One Minute of Darkness

It’s been two years since Channel 4 unveiled its ambitious yet patchy Red Riding Trilogy, which was adapted from David Peace’s crime novels, with each of the three episodes made by a different home-grown director. Following a similar principle, the three-part German TV project Dreileben, which screened in the Cinema Europa section at this year’s London Film Festival, was directed by three of the country’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow), Dominik Graf (Germany 09) and Christoph Hochhäusler (The City Below, Germany 09). This screening may not have been met with the same level of enthusiasm by UK audiences as back in Germany, when the films premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, yet Dreileben is a bold, innovative and largely compelling experiment in cinematic storytelling that deserves more attention than it has received during its limited festival run.

Almost more fascinating than the outcome is the initial extensive email conversation between the three filmmakers about film aesthetics, which ultimately led them to continue their heated exchange on screen. ‘The three of us had a long and extremely intensive correspondence on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the DFFB, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin,’ says Petzold. ‘It started off with a discussion about the so-called “Berlin School”, which Dominik criticised. According to him we were in danger of compromising our view, our deep and passionate criticism, in favour of a common style, which would ultimately lead to a feeling of artificiality, constraint, and a distrust in communication, in language. We wrote to each other on a daily basis for about six weeks. Suddenly, the DFFB anniversary had passed, but we missed having these conversations, so we continued to meet and to talk, without any recording devices or designated use, until we decided to start this film project together.’

Defined by Hochhäusler as ‘sibling films rather than a trilogy’, each of the resulting films feels very much like a separate piece of work, although there are more or less obvious plot links and reoccurring characters, similarly to the format of the Red Riding Trilogy. Most importantly, the filmmakers agreed upon a criminal case as the golden thread that binds their individual narratives: the escape of a convict from police custody into a small town called Dreileben. Located in the beautiful yet chilling Thuringia Forest, in the former East Germany, it seemed to be the ideal place for what the directors where trying to achieve. ‘I knew Thuringia from my childhood,’ says Petzold. ‘My mother grew up there, and I made Christoph and Dominik go and visit the area. Despite its proximity to Weimar, the home of Goethe and Schiller, it has always been a very poor area. People didn’t want to live there, they left if they could, and those who stayed told dark stories to each other. We liked that.’ As a consequence, Dreileben draws heavily on the German romantic tradition in terms of its approach to nature – seeing it both as a place of danger and a place of inspiration.

This becomes most evident in the third part, One Minute of Darkness, directed by Christoph Hochhäusler, which also proves to be the most compelling episode. The film focuses on the investigations by the local detective in charge of the case of Frank Molesch, the escaped murderer, who – if only in the eyes of the detective – may actually be innocent. ‘What I find very intriguing is that we can never be sure about anything,’ says Hochhäusler. ‘Instead we have to construct reality time and again. And what interested me most about Molesch’s character was the question: to what extent are we the authors of our own destiny, and to what extent do other people have an influence on that? Molesch is an extremely malleable, extremely soft persona, whose entire life has been dictated by his foster mother and external authorities, and I thought it would be interesting to explore what happens if such a diktat no longer exists. Can he actually make use of this moment of freedom? Where does it lead to?’

Hence Hochhäusler’s episode is told mainly from Molesch’s viewpoint. In one of the film’s most gripping scenes, Molesch, despite his almost brutish actions, enters into a wonderfully tender bond with a young runaway, who also happens to be hiding in the woods. Meanwhile, the police inspector tries to get inside the head of Molesch, in order both to find him and prove his innocence. Shot in the cool and sparse New German Cinema manner, One Minute of Darkness may bring nothing terribly new to the genre, but it still makes for an effective and solid thriller in its own right.

In contrast, Petzold’s Beats Being Dead (the first episode in the trilogy) dazzles on the aesthetic level, but fails to keep up the tension and intensity from start to finish. Petzold reveals very little about the murder; instead, we meet Johannes, a young male nurse, who begins an affair with an immigrant girl from Eastern Europe who works in a nearby hotel. While the hunt for Molesch always remains in the shadow of the film’s main narrative, Petzold decides to concentrate on the mismatched couple as they struggle with life as much as with their young, and doomed, relationship.

Sitting in between the two episodes is Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around, in which a police psychologist has been ordered to Dreileben to help the local police in their investigation. Adopting a style that is less cool and detached than Petzold and Hochhäusler’s approach, Graf manages to deftly weave a compelling personal story about two women, who fell for the same lover in the past, into the crime scenario. However, he gets slightly too carried away by his own ambitions for the project, rather than simply sticking with its initial premise.

Taken as a whole, Dreileben might have benefited if Petzold, Graf and Hochhäusler were slightly less hard-headed filmmakers. There seems to be a potential in their work that is not quite realised, a kind of brilliance that keeps bumping against the same creative blockages. Still, aesthetically and conceptually, Dreileben is an innovative and engrossing, if slow-burning, TV-style crime-drama experiment that often hits a note of genuine mystery and discomfort in its attempts to break away from the narrow scope that has characterised much of recent German filmmaking. It’s certainly worth four and a half hours of your time, even if it’s not quite the triumph that might be expected from each of these three directors.

Pamela Jahn

Lipsett Diaries

Visiting the Barbican for a special screening of Lipsett Diaries (2010), Theodore Ushev’s much-praised 15-minute film about experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, it was easy to forget the iconic concrete labyrinth was playing host – for the first time – to the London International Animation Festival. The monthly programme had a lonely, rather perfunctory, paragraph of blurb while the majority of the milling crowd seemed to be there for a new production of South Pacific. As I waited patiently outside Screen 1, I saw with some relief that word had clearly spread about LIAF as a large, high-spirited crowd streamed out of the festival’s British Showcase screening. Perhaps the throng was all showcased filmmakers with friends in tow; still, the lively festival-goers created a welcome buzz and, while many did not stick around for Lipsett Diaries, those who did attend (and the number was respectable) were rewarded for their attendance; the event was another example of thoughtful programming from the LIAF organisers.

Lipsett Diaries could easily have slotted into one of the festival’s regular screenings, lost amid the roster of impressive shorts; instead, it was used as a catalyst to introduce Lipsett’s work and as an ending to a comprehensive retrospective of Ushev’s work to date. It is certainly Ushev’s best film, although his animations have displayed technical virtuosity from the beginning. His first work – The Man Who Waited (2006) – re-tells a Kafka short story through a rapid, claustrophobic edit of images, hand-drawn in the style of German expressionist woodcuts. The fast pacing of Ushev’s filmmaking – something shared with Lipsett’s – is a real strength, and the retrospective included several shorts influenced by 20th-century art movements obsessed with mechanism and speed: constructivism, futurism and vorticism. Tower Bawher (2006) followed this pattern and re-trod a path pioneered in Russia at the start of last century. There was nothing new about the montages of newsprint, geometric blocks, architectural towers and saluting hands but the computer-generated speed did add a certain freshness to the images.

That Soviet typography and striking images appeal to Ushev should come as no surprise, given his background as a graphic artist. I saw a continuation of this profession in his filmmaking: not only in his use of striking aesthetics but also in the way he fits images to his films’ subjects, almost as if working to a brief. In the Q&A following the screening, he spoke of serving a concept; the key was making ‘a film, not my film’, he said. While commendable in many ways, this approach creates a certain passivity in his filmmaking; the image is applied to, and therefore at the mercy of, the text or idea. For me, the overly cutesy narration of Tzaritza (2006) made a sweet tale about families separated by emigration more throwaway and saccharine than it needed to be. It seems that Ushev creates his best films when working with rich personalities that provide a strong voice. As a case in point, Yannick Nézet-Séguin: No Intermission took an interview and performance by the eponymous conductor and created beautiful glowing visuals: lively flashes of Nézet-Séguin’s animated face and hands appear from extreme blackness to tame and direct an invisible orchestra.

Lipsett Diaries provided another strong voice and portrait of the creative spirit. The film was born out of discussions with fellow filmmakers, a series of talisman coincidences – including the discovery that Lipsett had previously lived in Ushev’s first apartment block in Montreal – and a script by writer Chris Robinson. Divided into three separate segments, the narrative tells Lipsett’s story, from a difficult childhood to his death. An exceptionally talented filmmaker, Lipsett created several astonishing shorts in the early 60s and committed suicide just before his 50th birthday. Composed of hundreds of acrylic paintings, the film’s animation is intense and extremely delicate, borrowing from the visceral style of Francis Bacon and Goya’s later paintings and occasionally nodding to Pop Art. These images play out as filmmaker Xavier Dolan narrates snatches of text and builds up an insight into Lipsett’s inner turmoil. It is only at the end of the film that the audience is told that Lipsett’s diaries were never found and that the film is a fictionalised account, using narrative texts from Lipsett’s shorts.

The non-linear approach of assembling text and images mirrors Lipsett’s own filmmaking technique, which cut up dialogue – often passages of cultural criticism – and playfully juxtaposed the words with images of everyday life, either shot by himself or his contemporary filmmakers at the National Film Board in Canada. The editing skills displayed in his debut film, Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), brought Lipsett to the attention of the Academy and also that of filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrik (who asked him – unsuccessfully – to work as his editor). Lipsett was a master of editing but, more than that, he offered a delightfully skewed way of looking at the world, which cuts through the noise and commercialisation of our normal existence. His work goes beyond surrealism’s random juxtaposition of images and, while it uses the everyday, it is not quite Pop Art either. Lipsett’s work does not propel commonplace objects to the position of High Art in such a straightforward composition; instead, it uses everyday experience to comment upon cultural criticism, political theory, religious belief and social observation. The strange juxtapositions of images are sometimes used to directly contradict the rhetoric being espoused and, at other times, to point out the futility of trying to contain and define the human experience in words. The grand theories are interrupted by phone calls, cut off in mid-stream and shown disintegrating into unintelligible burbles and nonsensical noises. The films create a collage of competing voices, snippets of text straining to make sense of the world.

