Monuments

As long as art is seen as creation, it will be the same old story. Here we go again, creating objects, creating systems, building a better tomorrow. I posit that there is no tomorrow, nothing but a gap, a yawning gap. That seems sort of tragic, but what immediately relieves it is irony, which gives you a sense of humour. It is that cosmic sense of humour that makes it all bearable.
(Robert Smithson in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object)

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) is looking into the half-distance. Resurrected, having emerged from an underground car park into a 2009 suburbia and wearing an exceptionally bad wig, he contemplates post-minimalist art with his equally glacial buddies Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) and Dan Graham (b. 1942). In a landscape of greys and blues the trio slope around, deadpanning theory and journeying into a reverie of architecture and cinema.

A beguiling oddity, Redmond Entwistle’s short film Monuments stood out as a highlight at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. A thoughtful, funny, sad film. A film with a bibliography. A film about New Jersey. ‘New Jersey was where my grandparents settled and lived after moving from Poland,’ Entwistle explains. ‘It is the counterpart to the visible New York. New Jersey feeds the city with materials, construction and invisible labour. At first New Jersey was the working-class suburbs of the city, then it became the white-collar suburbs, and now it’s something else. It’s a new hinterland. It’s a corporate park.’

Overlapping in time spans, all three artists created seminal works in New Jersey: Graham’s Homes for America photographic series was largely shot there; Matta-Clark carved up suburban houses with a power saw in Splitting and Bingo; and NJ-born Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic essay was a journal of a trip he took there, creating a series of photographs along the way. ‘In it, he talks about the cinematised landscape,’ Entwistle explains. ‘The landscape in New Jersey for him is already a filmic landscape.’

Monuments echoes what Entwistle sees as an underlying structure within their work. ‘Even though it’s sculpture and exists in that kind of space, it felt like there was an underpinning of narrative to their work. The narrative I recognised was this movement out to the fringes to collect material that you bring into the centre, as a means of authenticating society again. The way they’re going out to these environments and using raw materials, I think to some level there’s a reiteration of that narrative, of modernism, where one goes and finds the authentic materials and brings them back to the centre again, and that relates to their interest in context as well.’

Formerly a projectionist at the ICA in London and currently based in New York, Entwistle cuts a serious but restless figure. He has been making moving image work for 10 years, often switching between cinema and gallery exhibition. Paterson – Lódz (winner of Best International Film On-Screen at Images 2008) is an expanded sound piece for a seated audience in a cinema and Belfast Trio (also shown at Rotterdam) consists of three short films that were originally displayed in a gallery but also screened in three cinemas simultaneously in Belfast – each one a short staged scene that doesn’t necessarily relate to the dialogue on its soundtrack. ‘None of the pieces sit comfortably in a cinema or a gallery setting. They’re always between,’ he states. ‘I’d say neither space is adequate, so it’s partly a process of trying to provoke some sort of dialogue about the alternative ways of showing and making work. The cinematic experience has not always been a fixed one, it’s been one that’s open to new possibilities of screening. But I wouldn’t say that the works I’m making are defining what that should be. They are not just critical, but they do construct a certain way of viewing.’

For now though Entwistle has a pressing concern, how the very-much-still-alive Dan Graham will respond to the adventures of the zombie-esque photocopy of himself in the film. ‘I was concerned how he would react to it. I didn’t want to ridicule him. I think maybe it’s slightly unavoidable. He has his persona and I’m ridiculing that persona in some ways.’ Entwistle recalls the post-screening Q&A at the IFFR premiere: ‘I think a couple of people felt that I was mocking the artists’ work. But I really feel that if there is a humour in there it’s directed rather at the industry around the artists. Their mythic status isn’t of their own making, it’s something that’s happened as a process of a cultural industry around their work. I wanted to separate their work from this hagiography that developed around it.’

