. He got into mysticism and started hypnotising himself in his room, practising ‘automatic writing’ – repeatedly writing down his goals, to help make them come true. But what led him to write ‘RFK must die RFK must die’?

Since the early fifties, the CIA had been trying to create a hypnotically-programmed assassin, a real-life Manchurian Candidate who could be trained to kill with no conscious memory of being programmed. Dr. Herbert Spiegel, America’s leading expert on hypnosis, believes this is what happened to Sirhan.

Today, Sirhan is still in the same California prison as Charles Manson. He told me he feels trapped in a Kafkaesque world, imprisoned for a crime he doesn’t remember. Now, a new audio recording of the gunshots has emerged. Sirhan’s gun held eight bullets but audio experts have concluded there are thirteen shots on the tape, suggesting Sirhan may well have been a decoy for the real assassin.

Shane O’Sullivan

RFK Must Die screens in the East End Film Festival on April 23 and is released on May 16. Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy will be published in June.

Features

MIDNIGHT MOVIES LAUNCH NIGHT

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Midnight Movies poster

Event: Midnight Movies launch night

Date: 29 February 2008

Location: Curzon Soho

Showing: Society (1989)

A midnight movie is not just a film shown at midnight. Bridget Jones’ Diary shown at midnight would not be a midnight movie. Neither would a midnight screening of Time Regained – not unless the crowd were told to speak in French and to bash a teaspoon against a teacup when a compere gave the cue.

From its origins in 1950s America, the midnight movie slot has always been given over to low-budget, horror and trash. Top scores if the film is all three. Rather like the graveyard shift on radio, the midnight movie slot is meant for the niche or risqué stuff admired by nighthawks, insomniacs and the downright crazy.

The midnight movie concept was dead by the mid-80s. Until then late-night movie-goers had been able to feast on the horrors and delights of films such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, going back time and time again for more. But things changed when the big studios saw the midnight screenings as an effective marketing tool and tried to reverse the bottom-up creation of cult films by releasing their movies at midnight in the hope of attracting an audience as loyal as the fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example.

Rocky is perhaps the most famous and persistent example of the midnight movie, its fans still meeting at cinemas the world over to watch a midnight screening and act out scenes from the film. Their crude and irreverent heckling of the characters in the film often reaches anarchic proportions and, as any visitor to a Rocky event can tell you, makes for a damn good night.

It is this spirit of fun and spontaneity that inspired the folk at Curzon Soho to bring back the midnight movie. But rather than show just the old classics, the events team hope to screen all kinds of films that reflect the spirit of the midnight movie. ‘We wanted to put on a night that people wandering around Soho after a few drinks could come to and enjoy. The first two screenings are of US films but we want to move away from just that and start showing European films, for example, which still have that gritty, grimy feel to them’, said Simon Howarth of Curzon.

Their first offering, Society, hit the right spot. Gory, dark and camp in equal measure, the film’s 1980s styling and casting of Baywatch goodie-goodie Billy Warlock lend it an added veneer of trash. By most people’s standards it is not a good movie and at any other screening could be justifiedly panned. But it is just right for the midnight slot, which turns its shortcomings into merits.

As a prelude to the screening the Curzon’s main bar area was given over to a party complete with free beer (well, one free beer per head) and hosts and hostesses dressed up like zombies. The dark 80s tunes, such as the theme from Twin Peaks, provided a suitable soundtrack to the revelling of cinema-goers who had been able to leisurely make their way to the Curzon and who were enjoying meeting and greeting other midnight film buffs.

With bums on cinema seats, author of The Cult Film Reader and director of the Cult Film Archive Xavier Mendik introduced the screening, explaining how Society showed the ruptures in the Reaganesque Conservatism of the 1980s in the US. It was interesting and informed but it was not quite the right time for that kind of talk. The crowd was loose and ready to heckle. They were obviously discerning film fans, and would have been interested in what Xavier had to say if it had been earlier that day or when the hangover subsided the next. But having him speak then was a bit like casting Laurence Olivier in a Carry On film. There were a few guilt-riddled heckles and some whoops and cheers but a quirkier, cheekier kind of compere would have been better suited to the mood of the audience. Statuesque and matronesque glamster Dolly Rocket of the Flash Monkey burlesque club came to mind as an ideal candidate. Or Vampira.

But compere queries aside, the return of Midnight Movies captured the spirit of the original phenomenon. It has obviously struck a chord with Londoners who were so eager to reserve for the next event (a screening of the Grindhouse Double Bill in its full glory) that an extra screening has been announced. Now we just have to sit back and wait for Odeon and Cineworld to announce that they are doing the same.

Lisa Williams

Festivals

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2008

Asyl

Berlinale

8-16 February 2008

This year, the true beauties of the Berlinale film festival remained on the margins: in the final days of the cine-marathon, a cinema far away from the buzzing festival centre presented a late-matinee screening of Wakamatsu Koji’s stunning exploitation classic Ecstasy of the Angels (Teshi no kokotsu), a visually stunning head-on collision of explicit violence, political revolt and soft-core porn. Part of a mini-tribute to Wakamatsu’s work – whose latest film United Red Army premiered this year in the International Forum section – this early feature tells the story of a left-wing terrorist faction planning an all-out attack on Tokyo. Despite all the kinky sex and ferocious brutality, Wakamatsu’s main concern is to explore the sacrifice and self-destruction that the revolutionary process requires from the young radicals, and to observe how they ultimately turn against each other instead of combining their forces to fight the odious system.

United Red Army, which I’d seen only a few days before, then almost felt like a remake of Ecstasy, which he made in 1972. In his new film, Wakamatsu sets out to reveal the full history of the militant student movement that rocked Japan during the 1960s in a challenging three-hour docu-fiction drama, staged as a chamber play in the group’s mountain hide-out. Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of both films is an oddly engaging energy and a genuinely disturbing quality, which was absent from most of the works presented in the three main festival sections. That said, leaving the blatantly commercial and rather underwhelming films in the Official Competition aside, there were some welcome surprises in the other two main sections – Forum and Panorama.

Only vaguely related to the festival overall music focus was the wonderfully refreshing Russian feature Mermaid (Rusalka) by Anna Melykian. A freely adapted, near-surreal version of Antonin Dvorák’s eponymous opera, the film follows the bizarre life of an idealistic girl from childhood to maturity. While the tone is at times perplexingly downbeat, the film radiates a wonderful, bitter-sweet and light-hearted spirit that opened this year’s Panorama with a ray of light. Two fairly impressive documentaries offered musical experiences of different sorts: Steven Sebring’s rewarding Patti Smith: Dream of Life and the way more off-centre Heavy Metal In Baghdad, a touching portrait of an Iraq heavy metal band after the fall of Saddam Hussein, whose members struggle with the impossibility of living peacefully as long-haired head-bangers in a war-torn country.