There is despair in Lipsett’s shorts but there is also warmth and humour; traits that were slightly lost in the script for Lipsett Diaries, which preferred to emphasise a darker, more straightforward narrative of the artist as tortured soul. Lipsett’s work is full of humanity – laid bare for the audience in his every choice of image – and it was wonderful to sit in the Barbican watching his early shorts unfold on the big screen. For bringing Arthur Lipsett to new audiences, to the organisers of LIAF and the makers of Lipsett Diaries: bravo, very nice, very nice.

Eleanor McKeown

Keyhole

Colonial Report from the Dominion of Canada (above the 49th Parallel)

Toronto International Film Festival:
It’s All about the Stars, but There Are Good Movies Too

Although a major city in Our Fair Dominion, Toronto bears the distinction of being the biggest, most pathetic provincial backwater to blight the massive landmass that is Canada – a country in which the majority of the population resides along a 100-kilometre strip just above the Canada-U.S. border, from, to borrow a line from ‘America the Beautiful’, ‘sea to shining sea’. That said, together with Montreal, Toronto is home to some of the more culturally significant events and organizations in the country.

This is the eternal dichotomy and a truly salient example of the two solitudes that have been an endless trademark of life here in the colonies. In La Belle Province, the divide between French and English is more obvious, but Ontario is quite another thing, as the real base of power remains rooted in the most repressive, pole-up-the-ass Presbyterianism – the reigning capital of which was and still is the city of Toronto.

This, of course, is what makes Toronto such an unlikely centre of culture in the Dominion. One of Canada’s true literary giants, Scott Symons, devoted his life and writings to exposing this dichotomy – railing against the country’s old-money establishment residing in Toronto’s leafy, affluent and decidedly ramrod-up-the-rectum enclave known as Rosedale.

Symons referred to these power brokers as the ‘Bland Men’ of Toronto. I, however, prefer Symons’s more colourful description of what rules Toronto. In his great novel Civic Square, Symons coined the indelible phrase The Smugly Fucklings. (Symons always regretted adhering to his publisher’s advice and NOT sticking to The Smugly Fucklings for the novel’s title.)

Symons, without a doubt, hit the nail on the head. Toronto, and by extension much of English Canada, is in the hands of the Bland Men, the Smugly Fucklings. What distinguishes them from the usual dyed-in-the-wool new conservatives of Canada (our own version of America’s woeful Tea Party) is that they are educated, erudite, purportedly liberal and imbued with a desperate need to be cooler than cool. Parading through the city with haughty, smile-bereft faces, their buttocks clenched within an inch of their lives and adorned in the fashion ‘styles’ of Hugo Boss – these are the gatekeepers of all culture for the Great Unwashed of Our Fair Dominion.

Is it any wonder then that the question I am asked most by ‘normal people’ about my experience at the Toronto International Film Festival is not, ‘Have you seen any good movies?’ but rather, ‘What movie stars did you see?’

Toronto is a city so desperate for acknowledgment that it is the centre of the universe that it will do anything to ensure this status. The residual effect is that culture of the highest order is on display in this city ruled by the Bland Men. It exists because of those who merely purport to be on the cutting edge. In fact, I suspect they desperately want to be the thing they’re most afraid of and it is precisely this lip service to alternative culture that inadvertently offers world-class events. The Smuglies have no idea how truly un-hip they are, but it is their desire to be seen as NOT what they are that gives so many of us a reason to hate Toronto, but at the same time, to not completely abandon it because we’d otherwise be bereft of culture.

And so it was, and so it remains, that the Toronto International Film Festival is one of the premier cultural events in the world. On one hand, it is a glorified junket for the American studios, while on the other, it offers hundreds of movies you might never see anywhere else. It is at once a film festival where the Great Unwashed of Toronto pathetically crowd around the police-patrolled barricades protecting the various red carpets – hoping that they might possibly snatch a glimpse of Brad Pitt or Madonna – and where the rest of us, thanks to the wide variety of motion pictures assembled by The Men Who Would Be Kings of Cool, are kept hidden for days on end in the dark, our eyes glued to the screens and dining at the trough of great cinema.

* * *

TIFF 2011 proved to be a pretty banner year for me. Between North American and world premieres of a wide variety of pictures, I was one happy fella.

Of course, there were many dubious inclusions that seemed to be on display for their star-appearance quotient, but thankfully, the accent was on the pictures themselves.

Here then, are a few highlights and lowlights of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.

* * *

A Dangerous Method (2011) *

When David Cronenberg is good, he is very, very good. When he is bad, he’s cerebral. A Dangerous Method is dour, dull and decidedly humourless, though the first few minutes do suggest we’re in for a hootenanny of the highest order. The score, oozing with portent over a twitching, howling, clearly bonkers Keira Knightley, thrashing about in a horse-drawn carriage as it hurtles towards Carl Jung’s Swiss nuthouse, initially suggested a belly flop into the maw first pried open by such Cold War wacko-fests like The Snake Pit or Shock Corridor. Alas, Cronenberg seems to have abandoned his pulp sensibilities and instead appears to be making an Atom Egoyan movie. Sorry David, Atom Egoyan makes the best Atom Egoyan movies. Cronenberg’s unwelcome return to the cold and clinical approach from his pre-Eastern Promises and A History of Violence oeuvres quashes all hope for a rollicking good wallow in lunacy. Come on, David, we’re dealing with psychoanalysis and sex here. A little oomph might have been in order.

Lord knows Cronenberg’s dealt deliciously with both before – most notably in The Brood. It starred a visibly inebriated Oliver Reed, crazily cooing about ‘the Shape of Rage’ amid spurts of horrific violence laced with a riveting creepy tone. Most notably the movie provided us with the indelible image of a semi-nude, utterly barmy Samantha Eggar adorned with monstrous pus sacks dangling from her flesh, licking globs of gooey, chunky afterbirth from a glistening mutant baby expunged from one of the aforementioned pus sacks.

No similar shenanigans are on view in A Dangerous Method. It’s pretty much a Masterpiece Theatre-styled period chamber drama with Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) jousting with his mentor-rival Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung spanking Keira Knightley, a daft want-to-be-psychiatrist with Daddy issues. Sadly, no proper views of open palms connecting with buttocks or slap imprints on said buttocks are afforded to us.

We do, however, get an abundance of yammering.

* * *

The Deep Blue Sea (2011) ****

Keira Knightley is used much better here than in Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Oops, wait a second, I mean Rachel Weisz. OK, well, if Keira Knightley HAD been in this movie, I suspect she WOULD have been put to rather better use here, but she’s not, so she isn’t. I am indeed referring to the Knightley doppelgänger, or rather, the doppelgänger of Rachel Weisz, or rather, I mean…

OK, fuck it! In the parlance of Monty Python: ‘Start Again!!!’

Terence Davies coaxes an astonishing performance from Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea, a heartbreaking, sumptuous and tremendously moving adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s great play of the same name. Rattigan’s theatrical explorations of class and sex have made for rich film adaptations, most notably The Browning Version, Separate Tables, The Winslow Boy and The Prince and the Showgirl. Rattigan, given the discriminatory criminalisation of homosexuality in England (his frequent collaborator, the closeted director Anthony Asquith, was the progeny of the man who signed Oscar Wilde’s arrest warrant) chose to primarily reflect on gay issues and culture by utilizing a critical dramatic look at the often troubled lives of straight couples.

Nowhere is this more powerfully rendered than in The Deep Blue Sea, which Davies has adapted with considerable homage to the play’s tone and themes while using the source as a springboard for his own unique approach to affairs of the heart. (While Davies oddly reduces the role and importance of the play’s one clearly gay character, one suspects he did this to focus more prominently on the trinity of its central characters.)

Davies might well be one of the most important living British filmmakers. Working in a classical style with indelible compositions, creating a rhythm through little, no or very slow camera moves and infusing his work with a humanity seldom rivalled, Davies recognizes the importance of cinema as poetry – or rather, using the poetry of cinema to create narrative that is truly experiential. (I doubt any audience member will forget the haunting underground tracking shot during the Blitz – as evocative to the eye, ear and mind as anything I’ve seen.) I’d go so far as saying that Davies might well be the heir apparent to film artists like Alexander Dovzhenko and Sergei Paradjanov – exploiting the poetic properties of cinema in all the best ways.

Here we feel and experience the tragic tale of Hester (Weisz), who leaves her much older, though loving husband, the respected judge Sir William (Simon Russell) when she meets the handsome, charming Freddie (Tom Hiddlestone), a former RAF pilot who allows her the joys of sex for the first time in her life. Alas, Freddie’s a bit of a rake and soon tires of domesticity, and Hester is driven to seriously contemplating suicide. Sir William wishes desperately to have her back. The eternal dilemma is that Freddie doesn’t love Hester as much as she’d like, nor does Hester feel as much love for Sir William as he does for her.

The triangle is played out with Davies’s trademark style and a welcome return to pubs thick with smoke and filled with songs sung by its inebriated denizens. Harking back to Distant Voices, Still Lives, the songs here are not so much a counterpoint to the drudgery of the characters’ lives as something indicative of an overwhelming malaise born out of repression and class.

Davies dazzles and moves us with his humanity and artistry. It doesn’t take much to give over to his stately pace, and when we do, we’re drawn into a world that can only exist on a big screen, while at the same time providing a window on the concerns of days gone by that are more prevalent in our contemporary world than most of us would care to admit.

