Glasgow Film Theatre

Programme Note: Of Gods and Men

2010-11-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

Please note that these programme notes contain spoilers.

‘Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity’ – Julia Kristeva, 19891

Themes of foreignness and invasion permeate Xavier Beauvois’s film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et des dieux, France, 2010) or, it might be more accurate to say, the subversion of these notions. The film is based upon true events of May 1996, when a group of French monks resident in Algeria’s Atlas mountains were taken hostage and killed by Islamic extremists. The exact circumstances of their deaths, in some snow-bound corner of the Algerian countryside, and the specific identities of their killers, remain mysterious today. In Of Gods and Men, Beauvois seeks to imagine the final few months of the monks of Tibhirine, as the growing spectre of violent unrest threatens to destroy their peaceful existence. The film was awarded the Grand Prize at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in 2010, with Beauvois having won the Festival’s Jury Prize fifteen years earlier for his feature Don’t Forget You’re Going to Die (N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir, 1995).

In the opening scenes, there seem to be no divisions between the Cisterian monks and the Muslim community which surrounds their monastery; the brothers are as well-acquainted with the Koran as they are with the Bible, the monastery doubles as a doctor’s surgery to the villagers, and the monks jovially attend local Muslim celebrations. This gentle harmony between monks and villagers will render the violence and hatred which destroys this equilibrium all the more shocking. Whilst preparing for the shoot, Beauvois, seeking to immerse himself in the kind of life the brothers would have led, embarked upon a monastic retreat, and was captivated by the monks’ quiet rituals, saying, ‘it’s rare, nowadays, in a selfish society, to see people taking an interest in others, in other people’s religion, intelligent, passionate people, who are in the state of ‘being’ whereas we’re in the state of ‘doing’, doing things’2. Beauvois films the monks’ rituals with a respectful, non-invasive gaze: at many points, we may only observe their prayers from behind, their faces turned towards the altar and away from the camera. Initially, this serves to remind us that, though we are being granted access to a private world, these rituals are not performed for display or with any other viewer in mind than God. However, as the film progresses, we are welcomed more closely into the monks’ circle, viewing their devotions as if from the altar itself. As the camera captures them in a group, arms clasped tightly around each others’ shoulders, continuing their chant despite the menacing drone of a circling helicopter, we see that, in Beauvois’s words, ‘beyond religion, the film is about men’3. And these are men who, despite threats of death, refuse to leave the monastery, to abandon the villagers who need them or, indeed, to desert each other.

Of Gods and Men arrives at a time when, with the French government’s banning of the burqa in 2010, debates between secularism and Islam in France (home to the largest population of Muslims in western Europe) are raging more furiously than ever, though they have never truly been dormant. The French conquests of Algeria began in the nineteenth century, with the North African country only being granted independence from French colonial power in 1962, after years of bitter conflict. That Algeria is the location where the tragedies presented in the film occur reflects the still volatile relationship between that country and its former coloniser, a legacy of pain and war which lingers long in the minds of the Algerian people and in the landscape’s physical scars. While the villagers around Tibhirine treasure the friendship of the monks, the armed extremists who invade their monastery regard them as strangers who have no right to be there.

Despite its focus on real events, Of Gods and Men does not aim for a documentary-style aesthetic. Director of photography, Caroline Champetier, brings an extraordinarily tactile, painterly eye to the film’s visual style. The colour scheme – the muted grey-blue of the monastery’s stone walls, the glorious pink of the morning sky over the mountains, and swathes of bluish-white snow against the night sky – recalls the work of Russian filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, 1966, Mirror, 1975), and his twenty-first century counterpart, Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return, 2003, The Banishment, 2007), whose low-lit landscapes and hushed interiors evoke atmospheres of secrecy and silent, ancient devotions, similar to those suggested in Beauvois’s film. In one breathtaking scene, Champetier’s camera tracks around the monks’ dinner table as they listen to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; initially, we see joy and laughter in their faces, but as the camera slowly moves back around the table, the music rises to its crescendo and some of the men begin to weep. The camera’s focus on the quiet tears filling the eyes of the monks’ elected leader, Brother Christian, (Lambert Wilson, an unusual casting choice, often regarded as a symbol of proud, weary masculinity in French cinema, and more famous elsewhere for his role as slick villain, The Merovingian, in the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix trilogy) provides a lingering image of sad dignity in the face of danger. Here, we see each man as an individual, not simply as part of a larger entity, as Champetier captures every wrinkle, every tiny defining feature of their faces. Music also plays a crucial role elsewhere in the film, as scenes of the brothers chanting evoke an almost hypnotic atmosphere of peace, starkly contrasted with the gunfire and screaming of the film’s violent scenes.

Of Gods and Men is a film which evidently deals with religion and territorialism, but perhaps less than we might expect. The binding thread of its narrative is surely the kind of deep, unflinching love and devotion which lingers in memory long after physical bodies have ceased to exist.

Jenny Munro, Film Journalist
November 2010

1 Julia Kristeva, ‘Strangers To Ourselves,’ published in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997, p.264.
2 Xavier Beauvois, interviewed by Fabien Lemercier. http://cineuropa.org/interview.aspx?documentID=145652, 2010.
3 Ibid.

Programme Note: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2010-11-25T04:46:00.001-08:00

Please note that these programme notes contain spoilers.

Mid-way through the third film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular Millenium Trilogy, one character refers to Lisbeth Salander’s tumultuous public profile as being ‘like a Greek tragedy’. There may be more to this statement than a simple reference to a dramatic lifestyle. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest considers that such base human instincts are more prevalent in society today than we may think, particularly in relation to gender.

Daniel Alfredson directs for a second time, starting exactly where he ended in The Girl Who Played with Fire, with Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) hospitalised after having been shot by both her father and brother. As she recovers from a bullet wound to the brain, she awaits charges on three counts of murder on her release and, once again, it is journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) who will fight for her innocence through the vehicle of his left-wing political magazine Millenium. To be acquitted she must face a corrupt web of enemies and her own troubled past. It’s part political thriller, part courtroom drama, with less action than its predecessors and more didactic recapitulation of the trilogy as a whole.

It certainly wears its gender thematics on its sleeve. In an early scene, a female police officer’s neck is abruptly snapped by Lisbeth’s estranged brother Ronald Neidermann (Mike Spreitz). This preludes the film’s initial representation of women. Mikael’s co-worker Erika (Lena Endre), editor of Millenium, is intelligent and determined and yet her actions are largely guided by her love for him. His sister Annika (Annika Gianinni), also Lisbeth’s lawyer, is pregnant, her corporeal vulnerability heightened when she visits Lisbeth in hospital and they are threatened by a gunman. Even Lisbeth, posited as a strong female lead in the first two films, is constrained for much of the narrative, relying on the actions of men to shape her circumstance. An expected familial showdown is avoided early on when the gunman kills her father in a nearby hospital bed.