Moving into low-budget, queer territory, the weirdest and undoubtedly most indigestible film was Bruce LaBruce’s latest provocation Otto; or Up with Dead People, which follows a depressed gay zombie through the streets and dark rooms of Berlin. Screened in London as part of this year’s Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the film mixes horror, hard-core porn, silent film and documentary into a mercilessly sensationalist shocker. Queer activist Rosa von Praunheim’s new documentary Dead Gay Men and Living Lesbians (Tote Schwule – Lebende Lesben) was disappointingly dilute, and didn’t live up to its promising title. Quite different from Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s debut The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, which sounded like a semi-improvised fairy tale about a Filipino ‘lady boy’ who meets her sleazy porn chatroom boss for a hanky-panky weekend in Paris, but turned out to be a charming first feature, once the faux documentary style had established a vivid, convincing world.

Although there was no readily identifiable new trend at this year’s festival, a loose group of films by Asian women directors all refreshingly focused on quotidian inconsequence. Kumazaka Izuru’s wonderful life-affirming feature Asyl (Asyl – Park and Love Hotel) – which deservedly won the Best First Feature Award – centres on the bizarre life of a middle-aged woman who runs an unusual love hotel in Tokyo, with a beautiful little park on its rooftop which is open to the public. Deliberately sullen and rather dark in tone, the film paints a complex portrait of the landlady and of three other women who rent rooms at the hotel, carefully revealing how their defiant spirit collides with false pretences and loneliness.

Equally remarkable for its acute attention to detail, Naoko Ogigami’s Glasses (Megane) was primarily a wonderfully detoxifying treat. Set on a nearly untouched island, the film takes time to explore the almost excessively relaxed insular mentality, and Ogigami skilfully handles the slow pace by filling her script with just the right amount of deadpan humour and ineffable sensuous delight. Both films share a heartfelt desire to step back from big themes and melodrama to look for new ways to uncover meaning in the transitional ebb and flow of everyday lives. Likewise, two multi-character features from Taiwan, Zero Chou’s Drifting Flowers (Piao Lang Qing Chun) and Singing Chen’s God Man Dog, presented elegant, episodical views of everyday life and love steeped in social realism and artistically shaped in a poetic narrative.

Among the vast quantity of new titles, these were the films that afforded the greatest pleasures. A few glorious works from the archives provided extra thrills: Peter Geyer’s Jesus Christ Savior (Jesus Christus Erlí¶ser) is the long-lost filmed record of an incredible theatrical monologue by Klaus Kinski, held in 1971, which turned into an aggressive altercation with the hostile audience. Elsewhere, Charles Burnett’s re-released 1983 My Brother’s Wedding authoritatively demonstrated what truly independent filmmaking really looks like. Cut down by Burnett himself to 81 impressively rich, deftly choreographed and toughly funny minutes, it was a wonderful, startling discovery that alone would have made the trip to Berlin worthwhile.

Pamela Jahn

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH CATHERINE BREILLAT

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The Last Mistress

The Last Mistress

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 April 2008

Venue: Curzon Mayfair, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artifical Eye

Director: Catherine Breillat

Based on: the novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly

Original title: Une vieille maîtresse

Cast: Asia Argento, Fu’ad Ait Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute

France/Italy 2007

104 mins

A confrontational filmmaker, Catherine Breillat has often been unfairly and violently reviled simply for taking a brutally honest look at sexuality. Her past work, including Romance (1999), Fat Girl (A ma soeur!, 2001) and Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004) always offers a provocative, radical questioning of traditional views of female sexuality. Her latest, The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse), is somewhat of a departure. Adapted from a novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, it is Breillat’s first costume drama and has an unashamedly romantic tone. It centres on the impossibly handsome Ryno de Marigny, a dissolute dandy striving to disentangle himself from a passionate ten-year relationship with his earthly Spanish mistress Vellini, in order to be allowed to marry the rich and pretty Hermangarde. We were able to talk to Catherine Breillat at last year’s London Film Festival, where she told us about dandies and femmes fatales, her fraught relationship with the French press and how her new film differs from her previous work. Fully recovered from the stroke she suffered before she started shooting the film, she was as sharp and lively an interviewee as ever.

Virginie Sélavy: The Last Mistress is your first costume drama – how did you approach it?

Catherine Breillat: First of all, I fell in love with the novel. I think that if I’d lived in his century I would obviously have been Barbey d’Aurevilly.

VS: Why obviously?

CB: Because he was a dandy, and because his work was censored.

VS: Is that something you identify with?

CB: Yes, and it’s clear that in the film I identified with the role of Ryno.

VS: Ryno rather than any of the female characters?

CB: Absolutely.

VS: Why?

CB: It’s an autobiographical book, Barbey d’Aurevilly is Ryno de Marigny. I’ve always dressed as a dandy, I’ve always liked androgyny, and I wanted to film a boy who would have the beauty of a girl.

VS: This is something that recurs throughout your work. In Anatomy of Hell, Rocco Siffredi has a position that is almost feminine.

CB: He was very criticised for that in France! They asked him, ‘why did you let Catherine Breillat boss you around?’ In France, he’s a star, but as a stud who reinforces men’s idea of pure masculinity. So the fact that he let me feminise him… He replied, ‘because I like to be dominated by Catherine Breillat’. Rocco likes porn films and Pasolini. He loves cinema and he’s much more intelligent than people think.

VS: You offer a very blunt, honest, adult reflection on sexuality, so it’s strange that it seems to disturb so many critics.

CB: French critics are not so bad now. Although with Anatomy of Hell, one of them wrote a piece in a French paper that was presented as the announcement of my death. It was over two pages and the title said, ‘To Be Done With Catherine Breillat’. It was very violent.

VS: I don’t think that the critics would have been so shocked and would have reacted so virulently if it’d been the work of a male filmmaker. Do you think that it is the fact that you are a woman that disturbs people so much?

CB: Yes, definitely. In painting terms, I’m not Marie Laurencin, I’m Soutine or Bacon. And that’s what’s unbearable to them. Marie Laurencin is an esteemed painter but she paints pretty things. I find beauty in violence and brutality, and that doesn’t fit with the image of a woman. Claire Denis is another filmmaker who doesn’t mince her words, who is more brutal than a man. But she came after me, so she was lucky! At the same time too much aggressiveness prompts other people to defend you passionately. That’s why I don’t want to say that all critics badmouth me. Some of them do, like the one who wrote the death announcement piece. I met him after I’d had the stroke. He was coming out of my producer’s office where he’d done an interview for another film. I said, ‘ah, it’s you? All I do is make films! Why do you need to express so much hate, like a criminal, like a murderer?’ And as I was still half-paralysed, I said, ‘you see, I’m still alive! And I’ll still be around to piss you off! I’ll survive you!’ He was livid!