* * *

Keyhole (2011) ****

Full disclosure: I produced Guy Maddin’s first three feature films, lived with him as a roommate (I was Oscar Madison to his Felix Unger – Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple sprang miraculously to life on the top two floors of a ramshackle old house near Winnipeg’s Little Italy district), continue to love him as one of my dearest friends and consider his brilliant screenwriting partner George E. Toles to be nothing less than my surrogate big brother.

Most importantly, I am one of Maddin’s biggest fans and refuse to believe I am not able to objectively review his work. Objectively, then, allow me to declare that I loved Keyhole. What’s not to love? Blending Warner Brothers gangster styling of the 30s, film noir of the 40s and 50s, Greek tragedy, Sirk-like melodrama and odd dapplings of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, it is, like all Maddin’s work, best designed to experience as a dream on film. Like Terence Davies, Maddin is one of the few living filmmakers who understands the poetic properties of cinema, and this, frankly, is to be cherished as much as any perfectly wrought narrative.

This is not to say narrative does NOT exist in Maddin’s work. If you really must, dig deep and you will find it. That, however, wouldn’t be very much fun. One has a better time with Maddin’s pictures just letting them HAPPEN to you.

The elements concocted in Keyhole to allow for full experiential mind-fucking involve the insanely named gangster Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric as you’ve never seen him before – playing straight, yet feeling like he belongs to another cinematic era), who drags his kids (one dead, but miraculously sprung to life, the other seemingly alive, but not remembered by his Dad) into a haunted house surrounded by guns-a-blazing.

Populated with a variety of tough guys and babe-o-licious molls, Ulysses is faced with ghosts of both the living and the dead, including his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini – gorgeous as always and imbued with all the necessary qualities to render melodrama with joy and humanity), her frequently nude father (the brilliant Louis Negin – perhaps one of the world’s greatest living character actors, who frankly should be cast in every movie ever made), chained to his bed, uttering the richly ripe George Toles dialogue and Udo Kier (the greatest fucking actor in the world), whose appearance in this movie is so inspired I’ll let you discover for yourself the greatness of both the role and Udo himself.

Keyhole is, without a doubt, one of the most perversely funny movies I’ve seen in ages and includes Maddin’s trademark visual tapestry of the most alternately gorgeous and insanely inspired kind. For movie geeks, literary freaks and Greek tragedy-o-philes, the movie is blessed with added treats to gobble down voraciously.

Like all of Maddin’s work, it’s not all fun and games. Beneath the surface of its mad inspiration lurks a melancholy and thematic richness. For me, what’s so important and moving about the film is its literal and thematic exploration of a space. Strongly evoking that sense of how our lives are inextricably linked to so many places (or a place) and how they in turn are populated with things – inanimate objects that become more animate once we project our memories upon them – or how said places inspire reminiscence of said objects which, in turn, inspire further memories, Keyhole is as profound and sad as it’s a crazed laugh riot.

Of all the pieces about the movie that I bothered to read, I was shocked that NOBODY – NOT ONE FUCKING CRITIC – picked up on the overwhelming theme of PLACE and the SPIRIT of all those THINGS that live and breathe in our minds. It was the first thing to weigh heavily upon me when I first saw the movie. It has seldom been approached in the movies – and, for my money – NO MORE POIGNANTLY AND BRILLIANTLY than rendered by Maddin, Toles and their visionary young producer Jody Shapiro.

All the ghosts of the living and the dead (to paraphrase Joyce), the animate and inanimate, the real and the imagined, these are the things that haunt us to our graves, and perhaps beyond. And they all populate the strange, magical and haunting world of Keyhole – a world most of us, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, live in. We are all ghosts and are, in turn, haunted by them.

* * *

i am a good person/i am a bad person (2011) ***1/2

A dervish derives inspiration from God and does so with complete and total devotion, honouring the Creator with continuous, strenuous forms of physical manipulations, such as exercise or dance that involve literal whirling at breakneck speeds. Influenced by both John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh, Canadian filmmaker Ingrid Veninger is also developing an approach to her humanist form of dramatic cinema that is clearly all hers.

In fact, Veninger might well be cinema’s only living equivalent to a whirling dervish. Like a dervish, she honours her Creator (cinema), her prophets (Cassavetes, Leigh and others), then whips her creative concoction into a frenzy – literally living and breathing cinema – producing film from within herself, her devotion and life itself.

With her previous work and second feature as a director (she’s written, produced and acted in so many more), Modra, a personal dramatic exploration of her Slovakian roots, Veninger was on the cusp of embarking upon the film festival circuit. This got the dervish whirling. She wrote a script about a filmmaker taking a trip to Europe to present her film on the film festival circuit. She cast herself as the filmmaker Ruby, and her own real-life daughter, talented young actress Hallie Switzer (female lead of Modra) as Ruby’s daughter Sara. With ace cinematographer Ben Lichty and sound recordist/boom operator Braden Sauder, Veninger and Switzer blasted across the pond from Canada to Europe and made a movie. The screenplay, already workshopped and in final draft, accompanied the group who knew that as long as the structure of the story was adhered to, there would potentially be room for rewriting depending upon the exigencies of production.

The movie, i am a good person/i am a bad person, is funny and heartbreakingly moving, and while full of ‘realistic’ touches, it never descends into Canadian Cinema Dreariness 101 and is, in fact, imbued with a sense of scope to allow its tenderness and intimacy to shine in all the ways they should in movies.

The world is, of course, replete with father-son pictures, but mother-daughter relationships – in terms of numbers and quality – pale in comparison. This is a film that contributes admirably to this relatively rare tradition.

Ruby is a loveable scatterbrain. Her film, a crazed, seemingly political avant-garde celebration of – ahem – the penis, is set to premiere overseas at the – ahem – Bradford International Film Festival in dear Old Blighty. Eighteen-year-old Sara is dragged along on the trip to be her mother’s assistant, though one gets the feeling that deep down, Mom craves some one-on-one quality time with her burgeoning daughter.

Sara is decidedly serious – in general, but especially on this trip – and Mom’s carefree spirit is driving her up the wall. Mom, not totally oblivious to this, is still intent on having a good time. Things in Bradford reach a bit of a head and it’s decided that Sara will go to Paris on her own to visit with relatives and Ruby will forge on to a screening at the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin. As mother and daughter each face personal challenges, it also becomes glaringly apparent how much they need and love each other.

I suspect it might not be too much of a spoiler to suggest that hard decisions are wrought and events inspire more than a few tears from even the most hardened viewers. Those who stick with the seemingly freewheeling spirit of the picture are rewarded a thousandfold during the extremely moving finale.

Filmmakers of all stripes will, I think, get a kick out of the sequences shot in Bradford and Berlin. How many times have filmmakers heard the rather embarrassed words from festival directors – as Ruby does in the film – ‘It’s a much smaller house than expected, but they’ll no doubt be a spirited bunch.’

It’s also worth mentioning that i am a good person/i am a bad person is full of humour – gentle bits of human comedy and full-on Bridesmaids-style blowjob and scatological humour. Strangely, this doesn’t temper any of the sentiment, but in fact, enhances it. And unlike Bridesmaids, i am a good person/i am a bad person NEVER overstays its welcome. The picture is taut, trim, hypnotic and passionate.

Kind of like a whirling dervish.

* * *

Drive (2011) *1/2

This is exactly the kind of movie I hate seeing at major international film festivals – especially at TIFF. It clearly feels like a glorified press junket screening with its star trotted out every which way and the picture opening theatrically on thousands of screens one week after its festival screening, while the festival is still on at that. That said, I don’t usually mind if the movie is any good, but Drive most certainly isn’t.

Fast cars and existential male angst make for great bedfellows – or rather, they MADE for great bedfellows. The 1970s were full of them, the tent posts being Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, Walter Hill’s The Driver and Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point. Drive comes closest to Hill’s nutty car chase thriller, but lacks that picture’s drive (as it were) and pulp sensibilities blended with art-house-style chic. Nicholas Winding Refn, who delivered up a compelling one-man-show with Bronson, falls too in love with his good taste. Besides, how could Refn even hope to compete with The Driver when it features cop Bruce Dern referring to the title character played by Ryan O’Neal and uttering in full-on noir-speak: ‘I’m gonna catch me the cowboy that’s never been caught. Cowboy desperado!’

Aside from choice scumbaggery from Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as the gangster villains in Drive, we get too many eyefuls of Ryan Gosling staring soulfully at pretty much everything and everyone – adorned, no less, in a ridiculous Scorpion jacket.

Gosling plays a movie stunt driver who doubles as a heist getaway driver and who falls in love with his dewy-eyed, perpetually open-mouthed and equally soulful neighbour. He agrees to help out her recently released jailbird husband to pull a heist that goes horribly wrong and predictably leads to the aforementioned bad guys, who coincidentally are backing a stock car Gosling will be racing. It’s fine when a genre picture keeps it simple and stupid, but the plot of Drive is, well, just plain stupid.

The car chases are proficiently handled, but have none of the urgency of the true greats; some of the violence is satisfactorily shocking, but the movie – loaded with pretension and fake portent – seems even more disingenuous than, say, a Michael Bay movie.

At least, we all know Bay is a knothead. Refn clearly has more going on upstairs, but he’d have been far better off playing things with the same kind of relentless pulpiness he brought to Bronson instead of a preciousness that just drags the movie down to Dullsville.

* * *

Carre Blanc

Here are a few capsule rewrites of some of the films I covered daily during TIFF 2011 on The Daily Film Dose website.