Kate Taylor

Con Moto

‘It’s only fucking rock and roll’. After considered soul-searching and philosophical ponderings, Noel Gallagher’s Mancunian drawl brought proceedings down to earth with a sharp bump, stifled laughter rippling around the Roxy Bar and Screen. One of the London Short Film Festival’s many events combining music and film, the 65-minute documentary, Introspective (2006), was a captivating exploration of definitions: musicians struggling to define themselves, as individuals, among their contemporary peers, and within a complex sprawl of musical genres and history. While this type of quandary might not keep Noel Gallagher awake at night, fortunately there were plenty more thoughtful voices to discuss what the term ‘post-rock’ really means. A simple, low-fi mix of interviews and performances by bands associated with the movement, Adam Garriga’s documentary presented the audience with important dilemmas facing all artists in an age of information overload: how to come up with something original when it feels as if everything has been done before; and how to escape pigeon-holing while being indentified. The interviewees were an analytical, critical and engaging bunch, as they tried to find the words to define their art and their own place within the world. One of the more eloquent speakers, Jan St Werner from Mouse on Mars complained about the media trying to categorise and file bands: ‘our work is our definition,’ he explained. Ending with an eerily beautiful live performance of Low’s ‘(That’s How We Sing) Amazing Grace’, the film proved that words and definitions are not always necessary or able to do artworks justice.

The London Short Film Festival happily followed this dictum throughout its own programming. And this was nowhere better displayed than at the Leftfield and Luscious screening. The shorts compiled into this enigmatically titled programme defied categorisation, lying somewhere between video art and art-house cinema. Such assorted misshapes are usually left out in the cold or side-lined so it was nice to see them taking centre stage for a packed-out screening at the ICA.

As two ghostly figures appeared on screen, shrouded by mist and ethereal strings and saws, it was clear that this was going to be an interesting afternoon. While at times the programme felt a little long and films occasionally missed the mark, most offered memorable moments and arresting images and some were really very special. Generally, it was those that tried to marry conventional linear narratives with more intangible, obscure forms that worked least well. The dialogue rested heavily and awkwardly in these films, making you wish the filmmaker had dispensed with the everyday altogether and just let the visuals speak for themselves.

Toby Tatum’s painterly short, The Sealed World, which started the screening, presented two women cut off in an over-grown, secluded garden. Here, everyday activities become hyper-ritualised with girls deliberating, obsessing over books, pouring tea and, most bizarre of all, fondant fancies. This otherworldly, haunting quality was apparent across many of the selected films: from Conversation, a series of slowed-down, theatrical facial expressions that spiralled into increasingly abstract forms; to We Only Talk at Night, with its compositions of hypnotic pulsating city lights. Layered images, split screens and disjointed soundtracks were popular as filmmakers experimented and pushed at their media. For me, the most successful films were the ones that seemed to enjoy the possibilities of film – shorts that were happy being shorts and filmmakers who were happy working with film.

The programme was at its best with joyful celebrations of rhythm. Most straightforward, Sam Firth’s I.D. created a mischievous montage of photo booth pictures cataloguing teenage posturing and chameleon hairstyles while Max Hattler’s Aanaatt presented an endlessly mobile sequence of animated Bauhaus-style shapes and compositions. Magnus Irvin’s Spiral In Spiral Out also centred on geometric forms as drawn spirals expanded and increased, recalling early scientific films demonstrating the multiplication of microscopic organisms. The stand-out works of the programme were two shorts – Con Moto and Without You – by Tal Rosner, who won the festival award within this category. His kaleidoscopic visions of architectural views and receding countryside shot from racing train windows demonstrate the excitement that arises when music and film combine successfully. With a dynamism similar to Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique, Con Moto’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s 1935 Concerto for Two Pianos provided a fantastic seven minutes of cinematic vitality. An exceedingly happy marriage between music and film, which spoke for itself.

Eleanor McKeown

Watch Tal Rosner’s Con Moto:

Photo: Billy Childish
© Tate Media

TateShots

Release date: 21 January 2010

Watch on TateShots Website or download from iTunes.

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Bick

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

7th London Short Film Festival

8-17 January 2010

Rich Pickings Presents: Lolita Complex

Date: 10 January 2010

Venue: Shortwave Cinema, London

LSFF website

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

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

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

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

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

Eleanor McKeown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Taylor

London International Animation Festival

27 August-6 September 2009

Various venues, London

LIAF website

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginie Sélavy

London International Animation Festival

27 August-6 September 2009

Various venues, London

LIAF website

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

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

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

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

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

Eleanor McKeown

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

Still from This Way Up

Soho Rushes Short Film Festival

27-30 July 2009

Various venues, London

Festival Website.