The embodiment of absolute (male) brutality can be seen in Lisbeth’s brother. Incongruous scenes of violence – he pushes an unknown woman out of a moving car and murders an unsuspecting man with a brick to the head – indicate a vast vortex of cruelty. His subjugation of women is particularly notable; we see them tied up, helpless, crying. Seemingly stupid and mostly mute, he is incapable of feeling, both literally and figuratively, except for his father, his ‘creator’, whom he singularly must avenge by killing his sister. A Frankenstein interpretation is given no credence by an ambiguous character, however, and his sister’s intellect and intuition overcomes his animal strength.

Lisbeth’s doctor would appear to cast his ethics at the centre of his actions, the integral treatment of his patient taking precedence over police requests to continue their investigations by talking to Lisbeth. His growing interest in her complicates this initial reading, and her apparent indifference leaves us questioning his strength of character. A scene between him and Mikael in which they discuss Lisbeth’s condition has an underlying tone of male egoistical ownership.

In fact, Mikael’s bearing as a protagonist in the trilogy is compromised. His conduct, when faced with the potential abandonment of the Millenium print run, is questionable. Despite the ominous threats his co-workers, and particularly Erika, have been receiving, he is reluctant to jeopardise the prospect of Lisbeth’s release. His imprudent tenacity is paralleled with Erika’s strong will as she is prepared to forget him on moral grounds by contemplating resignation. His treatment of Erika pointedly mirrors Lisbeth’s treatment of him. Their lingering and somewhat awkward exchange at her door in the film’s pre-climactic scene is telling; it would seem that from his advances Lisbeth senses an inherent weakness in Mikael. It is of course also emblematic of the life-altering abuse she has suffered at the hands of men. The un-romanticised nature of Lisbeth and Mikael’s relationship and the lack of a Hollywood ending is refreshing (and interesting to consider in light of the subsequent David Fincher remake of the first film, due for release late next year).

The court scenes are a gender case in point. An all-male prosecution face Lisbeth and Annika, the former festooned in her trademark leathers and war paint for the first time in this film, suitably equipped to face her perpetrators and her past. The judge is female, and her perception of Lisbeth’s predicament grows as the hearing progresses. Her partiality is clearly affected when the recording of Lisbeth’s brutal rape is played out in court (for those who have seen the first two films, these graphic scenes will be familiar, their repetition doing little to nullify their shock value). Lisbeth is not a straightforward victim, her mercurial, often feral nature evident in court, but she is still capable of evoking great compassion. Lisbeth and Annika’s initially strained relationship takes on new weight with the introduction of this tape. These three women take on an assumed united front, complicit looks between them speaking of an innate female understanding. Lisbeth’s strength is restored and she remains the orchestrator of the narrative and her own fate.

At the heart of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is a study of sexism and gender inequalities that have permeated the whole trilogy. Lisbeth’s doctor gives her a book called Understanding DNA to aid her recovery; a symbolic code to cracking the inherent differences between men and women and why, since the inception of the feminist movement in the 1970s, misogynistic radicalism is still present in society today. The film ends with a question: a closing wide-shot of a night-lit Stockholm asks why gender crimes still fester in the depths of this, or indeed any, city.

Rachael Loughlan
November 2010

Programme Note: We Are What We Are

2010-11-11T09:18:00.000-08:00

Some will dismiss writer/director Jorge Michel Grau’s debut feature We Are What We Are as superior schlock, and little more. Yet before reaching such a judgement we might pause to remember just how easily people disappear without trace within late capitalism, no-one else batting an eyelid as they do. Grau’s tale of dog-eat-dog social meltdown, Mexico City’s social outcasts quite literally ending up as raw meat on the dinner table of a family of cannibals, is arguably more plausible than risible at a moment in time when governments brusquely abolish hundreds of thousands of jobs overnight in the name of economic rationalisation. A movie centred on the consumption of human flesh serves its viewer an uncomfortably large amount to chew upon.

That’s quite deliberate: in promotional interviews Grau has stressed his desire to use the horror film as a vehicle for contemporary political commentary, noting that, 'I didn’t necessarily want to make a genre film. I was much more interested in providing a mirror to talk about the social problems in Mexico right now.'1 We Are What We Are therefore assumes its place in a long and varied cultural tradition which we might label alle(gory). As early as 1729, Jonathan Swift offered A Modest Proposal regarding the dire plight of the Irish poor, noting that 'a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled,' and suggesting that the dispossessed alter their diet accordingly. Much more recently, the flesh-eating zombies of George A. Romero’s decades-long Dead cycle (Day…, Dawn…, etc.) are used by their creator to articulate a critique of consumerism from within a film genre castigated by many as overly commodified.

Jorge Michel Grau exploits cannibalism as dramatic device in similarly canny terms. We Are What We Are recalls, yet also extends, the practice’s status as the ultimate signifier of societal breakdown in the End of Days world of The Road (2006 novel; 2009 film). Pre- rather than post-apocalyptic in setting, however, Grau’s movie uses the literal consumption of human flesh as a way to underscore the existence of figurative, but equally horrific, real-life counterparts. Socio-political injustice and inequality are part of the explanation offered for the diverse types of butchery on display here. Corrupt, money-obsessed policemen prey on prostitutes instead of protecting them; a dead man’s body on the floor of a pristine shopping mall is treated as if just another piece of unsightly litter; quasi-religious superstition, misogyny and homophobia abound. Grau’s film depicts a society within which there is more than one way for an individual to reduce another to the level of living meat. One female cannibal won’t eat a murdered prostitute on moral grounds; elsewhere, a closeted male homosexual counterpart prefers to slay, rather than sleep with, others of the same orientation. The unspeakable nature of any particular use to which human bodies can be put lies very much in the beholder’s eye.

Yet other pieces of the film’s central puzzle – what combination of circumstances might conceivably reduce human beings to start feeding upon each other? – seem more existential in nature. If social conditions vary from place to place, and, to some extent, with the passage of time, the fundamentals of human nature might be far more fixed: we are, as the film’s title would have it, what we are. The cannibals refer repeatedly, for instance, to the unspecified ‘ritual’ which they and generations of ancestors have performed since time immemorial, its roots and reasons lost to memory. Indeed, at times they seem driven more by the imperative of sustaining tradition than of sitting down to a square meal. It also seems significant that the flesh-eaters are a family. Genetics, writer/director Grau seems to suggest, nearly always trumps ethics: you’ll put any moral distance between yourself and the rest of the human race in order to cleave to and care for those individual human beings closest to you.

Ultimately, We Are What We Are is an elegantly accomplished commercial proposition. The movie’s guttering candles, grimy cleavers and bloodstained plastic sheeting should sate genre aficionados hunting for a standard-issue serving of stylish viscera. Yet an art-house audience in search of serious (human) food for thought probably won’t leave unsatisfied, either. But whatever brings you to We Are What We Are, you’d be well-advised to leave off the popcorn (and definitely the hotdogs) until well after the end credits roll.

Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art
November 2010

1 - Quoted in Nick Schager, ‘Hunger Pains’, Village Voice (22/9/10) [Accessed November 7th 2010]

Programme Note: Another Year

2010-11-02T07:00:00.001-07:00

At first glance, there seems curiously little to see: the title of Mike Leigh’s new film appears starkly banal, neutral to the point of apologetic self-effacement. After you’ve watched the movie, however, multiple meanings (many of them murky) for its name swim into view. Leigh is nothing if not an artist concerned to uncover the profound within the plebeian. He does so, moreover, in ways consistently sophisticated and surprising. Repetition (whether comforting or frightening), resignation, mortality and rebirth are just some of the resonances which accrue to the unexceptional words ‘another year’ by the time this film’s end titles stop rolling.

If Another Year is a work concerned with the idea of repetition, this is partly because the movie reiterates many of Leigh’s key concerns and much of his distinctive filmmaking craft. Familiarity abounds: setting (contemporary suburban London), plot structure (the acutely observed social and emotional interactions within a small family-and-friend grouping), and protagonists (lead actors Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent are all long-term Leigh collaborators). Yet the presence of such a well-established directorial framework works to highlight the precise thematic nuances which differentiate each new Leigh movie, even as it inscribes upon them all one of the strongest directorial signatures in contemporary European cinema. Leigh’s previous film, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), was concerned with the sensibilities and situations of the young (Poppy, that movie’s main character, is an early-thirty-something primary school teacher). Another Year, by contrast, explores the fact of, and feelings provoked by, aging and the ever-more concrete prospect of what that process portends.

On one level, therefore, the movie’s title simply states the obvious: the vast majority of Another Year’s main characters aren’t getting any younger. Yet behind this stoically matter-of-fact façade, ambiguities and inflections abound. For some of the movie’s protagonists, conditional renewal of time on earth represents a precious gift: Tom and Gerri’s thirty-year marriage, for instance, is a heartening example of emotional security and stability in a world where, as the latter character puts it, ‘life isn’t always kind’. Yet for other protagonists within the film, the fact that life goes on (until the unforeseeable day when it doesn’t) seems more burden than boon. It’s striking, for example, that Leigh chooses to begin and end Another Year with images of possibly untreatable loneliness: a discomfiting close-up of a clinically depressed woman desperate for a prescription of sleeping pills at one end of the work is echoed by an equally chastening image of alcoholic (self-)medication at the other. In this movie, another year enjoyed by some is (yet) another endured by others.

That fact complicates the ostentatiously flagged seasonal structure of Another Year, a film which divides itself into four acts: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. In lesser hands, this creative decision might have proved a recipe for self-congratulatory truism: what goes around comes around, we are the midst of death in life (or vice versa, if you prefer), begin again, again, again, and so on. Yet Leigh’s movie, like Tom and Gerri within it, tries to achieve an understanding of life which is characterised by clarity, rather than compromised by complacency or compensatory fantasy. Take, for instance, the symbolic centrality of the couple’s beloved allotment. On one hand, this modest patch of land is a convenient and efficiently employed dramatic device: its changing appearance underscores the passing of time and illustrates the central theme of mortality. Yet on the other, the repeated sight of husband and wife tending their small annual harvest also recalls (and perhaps not by accident) a celebrated literary antecedent, another story created with the express purpose of reminding its audience that ‘life isn’t always (or even usually) kind.’ The French philosopher Voltaire’s Candide (1759) has its eponymous hero, chastened by comically direct and sustained exposure to the world’s arbitrary cruelties, conclude that the best anyone can hope for is attainment of the knowledge that, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin/We must cultivate our garden.’ Of course, Candide has a decent claim to be the unluckiest protagonist in world literature; Tom and Gerri, by contrast, are the most fortunate characters within the single fiction which they inhabit. Yet the conclusion they reach about life (in part because age forces them to face up to life’s conclusion) seems not-too-dissimilar to his: intervene and understand where you can; accept the all-too-numerous instances in which you can’t. If Another Year wears its emotional and philosophical complexities lightly, it doesn’t pull any of its main thematic punches, either. As such, the film represents a fitting and entirely characteristic addition to its maker’s distinguished oeuvre.

Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art
November 2010

Staff Review: The Kids Are All Right

2010-10-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

Billed as a comedy drama about modern family life, it's the astutely observed characters which lift Lisa Chodolenko's The Kids Are All Right above standard sitcom affair.

Certainly there's comedy to be found in the set up, a lesbian couple and their comfortable suburban life with their children, Joni and the improbably-named Laser, conceived via an anonymous 'donor dad'. Julianne Moore's Jules is particularly well-observed, a hippy, drippy LA mother, all half-baked business plans and talking about her feelings. In one particular scene of high farce she sits down and explains to her mortified teenage son his moms' (used as a collective noun) preference for gay male porn. Equally, however, there's pathos, particularly when Jules plays against her partner, Nic, a strict, uptight stickler for the rules who only wants the best for her children.

The touchy-feely happy family set up is disturbed, however, when Laser hatches a plan for he and his sister to meet their 'donor dad'. In a stroke of cinematic good fortune, they find Paul, a motorbike-riding restauranteur who describes himself as a 'locavore' - someone, he explains to rolled eyes from his son, who only buys and sells local produce - living in a nearby town. The family's dynamic is shaken as Paul quickly moves in, trying to forge a bond with the children he's never met.

Annette Bening's Nic is the stand out character here, all sharp edges and serrated put downs - 'Did you always know you wanted to work in the food-services industry?' she asks, dismissively, of her children's father - as she senses her family is under threat. The character's turnaround in the third act is remarkable, as she bonds with the 'donor dad' over a shared love of Joni Mitchell. It's an awkward and uncomfortable scene as Nic sings Mitchell's 'Blue', a cappella, in its entirety, at a dinner organised by Paul, before opening up to her family about her feelings for the first time in a long time only to be quickly shut down.

To go any further into the plot would be to give away it's secrets, but it's safe to say that it's a tightly put together film that really gets under the skin of its characters. It's a film about families, and about couples facing the challenges of bring up children and growing old together without growing apart.

Michael Richardson, Digital Marketing Assistant

Programme Note: The Kids Are All Right

2010-10-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

Please note that these programme notes contain spoilers.

Philosopher Judith Butler wrote that ‘normalizing the queer would be, after all, its sad finish.’1 On the surface, The Kids Are All Right seeks to do just that, to normalise homosexuality. Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are an all-female couple struggling with the same problems as those encountered by heterosexual families. After two decades together, they are struggling to keep their romance alive whilst simultaneously dealing with a pair of angsty teenagers. In its subtle storytelling and authentic characters, however, director and co-writer Lisa Cholodenko’s film manages to intertwine traditional notions about marriage with aspects of lesbianism which are often hidden from view in mainstream culture.