50/50 (2011) ****

50/50 is a comedy about cancer. The incongruity of this might seem off-putting, but the fact remains that rendering cancer dramatically with humour seems to be the best medicine (artistically speaking and otherwise). 50/50 does so with utter perfection. It’s the laughs, the human comedy, the on-screen knee-slappers that are the very elements which render the drama with so much poignancy and yes, pain. Adam (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) is a public radio reporter with talent, commitment and a bright future. When he is diagnosed with cancer his life quickly unravels and everything he holds dear begins to dissipate – including his chances of survival. Before you get the impression this is a total downer, allow me to say two words: SETH ROGEN!!!!! One of the best young actors in the business, he plays Adam’s mega-pot-ingesting (‘natch) best buddy and offers friendship, company, support, endless laughs (for Adam, but by extension, the audience) and dope (a most convenient painkiller for cancer victims). Director Jonathan (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) Levine’s exquisite direction covers the excellent screenplay by Will Reiser with the assured hand of an old pro. That said, Levine’s only in his 30s and this is his third feature film. One can only wonder what the ‘kid’ is going to generate when he actually IS ‘old’.

You’re Next (2011) **1/2

You’re Next is an energetic home invasion horror thriller crisply directed by filmmaker Adam Wingard, who delivers up the scares and gore with considerable panache. The picture is chock-full of babes including a mega-kick-ass heroine – an Aussie chick whose character, it is revealed, was raised in a survivalist compound Down Under. (I kid you not! An Aussie Survivalist Babe!!!) The killers wear ultra-creepy animal masks (like those really cute lifelike ones you can buy for your kids at Zoo gift shops) and dispatch their victims with considerable aplomb.

The first two-thirds of the movie proceed like a rabid bat out of hell. An affluent couple (the female half played by the still delectable Re-Animator babe Barbara Crampton) are celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary in a country mansion and have invited their kids and assorted significant others to join them. The characters share bloodlines straight out of some lower-drawer Albee or O’Neill play and the conversation round the dinner table plays out with plenty of funny, nasty sniping. Great stuff! Then the killing starts! Even greater! And then, a boneheaded plot twist one sees coming from miles away. Uh, this is not great! Not good! Not even passable! Thankfully, the carnage continues, but for this genre geek, the movie never quite recovers from a twist that was probably meant to be clever, but instead feels like a red herring that isn’t one at all, but the real thing that we’re supposed to be knocked on our butts by – NOT! Never fear, though, there’s still that Aussie survivalist babe. Now THAT is original!

Carré blanc (2011) ****

Harking back to great 70s science-fiction film classics like The Terminal Man, Colossus: The Forbin Project, A Boy and His Dog, Silent Running and THX 1138 – when the genre was thankfully bereft of light sabres, Wookies and Jabba the Hut, when it was actually ABOUT something – Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s debut feature film Carré blanc is easily one of the finest dystopian visions of the future to be etched upon celluloid since that time. The tale rendered is, on its surface and as in many great movies, a simple one. Philippe (Sami Bouajila) and Marie (Julie Gayet) grew up together in a state orphanage and are now married. They live in a stark, often silent corporate world bereft of any vibrant colour and emotion. Muzak constantly lulls the masses and is only punctuated by announcements occasionally calling for limited procreation and, most curiously, promoting the game of croquet – the one and only state-sanctioned sport. Philippe is a most valued lackey of the state – he is an interrogator-cum-indoctrinator – and he’s very good at his job. In fact, with each passing day, he is getting better and better at it. Marie, on the other hand, is withdrawing deeper and deeper into a cocoon as the love she once felt for Philippe is transforming into indifference.

In this world, though, hatred is as much a luxury as love. Tangible feelings and simple foibles are punished with torture and death. Indifference, it would seem, is the goal. It ensures complete subservience to the dominant forces. Love, however, is ultimately the force the New World Order is helpless to fight and it is at the core of this story. If Philippe and Marie can somehow rediscover that bond, there might yet be hope – for them, and the world. It is this aspect of the story that always keeps the movie floating above a mere exercise in style (which it is in large part). Love becomes the ultimate goal of Léonetti’s narrative and thanks to that, he delivers an instant classic of science fiction. The best works in this genre ARE about individuality and the fight to maintain the incommutability of the human spirit, which might, after all, be the only thing we have left – not just in future times, but now.

God Bless America (2011) ***1/2

Frank is a very kind person. He kills people. But they deserve it. Played with pathos and deadpan humour by Joel Murray, Frank is a hard-working American. He’s been diagnosed with a fatal disease. His wife has left him. His daughter is a shrill brat who won’t visit him on custody days because he ‘forces’ her to do arts and crafts, visit the zoo and play in the park (instead of being glued to video games). After work he stays home. Alone.

Home is a man’s castle, but not this man, not this home. His neighbours are poster children for strangulation at birth. Night after night, Frank cranks the volume on his TV to drown out their Neanderthal conversation, a cacophony of verbal and physical abuse, wham-bam sexual activities and constant caterwauling from their genetically stupid infant. What he endures on TV is precisely what indoctrinates the feeble minds of America. Channel-hopping to reality TV, a white trash ‘hose’ digs a blood-soaked tampon from her vagina and flings it at another. An endless parade of wags dump on the disenfranchised and insist: ‘God hates fags’ while images of Barack Obama as Adolph Hitler and news reports of homeless people burned alive buttress ‘Bowling on Steroids’ or the reality TV star Chloe, a nasty teenage girl who treats everyone like dirt. On his drive to work, the car radio is an aural assault from Tea Party types.

At the office he has to listen to his simpleton colleagues moronically regurgitating everything he endured on TV the night before. A tiny bright spot turns dark when the receptionist openly flirts and files a sexual harassment complaint. He loses his job, returns home and turns on his TV to drown out his Jello-brained neighbours.

There is, however, a solution. Frank, you see, is a Liberal – a Liberal with a handgun. He does what all Liberals must do when civilization is on the brink, This is a mere 15 minutes into God Bless America and at this point I laughed so hard I ruptured myself. From here, the movie doesn’t let up for a second – especially once Frank begins a spree of violence against intolerance with a gorgeous, sexy teenage girl. They’re a veritable Bonnie and Clyde – fighting for the rights of Liberals who are tired of the mess America is in.

Director Bobcat Goldthwait makes movies with a sledgehammer, but it’s a mighty trusty sledgehammer. He has developed a distinctive voice that began with the magnificently vile Shakes the Clown, and with this new film he hits his stride with crazed assuredness. Some might take issue with the way he lets his central characters rant hilariously – well, beyond the acceptability of dramatic necessity – but I have to admit it’s what makes his work as a filmmaker so unique. He creates a world that exists within his own frame of reference, which, at the same time, reflects aspects, and perspectives that hang from contemporary society like exposed, jangled nerves. God Bless America fights fire with fire. It’s the American Way! Even for Liberals.

The Eye of the Storm (2011) **

I have no doubt that Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White’s novel – which this dreary movie is based on – is not without merit, but if your idea of a good time is watching a harridan spewing vitriol, then by all means feel free to partake of Fred (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith) Schepisi’s rendering of The Eye of the Storm. For close to two hours we get to watch Charlotte Rampling chastise her spoiled adult children (the ubiquitous Geoffrey Rush and the wonderful, but wasted Judy Davis). With Mom close to horking out her final globs of life, the kids have made the trek to Australia from Blighty and Gay Paree respectively to ensure their inheritance will rightfully fall into their laps. We watch as this trio trudge through the turgid drama and seldom feel anything but contempt for all of them and wonder why it is we’re being dragged through this sludge at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a sucker for screen harridans. Mind you, I usually prefer them when they’re slugging it out with each other in melodramas like Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane – not dour British-Australian co-ventures we’re supposed to take seriously. One of the more sickening subplots in The Eye of the Storm involves Geoffrey Rush having his knob plunged and polished by one of Rampling’s caregivers – a comely young thing that (for God knows whatever reason) is genuinely charmed by him. We are also afforded endless flashbacks via Rampling’s dementia. In one of them, she seduces the buff young stud sniffing around Judy Davis. I know how this must sound ever so – ahem – appetizing, but I can assure you it is more than enough to induce major chunk-blowing.

Every year, it seems we get more and more movies like this – dull chamber dramas full of rich, old people with Commonwealth accents who crap on each other (and by extension, us) for two fucking hours, and we’re supposed to actually feel something for these miserable, privileged twits. I suppose they keep getting made because there’s always money available for such pictures. They’re relatively cheap to make, attract major actors, carry a veneer of respectability, are often based on acclaimed literary properties and can be directed for a song by filmmakers well past their prime. And, of course, they get programmed into major international film festivals.

Killer Elite (2011) *

What this lame duck action thriller is doing in a major international film festival like TIFF is beyond me. It’s the sort of movie that suggests festivals are little more than a junket opportunity for bad movies that need all the help they can get and/or an excuse to parade a bunch of stars into town. Though inspired by a not-so-manly-titled book called The Feather Men, it has chosen to rip off its title (sans the word ‘The’) from a solid Peckinpah action picture from the 70s starring James Caan and Robert Duvall. The Killer Elite is far from Sam’s best work, but I’d argue one frame of it beats this noisy, jack-hammering and ultimately leaden, meandering macho-man movie.

What will keep Bloody Sam from rolling in his grave is that this is, at least, not a remake of his movie. Basically we’ve got two old buddies – Jason Statham and Robert De Niro – who work as soldier-for-hire assassins. After a dull, contrived opening action set-piece, Statham’s character decides it’s time to retire. De Niro doesn’t. He’s kidnapped and used as ransom for Statham to take another job. The target is Clive Owen (sporting a stupid-looking moustache) as a rogue British operative. Cat and mouse ensues. The idea of an action movie starring these three thrills me to bits. Unfortunately, they’re wasted in an action movie directed by someone who clearly has no idea how to direct action – another contemporary genre picture with lots of bluster, far too many close-ups and/or boneheaded herky-jerky camera moves and attention-span-challenged editing.