(pause)

But in reality, I’m also very arrogant. In the film, the Vicomte de Prony says, ‘what I like in Monsieur de Marigny is that if he ever becomes Minister, he will make a point of being unpopular’. And I think I’ve always been like this. I’ve always provoked what I’m complaining about now, so in reality I’m not complaining about it. I need opposition to construct myself against.

VS: The tone of The Last Mistress is very different from that of your previous films, it’s a lot less belligerent. It seems that you’re not trying to break taboos so much in this film.

CB: But I’ve never wanted to break taboos, I simply want to go through them. Taboos are like initiatory doors. So it’s quite the opposite, I like to create taboos, to know where they are. I do like to go beyond the limits. That’s what I see as my work.

VS: In one of the reviews of The Last Mistress, a journalist said that it’s a feminist revision of the myth of the femme fatale. Is that how you see it?

CB: Everything was in the book, including the conversations between the Contesse d’Artelles et the Marquise de Flers, when they analyse how you have to manipulate a man, which are indeed very feminist. I knew that people would say I’d written this but it’s in the book, it was written by Barbey d’Aurevilly. However, I have explored the myth of the femme fatale. Vellini is the femme fatale, she’s a ‘flamenco’ character, she comes from Seville, but I approached her through the vamps of the 30s and 40s, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth; and also Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme, she has that singular sexual freedom, the freedom to provoke desire knowingly, which caused a scandal when the book came out, and later when Bardot made the film.

VS: Was it difficult to deal with that type of character? Were you worried that it might fall into a Carmen type of cliché?

CB: But what is fiction, if not a series of clichés in which people see themselves? We all live the same lives and if we can still read very old books it’s because they have fixed fictional types in which we can recognise ourselves. It’s not a convention, it’s a type of reference to oneself. The commonplace is precisely the place in which everyone recognises themselves. I’ve worked a lot on the commonplace. People have said that Virgin [36 fillette, 1988] was full of clichés, of things that people already knew. But that’s not true, it was about what people never show.

VS: Why did you choose Asia Argento for the role of Vellini?

CB: I thought that the flamenco character had to be a rock’n’roll character in our times. She had to have a very sexual, provocative side, but also be very androgynous. Rock’n’roll women are both feminine and masculine. They are aggressively sexual, like Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme, and at the same time, unlike Bardot, who was really a woman, they are masculine, like Marlene Dietrich, smoking cigarettes dressed in a suit. In Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel, Vellini smokes the cigar.

VS: For this film you’ve also worked again with Roxanne Mesquida for the third time. Do you like working with actors that you already know?

CB: No, with actors I have invented! It’s not just that I know them, I made them! It is true that I’ve made three films with Roxanne. As soon as she entered the casting room for Fat Girl, I said to my assistant, ‘you see her, she’s mine, you can stop the casting’. With Fu’ad [Ait Aattou] it was the same thing. He wasn’t an actor. He was sitting at the terrace of a café and when he got up I pointed at him and said to my assistant, ‘this is Ryno de Marigny, that’s exactly it’. I wanted my assistant to run after him and ask for his phone number because I thought we would never be able to find him again! But Fu’ad came straight towards me, maybe because I had so obviously pointed at him, and said he’s seen Romance and really liked it and he gave me his phone number. But he didn’t do it in a subservient way, he did it with this magnificent pride that he has.

VS: You have described Anatomy of Hell as ‘the end of a necessary cycle’.

CB: Yes, I had to take it to the end, I couldn’t have made The Last Mistress, which is essentially a crowd-pleaser, if I hadn’t done Anatomy, which was the worst film I could make.

VS: Why that idea of a necessary cycle?

CB: Because films are necessary to my life. If I didn’t make films I wouldn’t live. I’m only alive when I make films, when I write or when I talk about cinema. When I stop doing that, I feel like an invalid. My daily life is terrible. Daily life is not real life; real life is cinema, literature, and running around the world talking about my films.

VS: What did Anatomy of Hell represent for you personally?

CB: Daring to do what I hadn’t dared to do in Romance, which is to show the reality of the sexual organ. In Romance, the character talks about her face and about her vulva while looking at herself in the mirror, and the mirror should have been between her legs, instead of reflecting the pubic triangle, which is now completely accepted and politically correct. It was the sexual organ that repulses and horrifies that I wanted to film. And I didn’t do it because I was a coward and it was that cowardice that I had to transgress. So I made Anatomy of Hell for that reason. I filmed a hairy horrifying/horrified vulva, like the face of the Medusa. It was not about a real sexual organ, but about this world-wide fantasy of the vulva as a horrifying thing.

VS: Did your stroke have any influence on The Last Mistress?

CB: None at all. What changed in relation to my previous films was that I finally understood that the power of a filmmaker is very abstract. Now I know how to control a film without giving orders. I don’t think I could have kept control of the set designers, the costume designers, etc, before, but with this I made the film exactly the way I wanted. I often had half of the set removed because it was just too busy and you couldn’t see the essential anymore. Apart from that, the only thing that my stroke changed is that the insurers don’t want to insure me anymore!

VS: Do you think that The Last Mistress opens a new cycle?

CB: No, I only referred to a cycle that ended with Anatomy so that people who are scared of my films would understand that this one is less esoteric and more watchable. Usually, my films do well until the 6pm screening, then at 8pm attendance dives and while all the other films generally do better at the weekend, mine crash. So I wanted to say that this film was different from the others, where people were scared to go with their family or their wives, that this film could be seen in a respectable fashion… it’s for all audiences! (laughs)

VS: The tone in The Last Mistress is definitely much softer than in your previous films.

CB: Of course, since it’s a very romantic novel. So it seems softer, but it’s still a film made by me, so it’s not that soft. To get out of the enclosed drama that is my specialty I needed the help of a novelist who can build a work as an orchestral piece. What I do is chamber music – pardon the pun – and The Last Mistress is an orchestral piece.

Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: SEAN CONWAY

Alex and Her Arse Truck

‘In the bedroom of the Kurt Cobain-obsessed protagonist from my first short film Rocco Paris there are posters on the wall of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Bob Marley and Sean Conway.’
Sean Conway

He’s been described variously as ‘the UK’s coolest filmmaker’ (Giuseppe Andrews, actor) and ‘a fucking genius’ (Rankin, photographer and co-founder of Dazed and Confused). Writer/director Sean Conway (and self-confessed frustrated rock star) is undoubtedly doing something right. But with a drama to be screened on Channel 4, enough feature script ideas on the boil to last him his career, a multimedia collaboration funded by onedotzero, and a novella being published, Sean isn’t about to lie back in self-satisfaction.