In an early scene which establishes the perils to passion of a long-term relationship, Nic and Jules are attempting to make love whilst viewing a gay male porn movie. They are interrupted when the volume is accidentally turned to full blast and their daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) overhears amplified groaning from the next room. Later, their son Laser (Josh Hutcherson), having come across the offending DVD in his parents’ bedroom, enquires why two women would be turned on by two men having sex. Nic, an uptight neurotic, refuses to answer, whilst Jules, a free-thinking hippy, offers a humorous faux-intellectual explanation which contrasts the ‘internal’ of female homosexuality with the ‘external’ of its male counterpart. Thus, a typical trope of contemporary ideas about family life – the difficulty of maintaining a healthy sex life whilst balancing kids and a busy schedule – is given a queer twist.

After Joni and Laser track down their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo), Jules embarks on an affair with the latter. In contrast to the comedic failure of the two females to consummate their desire, Jules and Paul have feverish sexual encounters, characterised by Jules’ delight at having contact with a priapic organ for the first time in a long time. Such a plot turn may cause consternation among purists who wish to see lesbian relationships celebrated minus the incursion of males into the equation. There is something disarmingly candid about the storyline, though. The scenario may not be universally applicable to gay female couples but it highlights a phenomenon of the lesbian experience which has rarely been talked about in cinema.

Veracity is a regular feature and the strength of Cholodenko’s work. In her previous films, she has explored similar themes and protagonists with an equally delicate yet incisive eye. Infidelity is always a central motif. In High Art (1998), Lucy, a talented photographer, cheats on her long-term lover with a younger admirer; Kate Beckinsale plays a repressed academic who sleeps with her boyfriend’s mother in Laurel Canyon (2002). High Art contains a ‘gifted and passive’ character in Lucy, who is reflected in Jules’s lack of self-belief as she embarks on a career as a landscape gardener. Alex, a driven female scientist whose intelligence intimidates men in Laurel Canyon, morphs into Nic, a successful E.R. doctor who overwhelms her unconfident partner Jules.

Another essence of Cholodenko’s style is its low-key dialogue and unobtrusive narrative progression. When Joni and Laser meet their father for the first time, there are no emotional fireworks but simply a natural, slightly awkward conversational exchange. Similarly, when Nic finds out about Jules’s affair with Paul whilst they are dining at his house, in place of an expected dramatic confrontation, we experience Nic’s shock through muffled sound and a dazed close-up of her as the other dinner guests continue to interact, unaware of her distress.

Framing is also used to communicate developments in the story. The Kids Are All Right follows a three-act structure and each of these acts begins with a scene at the dinner table, the ultimate symbol of domesticity. These set pieces suggest the changes that have occurred in the family’s situation. In the first, Nic sits at the head of the table and commands the attention and respect of Jules and their children. When Paul is invited round to the family home for the first time, Nic and Jules sit together opposite him in a defensive stance against his incursion into their lives. Finally, during the dinner scene at Paul’s house, the latter has taken over as head of the table and Nic and Jules sit across from one another, separated by the gulf that has opened up in their relationship.

A comparison of Cholodenko’s technique can be made with the dinner table backdrop of another drama about the breakdown of a family, American Beauty (Dir. Sam Mendes, 1999). Bening also plays a control freak and the put upon partner of a rebelling libertine in Mendes’s film but her character is hysterical and uncomprehending, as opposed to Nic, who is intelligent and perceptive. In the earlier film, a hyperbolic battle ensues as Carolyn and Lester (Bening and Kevin Spacey) swap insults and hurl dishes against the wall during a contrastingly traumatic mealtime showdown.

The understatement of The Kids Are All Right forms a crucial core of its normalisation of homosexual relationships. Although the film demonstrates some specificities of lesbian relations, as referenced above, its central ethos is that non-nuclear families are essentially the same as traditional ones. This is conveyed through a realist aesthetic and gently probing narrative. The story’s open-ended conclusion sums up the film’s overall restraint, as it is left to the viewer to interpret whether Nic and Jules will survive as a couple or not. Cholodenko possibly had in mind Pete Townsend’s outburst in her film’s progenitor, documentary The Kids Are Alright (Dir. Jeff Stein, 1979): ‘A definitive end? What do you want me to do? Go out there and fall asleep on stage? Maybe I should go out there and die during my last solo?’ The second Kids Are All Right is one of the few productions starring big name actors playing homosexual characters, none of whom perish at the end of the film(2). In that respect, it is groundbreaking, in its own quiet, contemplative way.

Helen Wright, research student and freelance writer, University of Glasgow October 2010

1 ‘Against Proper Objects,’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, 2-3, pp.1-26, 21.

2 For example, in recently lauded ‘gay films’ such as Brokeback Mountain (Dir. Ang Lee, 2005), Milk (Dir. Gus Van Sant, 2008) and A Single Man (Dir. Tom Ford, 2009), a central homosexual character dies at the end of each film. Other recent films in which main characters who are homosexual survive the end of the film include I Love You Phillip Morris (Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2009) and Taking Woodstock (Dir. Ang Lee, 2009).

Staff Review: Another Year

2010-10-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

The problem with most British films about ageing or older people is that filmmakers underestimate their middle-aged audiences. Just because the audience aren’t in their twenties the film’s wit is always watered down and paralysed by a ridiculous script. It’s insulting. Gaggles of women drink Lambrini and talk about ‘bottoms’. A bunch of ‘blokes’ travel 100 miles to drink and watch a match. Coronation Street already exists, leave it out of the cinema!

Having never before seen a Mike Leigh film, I was unsure of what was to come. I expected cheap laughs and ridiculous dialogue, full of embarrassing Julie Walters-style characters dancing too much and ungraciously trying to disguise their wrinkles. Instead, Another Year struck me as an ode to the silent sadness that comes with getting older, and finding that the world no longer has a place for you.

The film is centred around an older couple, contented by the simple things: friendly environmental debates, spending time with their thirty-year-old son and tending to their beloved allotment which delicately illustrates the changing seasons.

Very British in its honesty, nothing is overdone. Leigh beautifully details the proud, solitary suffering of each character, highlighting their immense fragility when they finally break down, overwhelmed. Lesley Manville’s character Mary in particular is devastating to watch, her pained desperation thinly disguised by her wine-soaked cheery pretence. The script in particular is what really draws you in. The awkwardness between characters, usually omitted from slick scripts, is what makes the film so believable and heartbreaking. Some scenes are simply nauseating, the feigned politeness between characters transporting me back to being twelve, sitting at an awkward dinner party with my parents’ friends, wishing I could escape.

What I didn’t expect was to be so moved by the subject, so terrifying in its simplicity. And so, if like me, you blindly judge films before seeing them, make sure you note that nowhere in Another Year will you find ‘hilarious’ references to size 18 thongs, back hair, or see characters drunkenly humiliate themselves with post-work karaoke. This is genuine cinema: poignant, bittersweet and deeply resonant.