W.E. (2011) ***

The King’s Speech gave me pathological haemorrhoids. Thankfully my piles receded after seeing Madonna’s W.E. This vaguely feminist fairy tale crossed with fashion porn is a wildly stylish, dazzlingly entertaining and sumptuously melodramatic flipside to the aforementioned horrendous Oscar-baiting nonsense. Instead of Colin Firth spluttering with nobility as King George VI in television director Tom Hooper’s painfully earnest snooze-fest we get an exuberantly acted reverie into the life of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the snappily dressed American divorcee who wooed King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) into her boudoir, forcing him to abdicate for the woman he loved and thus allowing his stuttering, half-wit brother to mincingly don the Crown of Jolly Old England, hoist Blighty’s sceptre and eventually provide inspiration for the aforementioned haemorrhoid-inducer of a movie.

The love story in W.E. is told rather goofily through the eyes of Wally (Abbie Cornish) – named thus by her Wallis Simpson-obsessed mother. Wally is married to a philandering, alcoholic, abusive psychiatrist (Richard Coyle) and spends her days wandering through Sotheby’s public viewing of Wallis and Edward’s soon-to-be-auctioned worldly goods. There she meets the dreamy Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant Russian musician moonlighting as a security guard. He’s an olive-skinned, high-cheekboned Fabio with a Slavic accent and a great Jason Statham dome. He tinkles the ivories with passion and reads Rainer Maria Rilke. He’s a catch! Instead of immediately plunging herself onto Evgeni’s schwancen, she mopes about wondering why her hubby dinks around on her while sticking herself with hypodermics full of progesterone – hoping that she’ll get herself a bun in the oven. And then there’s Sotheby’s. There, she ogles Wallis and Edward’s finery and slips into dollops of their passionate love story – even occasionally getting visits from the ghost of Wallis, who dispenses Miss Lonelyheart’s advice.

OK, I bet you’re thinking this all sounds kind of stupid. Well, it probably would be, but Madonna’s insane, passionate direction yields a movie experience that is pure romance. Via cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski, Madame Ciccone allows the camera to glide and whirl its way through the dress and décor of the filthy rich with such abandon that she creates a magical world that we’re very happy to be a part of. Many critics are pouncing on Madonna for this movie. In this day and age, when it’s harder and harder to finance a movie and next to impossible to get a movie directed by a woman off the ground, an easy target is someone who is as rich, famous and powerful as she is. There’s a reason she’s rich, famous and powerful. She has exceptional style, savvy and talent. Most of all, making a movie about Wallis and Edward and focusing on Wallis is – dare I say – something we’d ONLY see from a female director. So it’s Madonna. Why the fuck not? W.E. is one of the most entertaining movies I’ve seen all year. I feel like a virgin all over again.

Killer Joe (2011) ****

At one point during William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, an unexpected roundhouse to the face turns its recipient’s visage into a pulpy, swollen, glistening, blood-caked skillet of corned beef hash. Said recipient is then forced at gunpoint to fellate a grease-drenched KFC drumstick and moan in ecstasy while family members have little choice but to witness this horrendous act of violence and humiliation. William Friedkin, it seems, has his mojo back. We’re in Jim Thompson territory here as we delight in a tale of a white trash family living in a trailer park, who hire the services of a hitman to knock off a relative for insurance money. It’s nasty, sleazy and insanely, darkly hilarious. This celluloid bucket of glorious untreated sewage is directed with Friedkin’s indelible command of the medium and shot with a terrible beauty by ace cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. Friedkin, the legendary director of The French Connection, The Exorcist and Cruising, dives face first into the slop with the exuberance of a starving hog at the trough, and his cast delivers the goods with all the relish needed to guarantee a heapin’ helpin’ of Southern inbred Gothic. This, my friends, is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore. Trust William Friedkin to bring us back so profoundly and entertainingly to those halcyon days. Oh, and if you’ve ever desired to see a drumstick adorned with Colonel Sanders’s batter, fellated with Linda Lovelace gusto, allow me to reiterate that you’ll see it here. It is, I believe, a first.

* * *

My capsule reviews above were all published in longer-form at Daily Film Dose along with several pieces by my colleague Alan Bacchus.

All in all, this proved to be a most satisfying edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. In addition to all of the above I managed to squeeze in over 20 movies in 10 days. Other titles I saw included Jonathan Demme’s final trilogy of Neil Young concert movies (Neil Young Life), a satisfying picture with All Neil All the Time and a stunning set-piece in honour of the victims of the Kent State Massacre; a moving and entertaining documentary on one of our great songwriters (Paul Williams Still Alive); Lars von Trier’s staggering Melancholia; Steve McQueen’s well-directed, but overrated Shame, a dramatic exploration of sex addiction that’s high on style, but lacks humour; a great Willem Defoe performance as a man tracking the Tasmanian tiger in the not-so-great The Hunter and a wretched low-budget post-apocalyptic thriller taking one slice out of the lives of non-cannibalistic survivors called The Day.

The city of Toronto and its major international film festival may well be too smug for their own good, but all is well in the colonies when so many great movies are on view.

From the Dominion of Canada, I bid you: Bon Cinema!

Greg Klymkiw

Flutter

British supernatural-tinged gambling neo-noir Flutter screens at the Raindance Film Festival on October 5. It is director Giles Borg’s second film, following last year’s bittersweet indie comedy 1234. Below he shares his tips for surviving the life of an indie filmmaker.

I had been working making TV, commercials and shorts for 15 years before I made my first feature but still nothing prepared me for what that first week was like. I felt like I’d been hit by a train, every day was just a barrage of questions and decisions to be made and it never seemed to stop. At night I’d dream I was on set so I’d wake up tired, feeling that I’d already done my day’s work. Even though I knew it was coming it was pretty much the same on my second film, Flutter, although the bigger budget did mean I got a lift to set every day rather than taking the bus as I did on 1234. Having said that, I’d do it all again in an instant, it really is the best fun I’ve ever had, but here are a few things I discovered during what seemed like the longest weeks of my life.

Look calm. Even if inside you’re screaming, outwardly look relaxed. If you look calm, everyone else relaxes. If you start screaming, so will they (probably).

Prepare. The more preparation you do before going on set the better. When you’ve nailed all the mundane stuff beforehand you’ll be in a much better situation, mentally, to react when it all goes tits up. Because at some point it will.

The director and the DoP are quality control on set. Let the 1st AD worry about keeping to the schedule, let the producer worry about the budget, you and the DoP are there to make sure everything that goes on film is the very best it can be, the shots and the acting. Just think about making those amazing and let other people worry about their jobs.

Without actors you’re nothing. If there’s a close-up on your actor and the audience looks in his eyes and doesn’t believe what they see then you might as well have not bothered. Spend time with your actors, they’re your greatest resource. Work on ideas with them, take their input, they’re going to live these characters on screen for you, make sure you let them own them. Give them the space they need and they’ll reward you handsomely.

There are no such things as stupid questions. Those two leather jackets may look pretty similar to you, but costume have been thinking long and hard about it and they need you to make a choice, and that choice will affect how the rest of the wardrobe looks. Lots of other people have work to do that can only be done when you’ve made your choice, so give it some thought. And if you get it wrong it’ll only annoy you every time you see it on screen. And it’ll be your fault.

Be nice to everyone. You could shout at people and not bother learning anyone’s name and they’d still work really hard, but really, you’re only making a film, not bringing peace to the Middle East, so try not to act like a twat.

Architecture (Numero Group)

American artist Al Jarnow started out as something of an accidental animator. Obsessed with capturing light, Jarnow initially created paintings. Like David Hockney’s photographic collages, Jarnow’s works laid out their subjects through squares of colour. Painted street scenes, architectural structures and landscapes were used to illustrate the motion of time, the changing of light and its transformative powers. Buildings were chosen as vessels; it was light that was the subject. Film, with its flickering frames of light and intrinsically temporal nature, was a natural progression. There was more potential for recording and exploring transience. He was also led towards the medium by his acquaintances and the environment of his city: the artistically free and exciting New York of the 1970s. Film Forum, Anthology and the Collective of Living Cinema provided unique platforms for experimentation. And Jarnow was a natural experimenter.

His first attempt at filmmaking – a psychedelic animation of Edward Lear’s poem ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’ – was for a NYU student film, produced by friend Dan Weiss, with drawings by his wife, Jill Jarnow. By necessity he learnt on the project; and by not knowing the medium, he was able to reinvent, challenge and improvise. Over the course of his career, he has played around with Xerox machines, he has produced stop-motion animations with filing cards and, in recent times, he has ‘fallen head over heels into the computer screen’, investigating the possibility of software-generated sequences without beginnings, middles and ends.

There is an elegant precision to Jarnow’s films. His 70s filing-card films stylishly play with geometric patterns. Piles of paper leap up and down mail-slots or shuffle like packs of cards, all the time revealing rotating architectural hand-drawn cubes. As the numbered sheets of paper flip before your eyes, your mind races to discover how it is done before duly giving in to the hypnotic rhythm, counted out on Mozart-written harpsichord beats. Autosong (1976), inspired by his wife’s blue Volkswagen car, is a labyrinthine journey of bends, bridges and hills knotting into abstract tubes and pipes set to field recordings of revving engines. Jarnow looked to the background scenery of old cartoons, rather than the racing hero.