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

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

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

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

Eleanor McKeown

Format: CD + DVD

Release date: 2009

Distributor: Mute

Directors: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

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



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

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

Virginie Sélavy: How did the project come about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IP: It was pretty uncool… (laughs)

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

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

VS: What was the idea behind Radio Mania?

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

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

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

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Still from Mother, Mine

Glimmer: 7th Hull International Short Film Festival

21-26 April 2009

Reel Cinema, Hull, UK

Glimmer 2009 website

The recent Glimmer Festival showcased a wide variety of outstanding short films from around the globe, bringing further exposure to a form of filmmaking that is as industrially important as it is artistically invigorating. Three of the short films that were screened at the 2009 event were produced by the South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to promote filmmaking in the region through developing shorts and running events and competitions, such as the recent 2 Weeks 2 Make It. The network’s Glimmer entries included Susan Everett’s award-winning Mother, Mine, about a young woman tracking down her natural mother, and Matt Taabu’s Into the Woods, in which a family outing in the countryside takes a dangerous turn following the appearance of a stranger. Both are suspenseful and unsettling thrillers, while Kieron Clark’s Joy is an entirely different proposition involving a singing fish. Each film was produced by Rob Speranza, a native New Yorker who relocated to Sheffield 13 years ago to undertake post-graduate study, and is now the Head of Operations of the SYFN and will be line-producing his first feature film this summer. John Berra met with him to discuss his recent projects, the importance of festivals, and the supposed marginalisation of short films.

John Berra: What is the development process for short films at the SYFN?

Rob Speranza: When I get a script, I ask myself if it’s something that people are going to want to watch. It sounds really simple, but it’s the sort of thing that a lot of producers forget about; they ask themselves, ‘do I want to make it?’, and that’s a good question, but I ask that question after asking, is this something that people are going to want to see? Is it something that festivals are going to show? Is it something that is actually going to be marketable? Can I get bums on seats with this film, and can I see people enjoying it? If I can answer ‘yes’ to most of those questions, especially the festival one, then I ask if I want to make it and if I am interested in the subject matter. I might read the script and say yes to all those other questions, but the script might be about windsurfing, and I have no interest in windsurfing. But then I might read a script about a boy who wants to connect with his long-lost father, or a script about a war veteran returning to normal society, and I like those subjects, so then I ask myself if it’s going to be likely for me to have a working relationship with the writer and the director.

JB: Festivals are often discussed in terms of representing a creative community, but there is always an intensely competitive element to such events in terms of securing financing for future projects.

RS: I’ve rarely attended a short film festival with a direct view to financing, aside from Cannes. I love festivals. I go to them with a view to selling the film. I know a lot of producers who don’t like going to them, who don’t like networking and schmoozing with lots of filmmakers, but I really enjoy it, to an extent. After three or four days, I want to go home because when I go, I’m really intense; I go to all the screenings, all the events, I’m at every drinks reception, I’ll keep my mouth open and keep talking and, after a while, I don’t want to drink anymore, I don’t want to give away any more business cards and copies of my film, I just want to go home. But the most important thing about festivals is to go and watch other films, to enjoy other people’s work, and see what else is going on and go, ‘why didn’t I think of that? That’s a great idea, why didn’t I make that film?’

JB: It seems that much of your responsibilities involve handling the film after it has been completed and keeping it alive on the festival circuit?

RS: I’m very fond of saying that a producer’s job begins when the film is finished. It’s relatively easy to shoot a film, and I say that with an emphasis on the word ‘relatively’, but when it comes to getting it seen, that’s when you have to really step up your game. You have to get the film out there, send it to the right festivals and sell it. There is so much talent out there; everybody and their brother are shooting films on DVD camera or on mobile phones, so it’s a very competitive world.

JB: What can an award from a festival do for a short film or filmmaker?

RS: When you start to collect awards, as with a film like Mother, Mine, which is doing really well and has won multiple awards, you get a different kind of reputation where people hear of you and you get a bit of renown, which is very positive. Then, of course, sales agents come to you, and you start to see articles in magazines, and that’s the kind of thing that awards can do. They create a sense of importance, talent and maybe a bit of glamour, especially around the director because it’s a director-led industry.

JB: Do you think that putting a short film on the internet can suggest a lack of confidence on the part of the filmmaker?