Sean has been making a name for himself since his award-winning short Rocco Paris made strange bedfellows of poignancy and cool. Since then, he’s proven himself with shorts Rabbit Stories (2006), and Alex and Her Arse Truck (2007). Sean aims to make films that, in his own words, leave people thinking, ‘Wow! I’ve been in another universe!’, and he sees himself as having the capabilities of directing the next Harry Potter film just as much as LA alt-porn: the binding factor being his possession of an ‘agitation of the mind’ (a phrase coined by Werner Herzog).

Rabbit Stories depicts the world of Fenton, a young man with schizophrenia. The fractured visual style complements a brilliant and similarly fractured script. The constant argument between sound and vision is a driving force in communicating Fenton’s state of mind. Unfortunately, we never reach Fenton’s inner core, despite being offered several ‘Thought Insertions’ in which Fenton’s sexual identity and propensity to violence are hinted at. This is slightly disappointing, as is the positing of Fenton as a Christ-like figure: a slightly tired concept that contrasts with an otherwise highly original film.

Sean’s latest, Alex and her Arse Truck, is a vast leap in many ways from Rabbit Stories. Funded by Film Four and the UK Film Council, part of the Cinema Extreme scheme, it revolves around a couple of idealistic hedonists, Alex and Baby Shoes, and their encounters with panties-sniffing perverts, dancing drug dealers and a car park full of cheerleaders. Sean’s use of light is visionary, but there are too many potentially interesting psychological concepts that end up in a music video style extravaganza. The ever-present music will most definitely date the film, but hopefully in the way of a good tattoo – it might not suit in ten years but it makes a statement about the film here and now. Several moments display stunning directorial vision. The decision to have Alex mouth her first line of dialogue, for example, is infinitely more powerful than if she had screamed it.

Each of Sean’s films are very Gen Y, expressing a constant need to be made whole and the notion that the future will be brighter if you just hang on a little longer… As Baby Shoes puts it: ‘It’s like my balls are going to explode but my heart can’t breathe’.

In Rabbit Stories, Fenton believes that he is piloting a plane flying overhead with his plastic remote control. It’s a fitting analogy for Sean’s work as a filmmaker: with such an ambitious mind at the helm, the possibilities that may take flight are boundless.

Siouxzi Mernagh

Features

BAD GIRLS

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Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

As the Bird’s Eye View Film Festival reminds us every year, there is still only a ridiculously small proportion of female directors working in the film industry. But while filmmaking remains a male-dominated world, there have been numerous opportunities within the movies themselves for women to get even. In a list where exploitation meets feminism, we look at ten of the sassiest, sexiest, baddest girls in the history of cinema.

1- Irma Vep (Les Vampires, 1915)
Played by Mademoiselle Musidora, Irma Vep was the first film villainess to don a catsuit to commit her dastardly deeds. Part of a gang of thieves and murderers called Les Vampires (her name is an anagram), she is indeed one of the original vampy heroines of cinema in more ways than one. Her carnal curves molded by an almost indecent, slightly see-through black fabric (latex was still decades away from being invented), a mask hiding all but her eyes adding to the kinkiness of the whole outfit, she prowls the rooftops of Paris like the repressed desires of the corseted middle-class incarnated. She is the bourgeoisie’s most scandalous and delicious nightmare, both the temptress that no man can resist, and the low-class criminal who threatens the social order.

2- Lulu (Pandora’s Box, 1929)
What makes Pandora’s Box truly exceptional is the union of Louise Brooks’ unique beauty, fiercely independent spirit and devil-may-care attitude with the character of Lulu, the childlike femme fatale, the guileless siren who causes ruin and death around her simply for following her desires. In Georg W. Pabst’s brilliantly ambiguous film, Lulu’s free spirit is punished at the end in a remarkable encounter with the ultimate woman-hater, Jack the Ripper. She remains, however, the subversive primitive force that cannot be controlled by social rules, and whose ability to live in absolute freedom can only cause chaos and disorder.

3- Gilda (Gilda, 1946)
The femme fatale of film noir is a feverish, paranoid creation that sprang up from post-WWII male unease. Beautiful but treacherous, calculating and selfish, she irresistibly drives men to self-destruction, using her charms to get what she wants. Too threatening for the male ego, she is brutally punished – often by death – for her provocative freedom and confident manner. But while male anxiety demanded the destruction of the femme fatale, it also magnified her power, creating some magnificent, unforgettable female characters. In Gilda, the ex-lover Johnny Farrell and the new husband Ballin Mundson do all they can to reign in Gilda’s devastating sensuality. Both uncomfortable about her dangerous allure and her free ways, they take refuge in what can only be described as a homoerotic friendship. But no matter how controlling Mundson is or how much Johnny denigrates her as sluttish, Gilda, played by a sublime Rita Hayworth, remains irrepressible, and the famous scene of the glove strip-tease only shows off the two men’s impotence. Treated as the ultimate object of desire, the femme fatale‘s only weapon is sex, and she doesn’t hesitate to wield it for power, doing what she must to survive in a man’s world.

4- Varla (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 1965)
‘Russ Meyer’s ode to the violence in women’, proclaims the subtitle, and never before had audiences seen a female character beat the crap out of preppy idiots and dodgy cowboys with such spunk and vigour. Tura Satana cuts a formidable figure as the spectacularly bosomed, raven-haired, black-clad and thoroughly evil-looking vixen who can kill with her bare hands. The film may be labelled ‘exploitation’, but this is as much about female fantasies as male ones. Satana’s spectacular cleavage is no sign of availability and she is more likely to use brute force than charm to get what she wants. There had been dangerous females in cinema before but until this women had never been able to compete with a man in hand-to-hand combat (although Attack of the 50 Foot Woman introduced the idea, the ‘attack’ only takes up a short section of the movie and is explained as the result of a freak accident involving aliens). That’s why the fact that Satana is so physically powerful is insanely exhilarating to female audiences, used to seeing women depicted as weak, as well as encumbered by dresses, long nails and high heels for so long. Some may see this as a simplistic reversal of roles, but as the mainstream cinema of the time favoured frail, painfully thin actresses (Mia Farrow being the most glaring example) who looked ready to be slapped around and victimised at the first opportunity, and as this trend would only get worse in the following decade (see almost any film by Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood, etc), the kind of primitive retribution that Satana metes out to men is all the more satisfying.

