Alex Fitch talks to Ted Kotcheff, the director of ‘lost’ cult classic Wake in Fright (1971), and to Terry Gilliam, whose new film The Zero Theorem is released this month. Kotcheff explains how Wake in Fright was recovered by its editor, and discusses the way it depicts issues of masculinity in crisis and has an unreliable narrator. Gilliam, in an extract from a 2013 London Film Festival Q&A session, talks about how his new film responds to issues of NSA spying, continues his strand of casting actors against type, and represents a ‘full fat’ viewing experience!
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FILM4 FRIGHTFEST IN ASSOCIATION WITH NE’ER DO WELL FILMS PRESENTS:
TURN OFF YOUR BLOODY PHONE IDENT COMPETITION
This summer, UK’s largest genre film festival Film4 FrightFest is giving up-and-coming filmmakers a chance to remind the audience of cinema etiquette and get their work shown on the big screen.
In 2012 a select group of filmmakers created a sensation in the festival with a quirky new brand of public service announcements.
In 2013, the festival recruited budding filmmakers alongside established names such as Andy Nyman, Patrick Syversen and Jacqueline Wright to encourage patrons to turn their phones off – the results were a series of amusing, sharp but always gory vignettes which continue to gather acclaim online still.
Now the festival wants to take the whole thing one step further.
Following on from the success of last year’s ‘Turn Off Your Bloody Phone’ idents, Film4 FrightFest (in association with Ne’er Do Well Films) is launching a competition to find the most inventive, crazy and funny ways of reminding the audience to not only turn their phones off during the screenings but also keep the etiquette of cinema-going alive.
To celebrate the 15th Anniversary of FrightFest, fans are encouraged to draw upon the festival’s rich, wild and varied history and create films which highlight the importance of behaving reasonably within the auditorium during the festival.
The competition is set to run between the 7th of March and the 11th August and will be judged by a prestigious jury including writer/director Sean Hogan and journalist and associate editor of Total Film Rosie Fletcher.
The five best entries as chosen by the jury will be screened at this summer’s Film4 FrightFest alongside works from some of the greatest genre directors at UK’s most prestigious genre film festival.
Birmingham’s brilliant Flatpack Film Festival returns for an eighth year for 11 days of inventive film delights, from 20 to 30 March. As always, expect a mind-stretching mix of new features, shorts and special guests, as well as avant-garde Austrian animation, a solipsistic installation, a Victorian magic lantern show, a psychedelic music night, walking tours and pop-up screenings in unexpected venues across the city.
Among the highlights:
• PHONO-CINEMA-THEATRE, the first UK screening of short films, many of them in hand-tinted colour, which were made for the 1900 Paris Exposition and featured theatre and variety stars of the day. The films include Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet and a can-can by Gabrielle Réjane; many of them have original sound thanks to an ingenious gramophone system.
• The UK premiere of THE GREAT FLOOD, a portrait of the devastation caused by the Mississippi floods of 1927 presented by experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison. Also screening are Morrison’s poetic take on archive footage of Durham miners’ lives from the 1900s to the 1970s THE MINERS’ HYMNS and his ode to cinematic decay DECASIA (we have an article on Decasia in our book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, available from Strange Attractor Press).
• CAFÉ NEURO: a weekend of talks, screenings and activities that will exploit recent developments in brain-imaging and eye-tracking technology to explore what cinema does to our brains.
• JAPANIMATION: a retrospective of Japan’s offbeat DVD label Calf including work by Mirai Mizue, Tochka Collective and Atsushi Wada.
• DVD BANG, a Korean-inspired viewing lounge, where you can book in to watch a movie day or night.
Feature films include an immersive, semi-horizontal screening of Douglas Trumbull’s 70s eco-sci-fi movie SILENT RUNNING, electrifying Kathleen Hanna documentary that will make you happy to be alive THE PUNK SINGER, Haskell Wexler’s counter-culture classic MEDIUM COOL, fascinating, thoughtful UFO doc about disinformation and the creation of truth MIRAGE MEN, Ken Russell’s mind-bending ALTERED STATES, sensuous neo-gialloTHE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY’S TEARS, Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1970s exploration of the mind ILLUMINATION, F.W. Murnau’s classic silent horror NOSFERATU, part faux doc on East German 80s skate subculture THIS AIN’T CALIFORNIA and Eiichi Yamamoto’s amazing-sounding psychedelic animé BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, based on a French novel about medieval witchcraft.
Alex Fitch talks to Ted Kotcheff, the director of ‘lost’ cult classic Wake in Fright (1971), and to Terry Gilliam, whose new film The Zero Theorem is released this month. Kotcheff explains how Wake in Fright was recovered by its editor, and discusses the way it depicts issues of masculinity in crisis and has an unreliable narrator. Gilliam, in an extract from a 2013 London Film Festival Q&A session, talks about how his new film responds to issues of NSA spying, continues his strand of casting actors against type, and represents a ‘full fat’ viewing experience!