Indeed, Jarnow presents humans as small specks, insignificant in the lifespan of the earth. In the two-minute short Cosmic Clock (1979), an impassive young male figure watches from a hillside as one billion years flash before his eyes. A strange time-lapse masterpiece unfolds as successive space-age cities rise and fall, water levels surge and plummet and ice ages sweep over the land. Architecture (1980) takes a different approach, using brightly painted toy blocks to create a stop-motion representation of urbanisation. Model animals weave in and out as buildings emerge, disintegrate and rocket up skywards. The elaborate city landscape sees the animals disappear as cars move in.

As well as charting the progression of human beings against the backdrop of the natural world, Jarnow also displays a desire to record time as it relates to an individual’s life. Jesse: The First Year (1979) is a playful sequence of photographs showing Jarnow’s new-born son over the course of 12 months, charting changes and growth during a period when the passage of time is sharply apparent. Similar in its personal approach, Celestial Navigation (1984) is one of Jarnow’s most fulfilled experiments. The 15-minute film records light passing through Jarnow’s Long Island studio from 20 March 1982 until 20 March 1983. As blocks of sunlight fall from the windows against whitewashed walls, Jarnow obsessively traces their movement across mornings, afternoons, days, weeks, months. He creates grids, photographic prints and a model of the studio, surrounded by a shining light bulb. He travels to Stonehenge for the summer equinox and produces a map of the landmark. There is a wonderful zoetrope-like sequence as the camera swirls around the stones, sun shining through and shadows cast. The effect of Celestial Navigation is like a fantastically talented jazz trumpeter stepping up to improvise, surrounded by silence as the rest of the band dies away. It is Jarnow’s personal philosophical riff on time and light.

Given the cerebral aspect of his works, it comes as a surprise that Jarnow also worked on many television commissions, including sequences for the mighty children’s television series Sesame Street. Generations of children remember his film, Yak (1970), an educational short about the letter ‘Y’. This commercial work paid for experimentations in the studio while Jarnow has described his personal work as acting like a laboratory for his commissions. And what a fantastic laboratory his Long Island attic became. Self-effacing in interview, Jarnow depicts his filmmaking as starting off on a very personal basis (‘my wife was an audience, my friends were an audience’). The uniqueness of Jarnow’s work rests heavily on its personal quality. Jarnow is an artist driven by an enviable desire to endlessly chase ideas, taking new perspectives and trying out all approaches.

Eleanor McKeown

Calculus

On a grim mid-January Saturday afternoon, the Roxy Bar and Screen was packed to the rafters with a lively audience waiting for the LSFF programme of music and video shorts. It was impossible to move for the people sitting on the floor, and still they kept coming. Their eagerness was justified: once more, LSFF delivered the goods in a selection of shorts that innovatively combined sound and image. The programme was bookended by Max Hattler’s Heaven and Hell, two films inspired by the visionary paintings of Augustin Lesage. They are constructed as loops, with patterns of coloured circles moving in a circular movement to repetitive percussive sounds in Heaven, while in Hell, dark grey machine imagery opens like the wings of an eagle to the noise of a sinister drone. Hypnotic and immersive, with complex variations on visual and aural patterns, they perfectly framed the programme.

One of the most impressive films was Franck Trebillac’s Calculus, the video to an electronic track by Stretta (scroll down to watch the film). Images of organic matter and insects are set to the throbbing music, with a beetle and a praying mantis moving in time to slower and faster rhythms, before a woman comes out of a chrysalis with a butterfly covering her eyes and nose. The pulsation of the music and the emphasis on the texture and palpitation of the insects’ bodies work together superbly to create a heightened sense of life’s matter, culminating in the creation of this beautiful, deeply alien creature. Another of Franck Trebillac’s videos was included in the programme, for Tricil’s ‘The Emancipation’. This time, the focus was on mechanisms and automata, with a ballerina in an old-fashioned music box dancing to a dark, heavy complex electronic beat. Her movements were jerky like a doll’s, and as the music progressed, her image was multiplied and superimposed, creating wonderful abstract patterns that fitted the music perfectly and underlined its dark, oppressive feel.

In Alex Harrison’s video for Aspirin’s electronic instrumental ‘Cutter’, a gloved hand tests brightly coloured 80s plastic toys in a white lab-like environment. As the music becomes more discordant, the toys spin out of control, until the lab tester sets fire to them. The Day-Glo 80s imagery was a perfect fit for the music, and the movement of the toys precisely matched the rhythm of the music. In a completely different style, Friends was a video directed by Edwin Mingard for François and the Atlas Mountains. François is introduced as the ‘curator’ of the ‘Atlas Mountains’ Memory Archive’ and he sings the song with an old Super8 projector behind him. This is intercut with images of a young man in various settings, who wipes words such as ‘Kissed a Girl’ and ‘Got Scared’ off his face. This is filmed backwards, the words appearing as the wiping is reversed. This temporal trick emphasises the melancholy of the song.

Among the films that were not music videos, one of the most interesting was Paul Cheshire’s The Cursed Cassette, which established a convincingly strange world in just one minute. A man receives a mysterious cassette in an envelope on which is drawn a moustache; when he plays it, high-pitched electronic noises and what sounds like a bassoon or a tuba are heard, while a moustache appears on his face. Weird electrical impulses are triggered and the man goes through a number of transfigurations; he multiplies and is transformed into a sinister masked figure. The Cursed Cassette brilliantly uses simple visual and musical elements to create an intriguing and evocative story in a remarkably short time.

Not all of the films were as successful, but in a programme that included 26 shorts, that was to be expected. Some of the music videos were not particularly interesting, and the two fashion films included seemed entirely unnecessary: Leaving Dreamland (Ivana Bobic and Rain Li) told the silly, clichéd story of a girl who looked like a model and whose only purpose seemed to show off hip clothes, while Cassia (Zaiba Jabbar) seemed like a self-indulgent portrait of Hoxtonites. But despite these bum notes, the screening was hugely enjoyable and interesting overall, and the audience certainly agreed, enthusiastically applauding every single film.

Virginie Sélavy

Watch Calculus:

Until the River Runs Red

With details of LSFF’s 2011 programme still under wraps, I ventured forth to an icy Soho street, buzzing with the Christmas rush, to collect a bundle of DVDs from festival programmer Philip Ilson. Home-burnt screeners whirring on my precariously balanced laptop may be a far cry from this month’s forthcoming screenings at the ICA but they provided a lovely taster of things to come: a preview of the festival’s most experimental new shorts selection, Leftfield and Luscious. Films are brought together for this programme under a fairly loose premise – namely that they lean towards a more abstract approach – and, as a result, it’s a varied assortment of discs. First to make it into my computer is the strange, poetic Sea Swallow’d, a collaboration between the filmmaker Andrew Kötting and artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, working under the name Curious. A work with clear surrealist influences, the film is at times madcap and lively; and at others, ominous and lilting. Divided into sporadic, episodic chapters, the film slowly builds to reveal its themes. The sea appears, disappears and reappears as a mysterious force. Guts figure in several forms: the camera trails the texture of a human stomach; a female voice declares her love in terms of digestive organs (she loves his insides, the darkness of his liver); and a fish is de-boned. Sea and guts represent the powerful, primeval aspects of life, ones which we do not often consider in our day-to-day humdrum. Sea Swallow’d is a beautifully made film and one that gently reveals some poetic lines and interesting questions about how far such primitive forces might influence human behaviour. The other stand-out example of filmmaking from the collection of discs was Paul Wright’s Until the River Runs Red. This film has some extraordinarily sumptuous cinematography – close-up shots of open meadow, wet skin and long tresses of hair, glimpses of sun and road snatched through a car boot. The film follows a girl who was kidnapped from a shopping centre and the couple who abducted her but, unfortunately, it felt as though the content itself had been underdeveloped; the subject matter was treated slightly melodramatically and the dialogue a little unoriginally. But director Paul Wright is clearly a very talented filmmaker; his step into features is an exciting prospect.

Wright’s film is nominated for the festival’s Best British Short Film Award, alongside two other shorts in the Leftfield & Luscious category. One of these, Murmuration, by Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, perfectly encapsulates the other side to this programme; a lighter, more playful side, which popped up across the selection. The film tracks a river canoe trip paddling underneath a murmuration of starlings: an acrobatic display put on by thousands of synchronised, flocking birds. With camera work aimed at emphasising their DIY-approach and a soundtrack by Beirut, there is a vivacious, carefree appeal to the film. This lightness and playfulness also struck me in Dominique Bongers’s Gallop, a visual experiment with a nod to Eadweard Muybridge’s flying horse, and Ruth Lingford’s Little Deaths, an animated representation of interviewees discussing their experience of sex. The content and tone of the Luscious and Leftfield films might vary enormously but the films’ abstract leanings mean that there is common ground: a shared love for the visual side of filmmaking. It is encouraging to see such strong work in this category. If this treat of DVDs is a hint of what the festival is offering, it should be another interesting year for LSFF audiences.

Eleanor McKeown

Ki Ri Ki Acrobats

Segundo de Chomón belonged to a generation of nameless film directors; his films were cast with nameless stars. With film only just stumbling into the 20th century, cinema was still a credit-less art form. No title sequence, just an abrupt ‘Fin’. It was the studios that supplied a name and an identity. The iconic Pathé cockerel repeatedly pops up mid-action while de Chomón’s name is nowhere to be found. Yet de Chomón is not forgotten; by sifting and piecing together film history, his name has become attached to an impressive filmography of tableaux and film fragments, celebrated at this year’s New York Film Festival.

The programme of films – some broken and some complete – was held together by early cinema specialist and playful commentator Tom Gunning. Introducing the films in an entertaining and pleasingly unobtrusive manner, Gunning rejoiced in de Chomón’s ‘Spanish sense of total weirdness’, speculating that perhaps a young Buñuel or Dalí might have settled down to his Andalucian Superstition (1912) years before they started work on their Chien andalou (1929). There are many similarities between the works, although there is a difference in authorial temperament; Gunning painted de Chomón as less of the artistic, controversial auteur and more of a technician. He was working at the very beginning of film when technology was being mastered and explored. The key was not making a statement, but rather entertaining the audience and experimenting with ‘what the camera could do’.