5- Otsuya (Irezumi, 1966))
Although there is an undeniable ambivalence on the part of Yasuzo Masumura towards his female characters, they are always the most individualistic, unconstrained and alive figures in his films. They are the ones most likely to rebel against society and challenge its oppressive rules and traditions. Otsuya, the young girl sold into prostitution who becomes a fearsome geisha after an artist tattoes a spider on her back, is one of Masumura’s most stunning creations. A complex, captivating character, she is a cruel, selfish, manipulative, murderous man-eater as well as a strong, independent woman who lives by her own rules.

6- Bonnie Parker (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967)
Bonnie and Clyde may have been inspired by the French new wave, but while Godard & co.’s women were often whiny, silly, misogynistic creations, Arthur Penn dreamt up a true action woman capable of wielding a gun with her chic beret still perfectly in place. Bonnie is not simply Clyde’s sidekick but is a true outlaw in her own right, fully and fearlessly embracing crime. What’s more, Bonnie is an unusual female character for the period in that she is the sexually confident, experienced one in the relationship, while Clyde, bold and gutsy as the gang leader, is nervous and uneasy whenever it comes to sexual intimacy.

7- Sasori (Female Convict Scorpion, 1972-73)
In the late 60s, Japanese cinema developed a taste for vicious female yakuzas and delinquent gang leaders. The mixture of violence and nudity was meant to boost a declining audience, but as in the case of Faster Pussycat and Foxy Brown, what was meant as exploitation cinema allowed new types of subversive female characters to appear. Of all the ‘pinky violence’ anti-heroines, the laconic Sasori (Scorpion), played by Meiko Kaji, remains the most interesting. The combination of her dark beauty and Shunya Ito’s inspired direction bring mystery and charisma to the character of a female prisoner intent on revenge against the male authority figures who have wronged her. As in Masumura’s films, the central female character is the ultimate rebel, and represents absolute freedom against the male-imposed rules of society. Meiko Kaji followed the role of Sasori with Lady Snowblood, another female avenger striking down male villains in early twentieth-century Japan. The line between female exploitation and female empowerment in ‘pinky violence’ is a fine one, and while Female Convict Scorpion and Lady Snowblood work because they contain very little nudity and focus instead on conjuring up a strong central character, other films such as Female Yakuza veer too much towards sexploitation. Reiko Ike does her energetic best in the title role to create a spirited, rebellious gambler, but the film is so crammed with gratuitous scenes of naked fighting girls that, while female audiences can appreciate the deranged excess of the film, Female Yakuza can never be a leader in the bad girls’ pack.

8- Foxy Brown (Foxy Brown, 1974)
Women had a lot of avenging to do in the 70s… In this blaxploitation classic, Pam Grier plays a woman who goes after the drug pushers responsible for the deaths of her boyfriend and her brother, inflicting an eye-popping, brutal revenge on them. Drug gangs are also the villains in Grier’s earlier film Coffy and in Cleopatra Jones (starring Tamara Dobson in the title role): the women of blaxploitation not only hit back at the evil men in power but also perform a public service by ridding the black community of the criminals that have oppressed it for too long. Just like Tura Satana, Pam Grier and the 6-foot-2 Tamara Dobson are both spectacular women and can compete with men on an immediate, primitive, physical level. These films may have been part of Hollywood’s cynical attempt to cash in on black audiences’ new-found appetite for the movies, but with the rest of the blaxploitation crop peddling ultra-sexist views (see Shaft or Superfly), films such as Foxy Brown and Coffy offered a rare empowering view of African-American women.

9- Perdita Durango (Perdita Durango, 1997)
Perdita Durango snarls and spits out menacing one-liners like she’s Tura Satana’s little sister (smaller, but certainly no less fierce). A true wildcat, she is no mere sidekick to her demonic sorcerer/criminal lover Romeo (played by Javier Bardem, sporting a pre-No Country For Old Men outrageous haircut), but is the one who suggests kidnapping a couple of hapless American teenagers with the view of torturing and killing them – for fun. Perdita and Romeo are fascinating monsters, characters of excess who know no limits and are beyond the rules and morals of conventional society. For all the comic book quality of the story, Perdita is a surprisingly rounded character, made more complex by her relationship to Romeo and by the flashbacks that reveal the hard-knock life she’s been leading. In the end, while Romeo is doomed by his superstitions and his inflexible code of honour, Perdita proves she’s a tough-skinned survivor.

10- Lee Geum-Ja (Lady Vengeance, 2005)
After completing the first two films in his revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, director Park Chan-wook decided to focus on a female character in the final instalment. Just out of prison, Lee Geum-ja is intent on revenge against the man who had her convicted of murder and ruined her life. But while revenge in Sympathy and Oldboy was complex and multilateral, with characters that came in all shades of grey, Lady Vengeance is a somewhat simplistic, black-and-white portrait of a half-angelic, half-evil figure. In fact, she is more white than black as we soon find out that she’s not even guilty of the crime of which she was convicted. Did Park Chan-wook have trouble imagining a woman who could be as radically amoral, angry and cruel as his male characters? Lady Vengeance should have been the direct successor to Female Convict Scorpion and Lady Snowblood but, disappointingly, she’s just not quite bad enough.

Virginie Sélavy

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH HARMONY KORINE

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Harmony Korine

For much of the 1990s, writer-director Harmony Korine was readily identifiable as the enfant terrible of the American indie scene, a twisted prodigy with a penchant for drugs, drama and artful rebellion. Now, after a lengthy hiatus, he returns with his most surprising work yet: the tender, warm-hearted Mister Lonely, a comic parable of love, loss and the importance of faith.

Tom Huddleston: The writing of Mister Lonely coincided with you pulling yourself out of a long dark period. Can you talk about how you ended up there?

Harmony Korine: Well, I guess about ten years ago, during my last movie, something happened to me. I was living in New York and I wasn’t very happy. I started to feel disconnected, it’s no secret I was very much into narcotics at the time, and it started to fall apart. I started to feel like most of the people around me were phonies, crooks and idiots. And then I began to question myself, like, if these are the people that are around me, I must be putting off that as well. So then I wanted to do nothing but disappear, just get out of that world. Basically I just kind of more or less disintegrated.

TH: Did you honestly consider quitting the movie business?

HK: Definitely. Absolutely. And it wasn’t just quitting. I mean, I’ve had fantasies about quitting almost since I began. It was a weird thing, because all I ever wanted to do was make movies, and then when I started making movies all I wanted to do was quit making movies. It wasn’t the films, I loved making the films. It was everything that came before and after.

TH: Mister Lonely is about a character rediscovering companionship and happiness. In that sense is it a very personal story?

HK: Definitely. There are all these ideas about faith and hope, wanting to be someone other than who you are. Being in beautiful places and feeling awful. A lot of searching, inventing your own reality.

TH: There seems to be more of a sense of joy here than in any of your other movies.