Kate Montgomery, Press Assistant

Programme Note: Carlos

2010-10-21T07:11:00.001-07:00

Writer/director Olivier Assayas’ Carlos is a remarkably ambitious, forensically researched account of a terrorist career spanning two decades, three continents, numerous languages, enough client states to populate a new supranational political organisation – the United (Rogue) Nations? – and the escalation, then eventual end of the Cold War. Originally broadcast in three parts and over five-and-a-half-hours on French television, the 160-minute theatrical version of Carlos which now reaches British cinema screens manages, despite significant truncation, to convey a powerful sense of the logistical complexity, ideological fluidity and historical resonance which underpinned the activities of the movie’s central character. In that sense, Carlos should be put beside other recent films which tackle related political subject matter and the same time period through similar narrative devices (focusing in on a charismatic figure from late-20th-century history) and on a similarly epic scale (multi-part movies which transcend the conventional boundaries of the one-hour-and-forty-minute single feature): the diptych works Che (d. Steven Soderburg, Sp/Fr/USA, 2005-08) and Mesrine (d. Jean-François Richet, Fr/Can, 2008) appear obvious points of reference here.

Yet even as it tells one story clearly public and expansive in character, Carlos at the same time narrates another much more private and claustrophobic in character. Strip away the notorious atrocities and clandestine meetings with heads of state and what’s left is a fascinating study of male impotence, both literally and figuratively speaking. Early on in Carlos, the central character’s narcissistic, utterly self-confident twenty-something self appraises a reflected image of his naked body. Self-contentedly stroking his genitalia as he does so, Carlos is transfixed by two things seductive precisely because stark in their seeming unmalleability. The sculpted muscular definition of the terrorist’s physical frame offers a suggestive visual analogue for the ruthless rigidity of the revolutionary Marxist creed which that body proclaims itself to be a violent instrument in the service of.

Compare this physical-cum-political spectacle with the sorry sight that dominates the final third of Carlos: a middle-aged male body gone to seed, its owner’s self-proclaimed dogmatic purity washed away long ago by personal vices he won’t control (the constant need for money to finance a lifestyle of luxurious dissipation) and historical forces he can’t (the Soviet bloc’s defeat at the end of the Cold War). That Carlos should be physically incapacitated by the after-effects of testicular surgery when his terrorist career finally ends in the early 1990s, the Sudanese government exploiting their erstwhile hired hand’s vulnerability to deliver him into the hands of French police, is symbolically apposite. Approached in these terms, suggestive cinematic counterparts to Assayas’ movie would be those recent films which construct the figure of the terrorist, whether real or fictional, as an inchoate mess of hormonal, emotional and political confusion: The Edukators (d. Hans Weingartner, Ger/Au, 2004), The Baader Meinhof Complex (d. Uli Edel, Ger/Fr/Cze, 2008), and even Chris Morris’ absurdist suicide-bomber comedy Four Lions (UK, 2010) all spring to mind.

This bifurcated focus affords Carlos a considerable degree of thematic complexity and variety. On one hand, the personal leavens the political. A dizzying rapid succession of scrupulously researched locations, dates and minor players might strike some viewers as little more than an off-putting mammoth history lecture-cum-journalistic exposé, were it not for the constant presence of Assayas and lead actor Édgar Ramírez’s imagined Carlos, a narcissistic chameleon who fascinates and repels in equal measure. Conversely, however, the political also complicates and qualifies the personal. Backed up by a wealth of primary research, Assayas is very much concerned to present historical terrorism (and by implication, its present-day successor), as a profoundly globalised phenomenon, one cynically and scrupulously micro-managed from official buildings and air-conditioned government offices rather than prosecuted with idealistic authenticity and spontaneity by motley bands of isolated mavericks and martyrs. As a result, Carlos is able to acknowledge and explore the charismatic, romantic myth erected around its central human subject (not least by the man himself) at considerable length without ever being in serious danger of succumbing to these. Confronted with a convincing analysis of terrorism as a political, logistical and violent web, both international and state-sanctioned in nature and scope, it’s hard for the viewer to accept Carlos’ view of himself as spider; so much of the evidence points instead towards his status as fly, however famous and audacious. Exploring as it does much more than just the story of one notorious renegade, Olivier Assayas’ new movie represents a remarkable synthesis of historical research, political analysis and filmmaking technique.

Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art

Five Questions for Malcolm Ross (musician, The Illusionist)

2010-10-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

Rooted in French popular culture of the 1950s, The Illusionist is based on a 1956 script by Jacques Tati, written as a private letter to his daughter and never before produced. Chomet’s film focuses on an animated version of Tati in an emotionally complex story of a magician and his young fan.

Before the screening on Wednesday 13 October (8.40) Malcolm Ross (Orange Juice) will be performing songs he composed for The Illusionist’s pop sensations, The Britoons, with Leo Condie and Ian Stoddart – the original line-up!

We asked Malcolm some questions about his involvement with the film.

1. How did you become involved in working on the film?

Bob Last the co-producer asked me to try writing the songs. I've known Bob since the punk days of the late '70s.

2. How much did you know about what the band were going to be like before you started working on the songs? Did you know what they were going to look like, for example?

Sylvain briefed me in great detail about The Britoons and how he envisaged them sounding. There was already an anamatic (basic, black and white, rough version) of their scenes so I knew how they looked and acted.

3. What was it like collaborating with Sylvain Chomet and his team of animators?

Sylvain and his team were a pleasure to work with, as was everyone at Django.

4. How does working on the music for an animated film differ to working on a live action film like Backbeat or Chocolat?

I don't feel I've really done enough film music to answer this.

5. What would you be your ideal type of film to write music for?

A dark thriller would probably be most fun for me. I could indulge myself in tense, melodrama.

Programme Note: Made in Dagenham

2010-10-07T01:58:00.000-07:00

Biba dresses, walnut-finish car dashboards and vertiginous beehives: Made in Dagenham is a movie which tries to charm by resurrecting temporarily the cornerstones of a traditional British way of life now (perhaps) lost to the past. You doubtless remember the kind of thing: half-decent summers, the days when fresh fruit constituted a novelty item, picket lines, popular support for trade unions, Labour governments and so on.

At the same time, however, Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole’s new movie also continues an indigenous popular cultural tradition which today still shows little sign of withering: a long line of domestic films which represent, whether in caustic or celebratory fashion, the nation’s working class. This cinematic lineage stretches back well before, and has continued long after, Made in Dagenham’s summer 1968 setting. It therefore seems appropriate that Cole’s film contains echoes of a range of working-class attitudes – and attitudes about the working class – which span something like an 80-year-long period.

For instance, if Made in Dagenham is quite obviously a work self-consciously crammed full of heart-warmingly nostalgic period detail, then we might include the spectacle of a happy, harmonious and powerful working class among the long list of bygone curios dragged out of the attic and put on the screen. Several of the film’s characters (mostly men) directly invoke the spirit of solidarity and confident belief in doing the right thing associated with the popular myth of the Second World War. The film itself performs a similar kind of invocation: central character Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) seems a slightly less manic daughter of the persona developed by Gracie Fields as a female working-class figurehead in seminal 1930s British movies such as Sing
As We Go (1934). At the same time, the sight of a physically and psychologically tight-knit group of workers (around 180 striking female machinists who live and work under the shadow of Ford Motor’s massive Dagenham plant) who somehow face down the entrenched might of external political and economic authority recalls the part-parable/part-fantasy depiction of the working class within the Ealing Comedy cycle of the late ’40s and early ’50s: Passport to Pimlico (1949) springs to mind here especially.