His early films show a fairly straightforward approach. A historical reproduction of Spanish resistance to Napoleon was a static affair with muddled crowd scenes and, as Gunning amusingly pointed out, ‘dead bodies finding comfortable ways to die’. Next came a slapstick chase film, which saw a newly rich man advertising for a wife and then beating a hasty retreat from swarms of pushy females. Again the camera was positioned stock-still while the action rushed in and out of frame but the charming conceit obviously took off and many variations were made, most famously Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925). Gunning was quick to point out that in early cinema ‘ripping each other off was business’. Indeed, I also spotted similarities between de Chomón’s Electric Hotel (1908) and Keaton’s Electric House (1922), which both show electrical gadgets wreaking havoc on unsuspecting residents. Using a beautiful range of effects, de Chomón creates gizmos – from a mechanised letter-writer to an automatic undresser – to rival those of Keaton’s glorious silent comedy.

It was with such later films and in particular, Ah la barbe (1905), that the NYFF screening took a decided turn for the surreal. As Gunning said of the film, ‘there is no plot, just plain weirdness’. Seated in front of a full-length mirror, a man lathers up and begins to shave, but is repeatedly thwarted in his attempts as his reflection morphs into strange, animal-like visages. Increasingly bemused and frustrated, the actor turns to camera to pull puzzled, exasperated faces.

These expressive facial asides highlight the enchanting theatricality running through de Chomón’s work. Vaudeville theatre is key and a major contributor to the bizarreness of his visions. One of his films even takes place inside a miniature children’s theatre with wrestling and fencing puppets playing out the action. Magic tricks are ever-present. A magician oversees the action in Les cents trucs (1906), turning ballerinas into clowns and back again; in The King of the Dollars (1905), a hand deftly plays with gold coins, creating optical illusions before our eyes; and in The Unseizable Pickpocket (1908), a crafty thief turns into a slither of fabric in his attempt to evade the law. De Chomón was himself a magician with his camera work, using editing and stop-motion techniques that we would associate with 21st-century expertise. For his 1907 film, Ki Ri Ki Acrobats, de Chomón shot actors lying in various formations on a black sheet using an overhead camera. Through this trick in perspective, the acrobats appear to be performing gravity-defying gymnastics. The funniest routine involves a tiny acrobat straining and holding up his huge colleagues on a narrow plank of wood. The exotic troupe of ‘Japanese’ performers, the physical comedy and the optical illusions are pure vaudeville.

According to Gunning, in addition to this theatricality, the other key contributor to the weirdness of de Chomón was his Spanishness. The Andalucian Superstition takes its plot from a traditional Spanish folk tale; a woman seethes with jealousy on seeing her lover talking to a Romani woman and dreams that her lover is captured by gypsies. The dream sequence is worthy of Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound (giving further weight to the idea that Dalí, who worked on the film, did see de Chomón!), beginning with the camera pulling up to a close-up shot of the jealous woman’s face, all haunted eyes and furrowed brow. The following interlude with its gypsy cave of strange bottled creatures is a strange, fantastical marvel. Again de Chomón seems light years ahead of what one might expect; the use of psychology and odd surreal visions seems like it could belong to a much later period of film history. This enchanting use of folkloric material also shines through in The Red Spectre (1907). A nonsensical work that roughly plots the rivalry between a male and female magician (played by de Chomón’s wife), the repeated images of skeletons and fire seem like symbols from a traditional folk tale. Reading between the lines, the film reveals a pre-occupation with the manipulation of the female image. Tiny women appear trapped in glass bottles and an image of a woman appears on a box composed of moveable segments. They are images that linger in your mind, playing out in strange colourised tones.

Interestingly, de Chomón started out working as a colouriser and would end his career in a similar technical role, working as a cameraman for the Italian director Pastrone, and as one of the many technicians on Napoleon (1927). He may not be remembered like a Keaton, a Dalí or a Hitchcock, or even like his contemporary Méliès, but his work as a director is imaginative and extraordinary and deserves a credit at last.

Eleanor McKeown

Rubber

Now in its 18th year of existence, Paris’s L’Etrange Festival continues to mine the past and present of cinema to unearth beautiful rarities, weird gems and forgotten masterpieces. The remarkable knowledge of cinema that informs the programming, the rich selection of films, and the opportunities for discovery it offers mark it out as a unique event in an increasingly busy festival calendar. It was founded in 1993 by Frédéric Temps, a TV director, music producer, musician and journalist, who somehow has managed to find the time to put together 16 editions of the event, with a two-year break in 2007-2008 when its host venue, the Forum des Images, closed for refurbishment. Helped by a team of four other people – who also all have day jobs in the audio-visual industry – Temps has this year again traced a wonderful path through cinematic strangeness for adventurous audiences.

Virginie Sélavy had the pleasure of talking to Frédéric Temps about the origins of the festival and its aims, as well as the unavoidable topic of the moment, A Serbian Film.

VS: How did the festival start?

FT: As journalists we were seeing a lot of films on VHS and in festivals (at the time DVDs and the internet didn’t exist), which, surprisingly, were not being released in France despite their quality, and one day we decided to create a festival to show the films that we, as viewers, wanted to see on a cinema screen. It started in this way in 1993 and it grew successfully, and now it’s a big festival that is almost international.

You don’t get paid for the work you do on the festival, but do you at least manage to cover your costs?

With difficulty, but these days we’re doing better because it’s better managed and there are more people attending. But after 18 years we still have to do this as volunteers because the state and private funding that we get is not enough to produce an event on this scale, with so many guests and films.

So it’s a true labour of love.

Absolutely, it’s really a passion for the whole team, including the 80 volunteers who help us during the festival and the five members on the main board.

It’s obvious that a lot of care and thought goes into the programming and you always have great guests.

It’s more interesting and enjoyable for everyone if we have guests when we’ve found a rare film. It’s good for the guests themselves to see that 20 or 30 years later their film is still greeted with the same enthusiasm by much younger generations. That was our aim when we restarted the festival last year, we were wondering if the generation that was very young when we started and was now reaching 18 would be interested in discovering those works. And it’s working. Last year we saw a new generation of viewers come to the festival, which was completely different from what we’d seen before the festival took a break in 2006. That’s wonderful, it means that the work we have been doing for the last 18 years goes in the direction of the filmic tastes of other generations, and that’s the best compliment, the best reward we can have.

You don’t just programme new films, as in the case of so many other festivals, you also dig up lost films and obscure rarities from the past.

That’s how it started. The festival was created to give audiences a chance to rediscover films that we knew were gathering dust on the shelves of certain distributors or producers. In France, there are far too many festivals that aren’t really properly curated, so we had to differentiate ourselves from them and do something really specific. But with time, we also followed more new releases because there are still directors who make films today and are not necessarily recognised. It’s good to try and bring recognition to new works that may go unnoticed. The festival is now as much about keeping an eye on the films of the future as those of the past, while trying to discover and support new directors.

This year for the first time, we have created a feature film competition with our partner Canal+. We didn’t have a competition until now because for us all the works had the same value, even if they were badly made or a bit fragile. But the partners of Canal+, in particular the Cinema TV channel, are very close in spirit to us. Unlike many festivals, including the biggest, where the prize is just a worthless trinket, we offer as a prize a direct TV purchase, which represents a large sum of money and is a big boost for the film. We decided to do this to give a chance to a film that maybe would not get a general release.

What is also great about L’Etrange Festival is that you go beyond specific genres to delimit the territory of the strange in a much wider and interesting way.

Exactly. Sometimes it’s a problem, some people don’t get it, and we are still categorised by some as a ‘chainsaws and raped Japanese women’ kind of festival. Those people have clearly not worked out what the programming is about because of course we are interested in all genres. There are films that, unfortunately, we couldn’t get because there are still distributors or people in the media who have a negative view of the festival. For instance, we wanted to show Frederick Wiseman’s latest film, Boxing Gym, which is very important for me because he’s a giant in the history of cinema, but his French distributor did not want to give us the film because he thought it was not the place for it. We still face this sort of problem but I think that, with time, people will understand that we can show Walt Disney films – I’m referring to the programme curated a few years ago by Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction, who had chosen a rare film by Robert Stevenson, the Walt Disney musical Darby O’Gill and the Little People – as well as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or A Serbian Film, which everyone is talking about this year, after what happened last weekend at FrightFest. [The film was pulled by the festival organisers after the BBFC and Westminster Council demanded cuts. Read more about this.]

Will you be showing A Serbian Film uncut?

For the moment there’s no problem because, despite the untruths circulated on the internet for a few months, the film has not been censored in France. No film has been banned in France for at least 30 years and unlike the BBFC, the CNC [French censorship board] has no jurisdiction over films shown for the first time in festivals. There was an article in the music magazine Les Inrockuptibles on what happened in the UK, which concluded by saying that maybe the CNC would get involved here, but that’s not the case at all. For the past year, non-profit-making festivals like ours don’t have to submit the films they are presenting to the CNC. This means that the organisers and the venue take responsibility for screening films that haven’t been shown before. Of course, A Serbian Film is extremely violent, one of the most violent films you can see right now. So we have indicated everywhere that the film can only be seen by over-18s, in agreement with the CNC’s guidelines.

It is indeed a very disturbing film, but I can’t quite understand where exactly the cuts imposed by the British censors will be made, given that the whole second part of the film is essentially one unbearable scene after another.