HK: Well, the truth is… It’s no secret I’m not a big fan of plots in films. I mean, I love stories and I love characters, but with anything I’ve done I’ve wanted to create a mood, a tone, and a feeling. I felt this movie would succeed or fail based on me getting across this sense of hope and happiness. Or at least the idea that in amongst all the horror there’s still some beauty, there’s still a kind of poetry to it all. The film before, Julien (Donkey-Boy), in some ways was very bleak, like a dark hole, and it reflected my mental state at the time. But I was feeling differently with this, and I wanted to make people laugh, and do something different.

TH: You seem to have a poet’s ability to encapsulate very distinct feelings in single shots or brief scenes.

HK: Sometimes I don’t really know where they come from. I try not to question it too much, it’s good when it becomes an intuitive thing. Certain images speak. I can say more in images and music than I can in actual conversation.

TH: What made you want to tell a story about celebrity impersonators?

HK: Visually, it was interesting to me. I like the way they look. And I like obsessive characters. It seems such an odd way to make your way in the world, this bizarre existence. Living as someone else, living as an icon. But at the same time I thought it would be interesting to see, you know, Sammy Davis Jr. mow the yard, or Abe (Lincoln) tending sheep, or James Dean washing clothes. Those were just things I wanted to see.

TH: Were you concerned that it could become kitsch, or seem to be making fun?

HK: Definitely, that was something I was always aware of. Obviously, I didn’t want it seem like a joke. I didn’t want people to be doing impersonations the whole time, you’d get tired of them. I was more interested in the human underneath.

TH: Your father was a tap dancer, and there’s always this vaudeville influence in your films. What do you think it is about that era that fascinates you?

HK: More than anything, I’ve always admired show-people. I always had a great affinity for people who can walk on stage and do a little performance, give their blood, sweat and tears for the people out there, make ’em laugh, change the mood. People that live by their wits and their creativity. So I think I’ve always just loved those elements of performance and show-people, that carnival nature.

TH: It seems in your films that dancing, or any unconscious movement, signifies happiness and release.

HK: Man, it’s fun watching people dance. Sometimes I just sit on YouTube… you get a lot of these almost novelty dancers, with hip-hop and stuff, you get a lot of these strange dances that I really love.

TH: Conversely, do you think you mistrust intellectualism?

HK: It’s like what Herzog says, it’s false currency. I would rather you feel something than for me to have to explain it to you, intellectualise it. It’s not the way I work. It’s why I love Cassavetes’ films, because they just are, you just feel it. You sit through a movie like Husbands and it’s more than a movie, it’s like a life experience that you’ve just shared with these characters. And that’s not to say that all films should be like that, because I also really enjoy movies like Knocked Up, really debased comedies I enjoy as well, those just aren’t the kinds of movies that I make.

TH: You seem closer, more sympathetic to your characters here than in either Kids or Gummo, do you think that’s fair? There doesn’t seem to be any artistic distance between the camera and the subjects. You’re with them all the way.

HK: Yeah, I think so. But I think, in Gummo, at the time I didn’t feel that far away from some of those people either, I just think maybe they were more extreme, so it was more of a provocation. With this, I guess that some of the characters are maybe less sadistic.

TH: Do you think that’s a sign of growing confidence as an artist?

HK: (laughs) I hope not. I don’t know, as soon as people start saying things like that I start to get nervous. I don’t ever want to get that confident, or too mellow. But with this movie, after going through so much shit in my life, I really wanted to push myself. I wanted to do things I never thought I would do, and express ideas and feelings that I hadn’t before. I think it was important for me to try that.

TH:Do you feel like it’s perhaps more traditional as well, in terms of its character development and narrative?

HK:Yes, without question. Those movies were more deconstructed, they were more about breaking down image and language. Julien and especially Gummo were more about how I wanted to see films, in a kind of fragmented, random, chaotic order. With this story, I didn’t feel like it needed that. It needed something simpler.

TH:Obviously the key eccentricity in Mister Lonely is the parallel story. What do you think the importance was of telling these two stories simultaneously?

HK:Even though they never intersect, I thought that they both spoke to the same ideas, the same philosophy. This idea of wanting to be someone other than who you are, change and faith and obsession and identity. And in some ways I thought that the nuns’ story served as a kind of poetic punctuation, or an allegory of sorts.

TH:Did you at any point consider cutting the secondary narrative, issuing it as a short, or as a prelude to the main narrative?

HK:Definitely. Because they started out as two separate ideas, but I thought they’re very similar, they’re both saying something very close.

TH:Inasmuch as this is a film about faith, you seem in the end to be saying that such faith is essentially misguided, that it all turns bad. Do you think that’s fair?

HK:I think there’s a few ways to look at it. I don’t really have an intention, so maybe that is what it says, I don’t really know. Sometimes, to me, it seems like the people who are the biggest dreamers, and the most pure in heart, in the end get hurt the worst. Society and the real world, I’ve noticed, have a way of kicking your ass at the end. But I also think that, for me, there’s nothing more important than the dream. The dream sustains us. It’s not about a person’s individual successes or failures it’s about the dream. At least for me, it’s the dream that always helps me make it through the day.

TH:Do you yourself have faith in anything?

HK:Of course. I think it’d be awful to walk these streets without it. But, you know, faith in anything. I have faith in the trees. I have faith in the belly-dancers.

TH:Did you ever consider giving the movie a happy ending?

HK:I think it does have one.

TH:Not for the nuns.

HK:Right, right, right. Yeah, maybe not, but who knows? Maybe they’re in some other world right now.

TH:How has the film been received so far?

HK:So far, so good. With my movies, in some ways, I’m delusional. In the back of my mind I always think it’s going to be, you know, a sequel to The Shawshank Redemption, or that I’m going to have these massive commercial successes. Then when the film is shown people tell me how insane that is, and how misguided I am.

The conversation then turned to Harmony’s earlier career, where the success and notoriety he earned writing Larry Clark’s infamous Kids quickly translated into mainstream fame, late night talk-show appearances and his own debut directing gig, Gummo.

TH:How was it being thrown into the spotlight so young? I saw you on Letterman (look on YouTube for these ridiculous interviews). You seemed to be playing with him a little.

HK:I was a kid, I was having fun. Making it up as I was going. I didn’t get in it for a lot of the reasons that most people get in it, so I figured if I was going to do it, I was going to make it my own. It was fun. I did a lot of stuff that caused me problems later in life, but I was enjoying it.

TH:Is it fair to say you were something of a nihilist as a young man? Life seems pretty bleak for most of your characters, even if they do have a little fun along the way.

HK:Sure. I’m sure there’s a lot of that in there.

TH:How much of Gummo came from personal experience?