RS: If you have a decent short film, you shouldn’t be putting it online first. If it’s a good short film, do the festivals first, put it out there, because that is where you are going to meet the people who will want you to make more films and pay you for the one that you’ve just made. I’m not saying that if you put it online, you can’t direct a sales agent to it, but there are all kinds of chances that you might scupper with a lot of festivals.

JB: The performances in Mother, Mine are very naturalistic and affecting. What is your approach to casting a short film, and is there much time for a rehearsal process?

RS: I always try to build in time for rehearsal for my directors. With short films, you don’t have a lot of money or a lot of time, so it’s wise to rehearse for as long as you can. With Mother, Mine the first thing we did was to get Rachel Fisher, our casting director, on board and she worked very closely with director Susan Everett; Sue wrote out her character descriptions and she had a short list of talent that she had been building up for a couple of years, because the short is a pared down version of a feature script she had written, so she had a short-list of names that she had gathered from either films or television. It takes time to generate the relationship between the director and the character, especially if the director didn’t write the script, and then for that person to suddenly come alive when they find them on the internet, or on the screen, or as a result of a casting director showing them clips. Most of the time when I’m working with somebody and they meet an actor who would be suitable for the role, they know it right away.

JB: Into the Woods is a very tight piece. How important is it to balance atmosphere and aesthetics with narrative urgency, and was the finished film stripped down from the original screenplay?

RS: The film did initially have a longer introduction. In the script, we spent longer with the family, they were walking through the woods, we were getting to know them, and it was clear that the mother and father were fighting and that the father may have had an affair at some point; but that was back-story, and back-story is the death of short films, so get rid of back-story, it’s not important. What is important is the way they are going to handle this confrontation because the subtle message in this film is that everybody probably has some kind of prejudice that emerges when you are confronted with a situation like that, when a stranger comes out of the woods, looking scary and bloodied, and saying all kinds of things in different languages.

JB: Why did you want to produce Kieron Clark’s Joy, a black and white film about a singing fish?

RS: Kieron is not the sort of director that I usually gravitate to but there was something about this story. He wanted to make a trilogy about the sea, and he is a very quiet guy, very reserved, extremely clever, very funny in a subtle way, and he knows what he wants. I thought it was a quirky little story, and he said he wanted to do it in black and white, and that there would be no dialogue, just a song. It appealed to my roots in poetry, because some of the first films that I made were eight short film-poems. I’m a much more mainstream, narrative, sales-and-festivals-driven producer now, I like to think I make things that people want to see, but Joy was a good mix because people do want to see it, because it’s not too weird, it’s not too avant-garde that it makes you go, ‘What in the world was that about?’

JB: How do you feel about the general perception that short films are marginalised, especially when compared to short literary fiction?

RS: Since the internet has taken off, you have all these different websites, popular websites like YouTube, Screening Room and DailyMotion.com, to show your film, and as a result of that, festivals are starting up all over the place. Every little town has a festival popping up, and bigger towns and cities a myriad of them, so there are so many ways to get your film seen. Short films are perfect for small, hand-held devices that do not have enough memory to store a feature film, like mobile phones and PSPs, so the market is expanding so quickly that there is a really good future for shorts. Short literary fiction was always marginalised, and yet now there is a massive market for short stories, mostly anthologies, and there are also more compilations of short films being produced and distributed.

JB: Do you think that short films should take more of an influence from commercial feature films in terms of narrative?

RS:A few years ago, people could only make a short funded by the Arts Council if you had to think about what it meant, but because of the popularity of short films now and the way that festivals like Times BFI London or Encounters have grown you have a very different world for short films now. People are making short films that have got great stories, great ideas, even if some of them are one-trick-ponies, and there are plenty of filmmakers out there who work in features but want to make short films in-between. You could make an argument that films like Short Cuts and Magnolia have got short film elements because they piece fragments together. Short Cuts is a good example because it’s based on a collection of short stories, but Robert Altman decided to merge the elements together and make the stories cross over. I love the way that a lot of short pieces can combine to create a really interesting whole and those are probably my favourite kinds of films.

Interview by John Berra

Rob Speranza is currently undertaking production work on two short films for Screen Yorkshire, shooting in 2009. Visit www.syfn.org for more information about the South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network.