There has always been very strict censorship in Britain. A Serbian Film was first shown at South by Southwest, then at the Brussels Fantastic Film Festival, and no one said anything. It is only since it was shown at Cannes that things have heated up. The problem is that A Serbian Film, like Pasolini’s Salò, or the Chinese film Corps 731 (Men behind the Sun) by TF Mous, which we have shown, are not for everyone. The scenes that are problematic for some people are the ones involving children. But if those scenes are removed, it changes the film. As the director and scriptwriter have said clearly, the film denounces the crimes committed during the Yugoslav conflict, which is something we all know about, it wasn’t that long ago, and we also know that, as the authors have said, their fellow countrymen have suffered worse things than what they show in the film. If you know this, you can understand that the film is not an apology for ultra-violence or paedophilia but, on the contrary, a denunciation of it.

If people can’t see that, I think it is also because the film is extremely well made, even though it’s a first film. It has sumptuous 35mm cinematography and well-known actors, who have appeared in Emir Kusturica’s films, for instance, and I think that has disturbed people because what is called trash porn films are generally cheaply and quickly made, with a very specific image and grain.

Of course, you can criticise the film like any other film. I know some people who didn’t have a problem with the content but didn’t agree with the point of view and found the film clumsy. They thought it should have included scenes connecting the story to the history of Serbia, with TV images of the time, for instance. They thought the film was not clear enough even if it is metaphorical.

Aside from A Serbian Film, what other films do you think are particularly interesting in this year’s programme?

It’s difficult to say, but Quentin Dupieux’s new film Rubber was a great revelation, and we almost picked it as the opening film because it represents the spirit of the festival so well. It’s a perfect genre film, very respectful of the rules and full of references to Romero, Carpenter, etc., but it also has something that subverts the genre in a completely surrealistic way: the tyre. When I see this film, I imagine Quentin Dupieux watching Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher, the ultimate serial killer film starring Rutger Hauer, for the umpteenth time and thinking that it would be funny to transpose the story with Hauer replaced by a tyre. The idea is fantastic because you can apply it to everything: you could remake The Umbrellas of Cherbourg replacing the actresses with tea pots! It’s a proper serial killer film, very well paced, with actors who are used to this sort of film, including Wings Hauser, who is a well-known American B-movie/genre actor, but it goes off on a completely mad tangent. This is exactly what L’Etrange Festival can be.

Every year you ask film personalities to curate programmes, and this year you’ve asked Alejandro Jodorowsky, among others.

Alejandro is one of the ‘godfathers’ of the event in a way. The first year, one of our coups was to find prints of El Topo and The Holy Mountain, which hadn’t been seen in France for 25 years, and Alejandro was very excited and came to present them. He came back again four years ago when El Topo was re-released. So it’s almost like coming full circle this year. Alejandro has been following the festival for all these years and is in complete harmony with what we do.

You also have an event called L’Etrange Musique.

We’ve had this for the past five or six years. If we had the means, and I hope it will happen in the future, we would like to take the festival into other directions, such as exhibitions, readings with writers and scriptwriters, performances, concerts. The first of those is music. One of my biggest dreams was to see The Pop Group play live and as it happens they reformed this year. So I contacted Mark Stewart straightaway and wrote to him saying how much I would love for them to play and they said yes. For me to have The Pop Group on our stage is one of the most fantastic dreams in the history of the festival.

There is some cross-over in the films shown at L’Etrange Festival and FrightFest. Do you work together?

No, not at all. We know each other. I’ve been following Alan Jones’s work for a long time. They present films that we show a week later, so in some cases the distributors tell us that the prints will be at FrightFest before they get to us. But for the first time this year, we’ve collaborated on the homage to Tobe Hooper because his first film Eggshells has been restored by an English company.We were in contact to organise Hooper’s guest appearance and take advantage of the fact that he was coming to London to bring him to Paris, which is something we’d wanted to do for a long time. That was an exception, but if FrightFest were interested in collaborating on the restoration of a print or the visit of a prestigious guest for instance, we’d be very positive because they do a fantastic job, you can see that they’re passionate about what they’re doing. We’re very open to collaborations with people who have the same passion for what they do as we have for our festival.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Comrades

Paris’s Cinémathèque française was closed. I was left staring at locked doors, an expanse of concrete and a poster for a Jim Carrey retrospective. Lemony Snicket wasn’t part of the plan. It was Lanterna Magica I wanted, not Ace Ventura. Still, I resolved to re-trace my metro ride and find my phantasmagoria. The exhibition – ‘Lanterne magique et film peint – 400 ans de cinéma’ – was fairly humble by the standards of a national film institution. Narrow and dimly-lit, the room presented long wooden cabinets simply filled with slides and magic lantern apparatus spanning nearly four centuries. There were some projections and cornered-off screening rooms but, on the whole, the viewer could leisurely pore over and ponder these illuminated glass artworks: from grotesque 18th-century caricatures to delicate, ethereal paintings of polar expeditions; from sentimental 19th-century stories of childhood illness to playful sequences on a skipping rope; from religious didacticism to diabolical, dancing figures of death. Links from the magic lantern to early cinema were plain to see: a painted Muybridge-like sequence of Loie Fuller echoed the Lumière Brothers’ Serpentine Dance (1896); a staged photographic enactment of a lunar voyage mirrored Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902). But with a primarily static presentation of the exhibition, it was left to the imagination to bring the majority of the slides to life. It was an enthralling, wonderful experience to spend a few hours trying, but I was eager to experience a full Lanterna Magica show for myself. The magic lantern bug had started to bite.

Luckily, two months later these enchanting slides came to life for real at Birmingham’s Ikon Eastside Gallery, as part of a special event organised by Flatpack Festival. The show demonstrated Flatpack’s continuing fondness for proto-cinema and early cinematic pioneers. Last year, artist Kevin Timmins presented his bicycle-powered phenakistoscope and filmmaker Mark Simon Hewis talked about making a life-size zoetrope. This year, magic lanternist Mike Simkin and his wife, Teresa, brought their Lanterna Magica to Flatpack audiences. There were travelogues with speeding trains and boats sailing across the channel. There were dancing American sailors and Victorian fairies. And there was my particular favourite: a dissolving view slide, which provided a feast of mesmerising, hypnotic optics, water pouring out of an ornate fountain. Like a strange 19th-century prog-rock video, the vision elicited a round of oohs and aahs from the assembled viewers. Happily, audience participation was actively encouraged as the lanternists asked for sound effects and heckles. This re-enactment of a historical show tied in nicely with the festival’s aim to explore not only film itself, but also how people view film. Elsewhere in the programme, there was a particular focus on the 30s’ cinema-going experience with a bus tour of art deco Odeon cinemas and a talk by Juliet Gardiner sharing surveys and diaries of everyday film enthusiasts. The limited technology – slides were mechanised with cranking handles; they accidently appeared upside down and back to front; they became stuck and were freed to a series of cheers – created a refreshing change from the uniformity of modern cinema experiences. There was a real sense of wonder rippling through the Ikon.

It was this same magic that had bitten Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas back in the 1960s. Preceding the magic lantern show, Flatpack hosted a screening of Lanterna Magicka (2009), a documentary exploring the rather fraught making of Douglas’s epic film Comrades (1987), which was released on DVD by the BFI last year. Comrades tells the tale of the 19th-century Tolpuddle martyrs punctuated by magic lantern shows and pre-cinema illusions. (Mike Simkin himself acted as lanternist for the production). Douglas was an avid collector of proto-cinema paraphernalia; the London flat he shared with friend Peter Jeffries soon became an extension of his ‘brain’, filled with books, slides and advertisements relating to Lanterna Magica. Douglas continued to be enchanted by the ‘magic’ of the lantern’s optical effects until the end of his life, taking an escapist delight in the aesthetic and technology of the past. And this escape provided a perfect retreat from Thatcherite Britain – the thinly-disguised allegorical target of Comrades. Douglas’s extraordinary collection is now housed at the University of Exeter. After the screening, directors Sean Martin and Louise Milne explained how thrilling it was to visit and film this archive, the embodiment of ‘30 years of tenacity and obsession’.

Another tenacious, obsessive lanternist to make an appearance at this year’s Flatpack was Julien Maire. Maire is a French artist preoccupied by the mechanics of technology and the possibilities of illusion. Unlike Douglas, who sought a refuge in the escapist fantasy of early cinema pioneers, Maire looks at ways to reinvent and expand on the concept of the magic lantern. In his projection-performance, Demi-pas, Maire uses a computer-assisted projector, which he has dismantled and rebuilt in order to project fantastically intricate, multi-layered motorised slides. By adjusting the focus to highlight different layers and by using mechanical devices, Maire creates a live performance within each slide. Demi-pas presents a simple story of one man’s daily routine, but the effects are far from ordinary; real-life water boils and fizzes within the slide as the man cooks his dinner; drawings appear outlined through a mini etch-a-sketch; rain droplets spatter onto the screen one by one.

Flatpack presented work by three different types of people inspired by the magic lantern – a historian, a filmmaker and a performance artist. Those still glass slides I saw in Paris came to life; and they did so in so many different ways and formats. Flatpack put on a magical, joyful spectacle and simultaneously raised illuminating questions about what constitutes a ‘film’ by programming events based around proto-cinema technology. After all, cinema itself is born out of the illusion of rapidly juxtaposing still images, but how many festivals are exploring and celebrating this fact? It is an important technological element of film but also a key to understanding the potential playfulness provided by film. At the beginning of Comrades, an itinerant lanternist knocks on doors to promote his act as ‘a show for the family, a show of comical pictures and colour: endless rollicking laughter’. Here is a description befitting of the Flatpack experience and the possibilities of film itself.

Eleanor McKeown