HK:A lot of that movie was filmed with people and friends that I knew growing up, in locations that I was very familiar with. But it was kind of both, it was things that I was making up and manipulating, mixed in with straight documentary. That movie was really just trying to get images from all directions, wanting to create a tapestry.

TH:Do you think it’s fair to say you had a tendency at that stage to pick the most grotesque aspects of the world you were exploring?

HK:I don’t know. Those are things I’m interested in, those were the types of pictures that I wanted to take, and those were the types of people and characters. It’s what I loved, those were people that I loved, and found interesting. Some of them, yes, you could say that they were bizarre, you could refer to some of that as grotesque, but for me that’s what I loved, that’s what was exciting to me. Those were the types of images that I hadn’t seen on screen. And I still love it. It’s still what it is.

TH:We know what happened to the principal cast of Kids, but what happened to the cast of Gummo? Are you still in touch with any of them?

HK:A lot of them didn’t fare so well. A lot of my friends are in prison, a few of them died from, you know, sniffing paint. It was a rougher road for those guys.

TH:How was it directing Werner Herzog the first time on Julien Donkey-Boy?

HK:It was great. When you see him, that’s how he is. He’s always exciting to work with. When you explain the character, when he gets in and understands it, you kind of just let him go. Yeah, Werner is a real performer.

TH:How much improvisation did you do?

HK:Improv is based on ideas. Improvising, for me, comes with the script, and letting the characters, actors leave their lines and take it in some other direction. With someone like Werner you can do a lot, but there are some people who are horrible at it.

TH:You talked a lot at the time of Julien Donkey-Boy about finding a new cinema, about finding new narrative directions in film. Do you still harbour those kinds of ambitions?

HK:I guess it depends. With this movie, it wasn’t about that. It was because the story seemed, to me, like it needed to be told in a simple way. And so I think it changes with each film. I have no interest in doing straight movies, I just don’t care about it, it’s not my thing. I don’t think like that, so I think my movies will always have something to offer in the form of non-narrative or, you know, something different. But I’m not staying up at night trying to discover new forms of cinema. It’s not like a science project. It’s not a math equation.

Interview by Tom Huddleston

Features

WOMEN ON THE VERGE

Darling International

I worked as a cinema usherette for a while. One of the great things about the job was being able to observe the audience’s response to film. I would sit on my fold-down usherette’s chair, at the perfect angle to watch the audience watching the screen. One of the most striking responses occurred at a screening of Jane Campion’s The Piano. The film opens with a close-up of a girl’s face, looking out from behind her fingers, watching and shielding her gaze at the same time. Once the plot of the film is under way, it seems a throwaway image, almost incidental. But later in the film, when the husband violently acts out his revenge on his wife, I saw all the women in the audience holding their hands up over their faces in the same gesture. What was obvious was the gender division in this reaction. The men just looked, the women looked and hid. When I think of anything to do with women and film, I think of this unconscious gesture. It suggested to me that there was a distinct female way of seeing and that good female directors, like Campion, knew very well what they were doing when they exploited this.

The trouble is that The Piano came out over ten years ago. It was already the product of more than two decades of feminist experimentation in cinema. It did what very few feminist films had done before: it won acceptance in the mainstream. It won Oscars. With acceptance, however, came a full stop. The decade since has seen an emptying out of politics from popular culture, post-modern irony replacing it. The need for a critique of this and for an alternative space to accommodate an alternative way of seeing has never been more vital.

Last summer at Club Des Femmes we revisited Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames: a razor-sharp, political, edgy film, it effortlessly creates a new storytelling shape, a very female narrative shape that truly explores a democratic point of view through a communal narrative structure and an anti-heroic plot. The final section of the film sees a terrorist blow up the Twin Towers. I knew the scene was coming, I knew what it would mean to see this after September 11, and I felt the impact of watching premonition with hindsight.

Visionary art depends on freedom. With commerce dominating cinema programming we lose space for radical vision and our mass media narratives are led by consensus. There are a lot of vital fights to be waged about the position of women in film. Bird’s Eye View importantly takes on the mainstream, pointing out that women make up only 7% of film directors and 12% of screenwriters. It’s an appalling statistic. What we try to do at Club des Femmes is give space to the many women whose politics and aesthetics do not fit in the mainstream. We look for the alternative, we look for politics and dialogue and experimentation. Here is where cinema is alive. Godard suggested that ‘all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’. It’s a cynical understanding of genre formalism that he exploits and subverts in all his work. At Club des Femmes we look for filmmakers who wield their cameras with force, because in the proper expression of vision comes liberation.

Sarah Wood

Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: WONDERWOMEN

Kathy Acker

Fifteen years ago the Spice Girls flogged the concept of Girl Power, or ‘feminism with a Wonderbra’, as they described it. Shortly before her death ten years ago Kathy Acker – the pro-sex feminist writer – interviewed the group for The Guardian. She was bewildered by their political naïveté but charmed by the positivity and bravery with which they took on the music industry without a thesis to their names.

So what would Acker think about the showcase of films either written, directed, produced or featuring women shown during the London Short Film Festival, a few miles away from the O2 Arena where the Spice Girls are playing one of their reunion shows? Certainly the films chosen by Sarah Wood and Selina Robertson of Club des Femmes would have received her thumbs up. After all, they included Fuses, the sexually incendiary film depicting Acker’s friend and ally Carolee Schneemann having graphic, loving sex with her then partner.

The amazing thing about Fuses is that it still has the power to shock, embarrass and delight. Not for any Nuts or Loaded wet dream could a woman look so content in a carnal setting. Not only that, but shots spliced into the sex scenes reveal she’s in a happy relationship which extends out of the bedroom. This woman has it all – both the feminism and the Wonderbra.

Moving forward in time, Acker’s own screenplay for Variety shows how, despite the ardent women’s movement of the previous two decades, the 1980s could still be an oppressive place for women. The female characters are forced to make a living as strippers and barmaids for lack of work, the photographer having to graft in a bar full of lecherous men while waiting for a sale, while lead character Christine is looking for a job that doesn’t list having a big bust as its main requirement.

Variety is beautifully shot as should be expected from a film starring cult photographer Nan Goldin. But while the supporting female characters are sharply drawn, in particular through their discussions of their lives and loves, the depiction of Christine remains blurred. She somnambulates through life, aimlessly smoking cigarettes in the foyer of the porn cinema in which she begins to work, having an answerphone relationship with her mother and a nonchalantly half-hearted relationship with a man who couldn’t care less about her personal development.

As she becomes more involved with her new job and the mysterious businessman who frequents the cinema, her feelings and desires become clearer but more problematic. She begins to follow him around the dark underworld of the city in which he works, watching him from afar. Stalking him as far as Staten Island, which he visits for a shady business trip, she takes the motel room next to his and goes through his things while he’s out. Rifling through his bag she finds a hardcore porn rag and is amazed by the pictures she sees.