Yet on the other hand, Made in Dagenham positions itself in relation to much more recent British cinematic strains with equal self-awareness. Opening with archive footage of a late-’60s promotional film about Ford’s Dagenham plant, the film recalls explicitly the use of the same device at the start of one of the most popular British working-class movies of all, Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (1997). Of course, in the latter film it is not just the celluloid, but also the hard sell within it, which looks like a blast from the past when viewed from a present-day perspective. The Full Monty opens by quoting an earlier decade’s confidence in British manufacturing industry (and the industrious people who did the manufacturing) in order to underscore just how hopelessly deluded such optimism would come to seem in a post-Thatcher socioeconomic landscape. Cattaneo’s film is absolutely typical of the contemporary British working-class film in this regard. While, as already noted, this popular cultural tradition has survived sturdily into the present, the celebratory worldview enshrined in its 1930s and ’40s origins has for the most part long fallen by the wayside. Indeed, it perhaps makes more sense today to talk about the post- or non-working-class movie as an indigenous cinematic staple. 1990s/early ’00s hits like The Full Monty, Brassed Off (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000) celebrate triumphs over adversity which are as isolated as they are unlikely, conceding that their characters can no longer expect to achieve self-definition or respect through traditional forms of, and ideas about, work. Alternatively, many of Ken Loach’s recent films, such as My Name is Joe (1998) and Sweet Sixteen (2002) anatomise the bitter consequences following on from the destruction/disintegration (delete according to personal political sympathies) of the British working class and its attendant popular and political cultures.

Ultimately, Made in Dagenham aligns itself much more with the immediate pre- and post-Second World War tradition than with the post-1990 one. The period optimism expressed in the archive footage which opens the movie is sustained rather than satirised. Paradoxically, the film has to hark back to the past in more ways than one – not simply telling a period story, but telling it with a period sensibility – in order to set out a confidently progressive political worldview. This chimes nicely with the recreation of 1960s Britain which viewers see on screen here, a country which feels modern yet archaic, foreign yet familiar, at one and the same time. Similarly, an exchange between two of the striking female workers sees one exhort the other to think about how different life will one day in the future be as a result of their industrial action and demand for equal pay. That Made in Dagenham invites its viewers to imagine a more equitable future precisely by harking back to an unequal past suggests a more complex work than lazy journalistic proclamations of yet another prolier-than0-thou feel good Brit-hit would acknowledge.

Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art

FilmCamp 10: An Overview

2010-10-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday 28 September GFT hosted the inaugural FilmCamp '10, an 'unconference' in the BarCamp model dedicated to digital innovation and moving image. FilmCamp 10 was developed by New Media Corp and GFT, in association with Glasgow: Scotland with Style. Supported by Creative Scotland and Skillset.

The line-up of speakers and presentations included programme and filmmakers, moving image exhibitors, game developers, web designers and people behind emerging creative digital media technologies, exploring the future of moving image, multi-platform content, the increasing convergence of technology and how audiences engage with it.

In the spirit of digital innovation and audience engagement tweeting was encouraged, with audience questions coming in via the #filmcamp10 hashtag, and the Twitter feed being displayed on the wall in Cinema 1.

Shed Productions' Digital Development Producer Kat Hebden opened the event with a keynote speech on web drama Being Victor and the benefits and challenges of being a TV production company making multi-platform content. Audience questions were keen to find out how the project was paying for itself, with some discussion of how Shed were working in partnership with various outlets including CTVC - the Christian charity who originally approached Shed with the idea for an online drama - MTV and STV, who will be showing Being Victor as a six part TV series later this month.

The speech was followed by a short selection of films from Central Station, the Glasgow-based social networking website for artists and creatives, with a wry little animation about Donald Trump from user fortsunlight prompting a particularly good reaction from the audience.

Highlights of the day included Gregor White talking about organising the NEoN festival in Dundee. A 7 day international digital art festival with a particularly focus on video gaming, NEoN explores the notion of collaboration between the visual arts, information communication, media production and gaming. The presentation ended with a showcase of some of the entries to NEoN 11's logo design competition.

Robin Sloan of the University of Abertay presented his research into emotional avatars and the 'uncanny valley', looking into the process behind emotional expression in animation and how this can be used in computer games and animated films, as well as having more serious applications.

Barry Sheridan of Digimania presented a tutorial of Muvizu, a free to use programme aimed at allowing people with no experience in animation to make their own animated films, presenting some interesting examples of user-made films. Audience members commented on how Muvizu could be put to good use, particularly within education.

New Media Scotland's Mark Daniels talked about the national development agencies funding for fostering artist and audience engagement with new media, focusing on Life.Turns, a film made one frame at a time - in the style of the first ever moving image device, the zoetrope - using images uploaded to photo journalling website Blipfoto.

Accidental Media discussed producing and marketing a film on a minimum budget, with lots of interest from budding filmmakers in the audience, followed by Paul Welsh of Edge City Films/digicult who asked 'Is social media pure theatre?', considering the internet, online spaces and social networking in terms of performance and theatre, with plenty of spirited musing from the audience.

GFT's very own Jen Davies presented an overview of GFT's upcoming website redesign, as well as a sneak preview of the Cinema City Project.

A discussion panel featuring Mark Daniels, Paul Welsh and GFT/Glasgow Film Festival Co-director Allison Gardner - chaired by film journalist Gail Tolley - considered whether new media held the same magic as cinema, and whether audiences would turn away from cinema in favour of new media outlets such as computers and mobile phones.

The closing keynote speech was delivered by Don Smith of Edinburgh-based digital company Realise on creating a new website for the relaunch of filmfour, scaling back written content and presenting a website that was more in tune with the cinema-going experience.

A big thank you to everyone who took part in helping make FilmCamp 10 a success.

Mr Cosmo's Movies of the Month

2010-10-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

Good day! A tip of the hat to you!

The marvellous month of October is upon us and there should be no complaining about Glasgow's cold and rainy weather, not when there's so much to see at the cinema - the weather makes a splendid excuse to go and see it, too! I've very kindly spent my afternoon rifling through GFT's October brochure to bring you the creme de la creme of what's on offer, my top five movies of the month - why not use the comments box to let me know yours?

The Leopard
Friday 1 – Monday 4 October

A splendid continental classic from Mr Visconti, recently restored by Martin Scorsese and unveiled at Cannes this year. Starring Burt Lancaster as the brilliantly-named Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, this stunning historical epic chronicles the fortunes of his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s. A breathtaking score by Mr Rota underpins lavish ballroom dance sequences. An old favourite from the Cosmo days. Marvellous!

Went The Day Well?
Tuesday 12 (12.45) & Wednesday 13 October (7.00)

A subversive and uncanny film from Mr Cavalcanti about a cosy English village under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Food for thought, and one of the finest war films ever made.

Sammy Going South
Monday 18 (1.00) & Tuesday 19 October (3.30/6.00)

An undiscovered gem! Recently restored to showcase the beauty of the African landscape as seen through the eyes of a child, this fine British adventure film stars Edward G. Robinson as a diamond smuggler who aides a young orphan in his quest across Africa.

The Illusionist
Monday 11 - Thursday 14 October

Back by very popular demand! I thoroughly enjoyed this marvellous animated feature from Mr Chomet, the man behind Belleville Rendez-vous, when it originally screened at GFT earlier this year. An affectionate little tale about an old-fashioned magician who moves from France to Scotland in order to find work. With stunning animation - including scenes set on the very-recognisable streets of Edinburgh - and a warm, gentle humour, this film was based on a script written by Jacques Tati in 1956 and remains true to the spirit of 'Monsieur Hulot'.

And on the 13th October, The Britoons - the pop sensations feature in The Illusionist, and old friends of GFT Director Jaki from her days at the Cameo in Edinburgh - will be playing their toe-tapping music from the film. I shall be shuffling a soft shoe or two to their very catchy tunes!

A Disappearing Number
Thursday 14 October (6.45)

Very curious to see how this one turns out: an award-winning play beamed live via satellite from Plymouth's Theatre Royal all the way to GFT. The marvels of modern technology! Theatre de Complicite presents A Disappearing Number, the story of Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. A mysterious, romantic play that weaves together stories set in present day London, Bangalore and Cambridge in 1914. Written and directed by Simon McBurney with a haunting score by Nitin Sawhney. A rare treat.

Programme Note: Police, Adjective

2010-09-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

During a scene of quiet domesticity in Police, Adjective, lead character Cristi discusses with his wife Anca the meaning of a kitschy love song’s lyrics. The singer croons, ‘What would the sea be without the sun?’ and Cristi questions the logicality and purpose of such an utterance. Anca, a language teacher, explains it is an image which becomes a symbol and which serves to define love, the sea expressing infinity and the sun representing light. The exchange is part of a persistent self-reflexivity on the ability of cinema to reproduce meaning effectively, a theme which characterises director Corneliu Porumboiu’s second feature.

Police, Adjective has been received as the latest product of a ‘new wave’ of Romanian cinema which includes, for example, the festival hits The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Dir. Cristi Puiu, 2005) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Dir. Cristian Mungiu, 2007)1. The film contains, however, a deliberate questioning of that cinema’s ability to convey Romania as a coherent concept. It is set in Vasliu, Porumboiu’s home town and the setting for his previous film 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006). In both works, there is a sense that the provincialism of Vasliu is being commented on and contrasted with the vigor of capital city Bucharest and with the rest of Europe, with which Romania is now supposedly in sync as a member of the EU. The earlier film portrays a farcical TV talk show in which two of the town’s inhabitants discuss their roles in the 1989 Romanian Revolution. It is implied that Vasliu was the picture of a silent, obedient Communist town and its dwellers only took to the streets after they were certain that dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had been safely overthrown. In Police, Adjective, detective Cristi is charged with investigating a teenager who may be supplying hashish to his school mates. The absurdity of Vasliu’s backwards police department building a case revolving around three kids smoking joints on street corners is highlighted when Cristi objects to his task and refuses to arrest his suspect. He tells a prosecutor that nowhere else in Europe could someone be arrested for such a trivial offence.

The idea of cinema as an effective means of imagining a country is self-consciously examined in the depiction of Cristi’s quotidian police work. He must stalk endless dull corridors and enter never-ending doors in order to carry out his inquiries. These stand in for the monotony of bureaucracy, and the antiquated nature of the official buildings, as well as their over-stretched personnel, would appear to demonstrate that Vasliu is a place in need of modernisation.

Romania, it is implied, is a country still suffering as a result of its legacy as a former member of the Eastern Bloc. However, the mundanity of Cristi’s job also functions to squash the symbolism which might be read into its depiction. Very long takes show him following his suspect in real time. Close ups of his written reports then allow the viewer to read in Cristi’s straightforward language exactly what they have just witnessed him doing. The net effect is an interrogation of whether these images can stand as an emblem of a country and its political and social situation or whether they are simply an insignificant transferral of everyday life onto film. The director himself has been quoted as saying, ‘I followed Cristi around the same way he, in his turn, follows his suspects around, with the strong belief that the cinema is witness to a meaningless world.’2

Porumboiu’s opinion appears to suggest it is futile to attempt to contextualise his film. This is ironic considering most of Police, Adjective’s dialogue consists of deliberation over the meaning of words and actions. The finale of a series of such debates is a showdown between Cristi and his boss, Captain Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov, known for his role as the chillingly immoral abortionist in 4 Weeks, 3 Months & 2 Days). Cristi explains he cannot carry out a sting operation to arrest the accused teenager because his conscience will not allow him to do so. Anghelache responds by asking him to read out dictionary definitions of the words ‘conscience’, ‘law’ and ‘police’. The latter in its adjectival form constitutes a ‘police novel or film involving criminal happenings’ or ‘police states or regimes which exercise control through repressive methods’. Thus the film again endeavours to objectively assess its own significance as a representative work of art. It is clearly not a traditional crime film, failing to conform to the cause and effect sequences of that genre. Is it a figuration of the regressive nature of Romanian society and its laws?

Police, Adjective is a puzzle which doesn’t answer itself. Its joy rests, though, in its efforts to do so and in the precision of its protagonists who embody these exertions. Cristi is stoical and laconic in his fact gathering. His modesty is demonstrated by the fact that he wears the same grey jumper for days on end, which conscientious Anca points out to him at the dinner table. Cristi’s put upon little guy is contrasted with his know-it-all superiors, first the prosecutor and then Anghelache. The captain is a classic bully. He dominates the conversation and puts everyone else down in a bid to assert his ascendancy. During the climactic dictionary scene, Anghelache sits between Cristi and his colleague Nelu, in the middle of the shot and slightly raised above the other two. He is played to perfection by Ivanov, who manages to create an intimidating authority figure, malicious but not cartoonishly so.

Anghelache, in his determined struggle to resolve Cristi’s dilemma through lexical inquiry, embodies cinema’s undertaking to turn images into symbols, as in the lyrics of the song which Anca and Cristi listen to. Porumboiu seems to repudiate the possibility of organising the world, or at least his world, into something orderly and comprehensible. It is, however, uniquely pleasurable to watch his characters attempt to do just that.

Helen Wright, research student and freelance writer, University of Glasgow
October 2010

1 For more on the ‘new wave’, you may wish to revisit the GFT programme note on The Happiest Girl in the World written by Matt Lloyd. You can find it online in our programme notes archive. (Ed)
2 Quoted in Kieron Corless, “Lexicon of the Law,” Sight & Sound, 20.10 (2010): 40-42, 42.