In this way, Acker questions the male gaze of cinematic tradition: Christine is the woman looking at the man looking at the woman. In the same way, she begins to compose erotic prose which she recites to her distant boyfriend. But it isn’t until she trusses herself up in a sexy outfit and admires herself in the mirror that the gaze comes full circle and she controls both the gaze and the reflection. Or in other words, the feminism and the Wonderbra.

Go forward twenty years and the short films showcasing either female characters or females behind the camera show a drastically different world. Screened as part of Dazzle Short Film Label’s programme ‘Lipstick Cherry’, 100th of a Second depicts a front-line war photographer winning a prize for a shot showing the horrific killing of a child. It is a chilling look at the media’s representation of war zones and the conflict between the need to document and the temptation to exploit. Is it her female sensitivities that riddle her with guilt or the pure horror of the memories that haunt her? Things twenty years on are not so clear-cut.

In ‘Femmes Fantastique’ – a programme of new shorts depicting women with attitude, collected by Wood and Robertson – A Short Collection of Hilary Flamingo’s Dream Vocations shows a woman at work. She escapes the factory where she works by thinking of other jobs she would like to do. A wig designer, painter of men’s bare bottoms or showgirl are just some of the colourful ‘moving photos’ of Hilary’s imagination. Not anchored in the viewer’s mind by her marital status or sexual availability she is free to play out her fantasies without being judged as silly or childish. Hilary is a lovable, flamboyant character, proving LSFF organiser Kate Taylor’s belief that ‘interesting female characters on screen are as important as those behind the cameras’.

Similarly the character in When the Telescope Came – which won the Club des Femmes award – lets herself be taken away by her imagination in a beautifully rendered animation. Elsewhere, New Love depicts a world where beautiful women pay to court and have sex with beautiful men – a helpful set-up for the protagonist whose short memory makes it nearly impossible for her to form lasting relationships. The last couple of years have seen a growth in the number of artistic depictions of women who pay for sex and this was an interesting development of the trend as the woman in question was not fulfilling an emotional need but a practical one.

From a feminist point of view there is still more fighting to be done for and on behalf of women. It was disappointing not to see any films tackling things like sex trade trafficking, the appallingly low conviction rate for rape, and the disregard for women needing to work while bringing up children. But having said that, the overwhelming majority of films made by women shown during the festival were bold, thoughtful and entertaining. They showed that the emancipated women of today don’t have to choose between active feminism and Wonderbras. Now women can concentrate on what interests and excites them – be that astrology, sex, war or cupcakes. Acker certainly would be proud.

Lisa Williams

Film Jukebox

LADYFEST LONDON’S JUKEBOX

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Ladyfest London

Ladyfest London is an arts festival which celebrates female creativity in all its forms. There have been Ladyfests all over the world and this year it’s London’s turn to host this exciting event. Showcasing women’s talents in music, art, comedy, photography, film and spoken word, Ladyfest London will be taking place on May 9-11, 2008. The ladies are currently seeking submissions from filmmakers and musicians. If you want to get involved, visit their MySpace. Upcoming events include a Samanthan Morton double bill at the Rio Cinema on March 16 and a Ladyfest-sponsored shorts programme at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on March 30. Below, organisers Kanchi Wichmann and Josefeen Foxter tell us about their favourite films.

KANCHI:

1- Mi vida loca (My Crazy Life, 1993)
I was a teenager sharing a house with five guys who liked action, sci-fi, etc, and this is the first film I remember watching ‘cos it had a female director. It’s about a Hispanic girl ‘gang’ living in the Echo Park area of LA, but the film avoids all those clichéd ways of portraying people in gangs as a menace to society. I was a big Love and Rockets fan (the comic not the band) so it was really cool to see this world I knew from the comic books on screen.

2- Daisies (1966)
I was a film student bored by the French new wave when I discovered the Czech new wave! Vera Chytilová was the only female director in this movement and this film is amazing. I had never seen a feature film using such artistic techniques with no linear narrative, but still using actors, dialogue, etc. This film opened up a whole new world to me of arty/abstract/non-linear narrative cinema and I realised that there are actually loads of women making really cool films. I started working at the London Filmmakers Coop and discovered Tanya Syed, Alia Syed, Su Friedrich, Maya Deren, Abigail Child, Barbara Hammer, Chantal Ackerman’s first feature Je, tu, il, elle and many many more.

3- I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)
Lili Taylor is so cool as Valerie. And this is such a well-made film. The Scum Manifesto changed my life. This film helped to bring Valerie to the masses. I heart Valerie Solanas.

4- By Hook or by Crook (2001)
I was so glad that this film existed and luckily the directors Silas Howard and Harriet Dodge were at the screening I attended so I could tell them so afterwards. It is a great film, a butch lesbian buddy movie, and I also liked the fact that they wrote, directed and acted in it. I also love Tribe 8 (The band Silas plays in) and the film Rise Above – The Tribe 8 Story. It is totally inspiring to see (queer) women like this up on screen.

5- Cecil B. DeMented (2000)
I was working in a cinema and we showed this as a late show. Loads of us came in especially and it was such fun, this film was us (except for the guns in the popcorn)… And it’s got Harriet Dodge (see above) in it. John Waters is one of my favourite filmmakers.

JOSEFEEN:

6- Fire (1996)
I saw this film just after I got back from six months in India. It had got right under my skin but I was deeply struck by the appalling position of women in Indian society and the use of religious mythology to perpetuate this. Fire is such a sensuous, evocative work, addressing deeply taboo issues. The fact that on its opening day in India Hindu fundamentalists attacked theatres and that this film about love was eventually banned for religious insensitivity are indications of its significance.

7- Orlando (1992)
‘The longest and most charming love-letter in literature’ from Virginia Woolf to (and about) Vita Sackville West was adapted for the screen by Sally Potter. The luminous Tilda Swinton slips through transgenerational, transgendered gorgeousness exploring the transient nature of power, culture and love.

8- Ma vie en rose (1997)
A sweet look at gender identity in children as experienced by Ludovic, who knows instinctively he is a girl and trusts that a supernatural force will bring a natural resolution to the erroneous circumstance of him being in the wrong body. His endearing hopefulness and optimism permeate the film right to the end.

9- Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
You know it’s never going to end in anything but grief when you start watching this powerful film about sexual transgression and retribution in the Midwest ‘burbs. Hilary Swank’s Teena Brandon is a compelling blend of contradictions… the search for one’s authentic self and having the courage to live it out is an endlessly fascinating subject.

10- Herstory of Porn (1999)
I love Annie Sprinkle, she’s one of the first sex-positive artists who called herself a feminist as well.