The Early Works of Hans Richter

2010-09-28T04:22:00.000-07:00

Hans Richter was a virtuosic artist and filmmaker whose career spanned the development of the avant-garde in Europe and America across the first decades of the 20th century. Inspired by Cubism, Richter experimented in Dadaist and Surrealist modes, working across painting, drawing, woodcuts and film.

On Sunday 3 October, GFT presents The Early Works of Hans Richter, an essential overview of Richter’s moving image work, including both Surrealist and Dadaist content.

The films will be accompanied live by the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, an internationally renowned ensemble from diverse artistic origins such as free improvisation, experimental music, jazz, classical music, folk, performance art and pop. They will be joined on this occasion by German cellist Johanna Varner.

The programme of Richter's experimental films will include:

Ghosts Before Breakfast, also known as Vormittagspuk, is a silent experimental avant-garde film, considered one of the first surrealist films ever made. Richter's interest in Dadaism is shown directly in this work as clocks, legs, ladders, hats, and people undergo irrational happenings in unusual settings.

Rhythmus '21 is an important early abstract film. This work of remarkable structural cohesion uses stop motion and forward and backward printing to depict a continuous flow of rectangular and square shapes ‘moving’ forward, backward, vertically and horizontally across the screen.

Somewhat less radical than its predecessor, Rhythmus '23 is constructed entirely out of the interplay between square shapes and diagonal lines, often related via superimposition. The underlying architectonic principle is geometric symmetry.

Filmstudie is a highly evocative non-narrative film that connects human faces, floating eyeballs and abstract forms through a series of poetic visual associations.

Richter's brilliant gift as an editor in nowhere more evident than in Race Symphony, an impressionistic documentary on the preparation and start of a horse race at a track near Berlin.

Inflation is a short film depicting Germany's inflation between the two World Wars. Richter compares the US dollar with the Deutsche Mark using inspired special effects.

All Hail the King

2010-09-21T01:37:00.000-07:00

Toronto Film Festival audiences are legendary for their enthusiasm. They roar their approval, applaud to the rafters, swoon at the glimpse of a celebrity and generally behave with all the giddy excitement of a child on Christmas morning . That's often before they have actually seen the film. The more cynical tend to suggest that their exuberance does equate with a startling lack of discrimination. On the other hand, it does mean that the winner of the Festival's Cadillac People's Choice Awards have to be taken seriously. They may like everything but if they really, really like one particular thing that it must be pretty special.

In 2008 the winner of the People's Choice was Slumdog Millionaire. In 2009 it was Precious. The 2010 Choice and winner of $15,000 prize money was The King's Speech which now seems to make it a sure thing for Oscar nominations. Everyone you spoke to at the Festival cited The King's Speech as one of their favourites. It tells the story of King George VI (Colin Firth) and his crippling travails with both a stammer and the need to become a very public figure in the wake of the 1936 abdication of his brother-the man who should have been King instead of him. Geoffrey Rush is the untrained speech therapist whose unorthodox methods include the insistence that the King treat him as an equal. The temerity of the man. The film is witty, touching, tells a great story and opens in Britain on January 7th.

The People's Choice Midnight Madness Award went to Jim Mickle's Stake Land, a grisly little tale charting the aftermath of a vampire epidemic in America and marking the big screen return of Kelly (Top Gun) McGillis. The People's Choice Documentary Award went to Sturla Gunnarsson's Force Of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie charting the irrepressible energy and commitment of the seventy-five year-old Canadian environmentalist.

A handful of other prizes included the International Critics award for Pierre Thoretton's L'Amour Fou, a fascinating glimpse into the life of Yves Saint Laurent, the fashion house he built and his life with Pierre Berge.

Most, if not all of these films will make an appearance in Britain, some of them at the 2011 Glasgow Film Festival which is being planned, plotted, organised and arranged as I write.

Toronto is a fantastic source of films and of inspiration. Highlights from the last few days include the screen version of the play Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart on top form as grieving parents coming to terms with the death of their four year-old son and The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, a gripping documentary on the creation of a seminal Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band album that includes some amazing footage of the rehearsals and recording of the album in the 1970s. That has definitely gone on the "must have" list for GFF 2011.

Allan Hunter, GFF Co-director

Programme Note: Winter's Bone

2010-09-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

‘Man trouble’ has been the sum of many a Hollywood plot, but there is no romcom froth on Debra Granik’s gritty, grainy Winter’s Bone. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a seventeen year old surrounded by cowardly, selfish men who abandon their duties while (violently) demanding their rights and privileges. When the local sheriff arrives to tell her that her father Jessup has skipped bail – and the family home was used to secure the bond – Ree realises she must find him (or what’s left of him) to save herself, her two young siblings and disabled mother from destitution.

A simple task, were it not for three salient facts. Firstly, Dolly senior ‘cooks’ methamphetamine (better known as crystal meths or ‘crank’) for the local drug trade, the biggest industry in the impoverished, hand-to-mouth Ozark mountain region of Missouri. The ‘crank capital of the US’ is largely untouched by the modishness of the big cities or the clean suburbia of the lowlands, where state and federal law come a distant second to the predominant clan culture (many of the original migrants were Scots-Irish). Secondly, Ree’s extended family is heavily involved in producing the trade and asking questions risks breaking the protective silence enforced through the codes of conduct and allegiance sustained by the clan culture. Thirdly, said kinfolk were probably responsible for ‘disappearing’ Jessup in the first place.

The goal is simple, the journey beset with danger and difficulty; a classic noir setup that drives Ree, and the audience, deep into the particularities of Ozark culture. This is where the benefits of Granik’s near anthropological methodology (also seen in her earlier film, the drug-themed Down to the Bone (2004)) are most evident. The film is the result of months speaking with locals, listening to the often superb music, soaking up the dialect and the everyday rhythms of life. The resultant tone is bleak yet strangely vital. Scots cinematographer Michael McDonough paints the landscape as a once-verdant, wintery Eden marbled with the drab blues and rust reds of anoraks, pickup trucks and lumberjack shirts, all sourced from the locals.

Threat and promise mingle in this careful palette, aided and abetted by sound design that pulls us into reverie over nature, or the transportive music of singer Marideth Sisco (who appears in cameo), only to suddenly spook us more deeply and profoundly than Blair Witch (1999) ever could. The combination is almost a tone poem in itself, redolent of the much-mined photo archive of Depression-era America as filtered through Ozu. Yet these aspects are made to serve the drama and anchor it in truth far removed from the caricatures of that other notable Ozark screen family, The Beverly Hillbillies.

Nor does it surrender to the naked fear and loathing city folk can harbour for their rural cousins, as found in 1970s horror stories The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Deliverance (1972) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Instead of check-shirted monsters, Granik presents us with a succession of characters etched from the landscape, most damaged by their choices and beaten down by the environment.

The humanity of each is respected, no matter how fleeting the screen time. The scarred, battered face and grizzled beard of Ree’s uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) seem to hide decades of bad choices and hard consequences. Fuelled mostly by dope and spite, Teardrop is tightly coiled, dyspeptic, his fists always ready to clench and swing. Yet Hawkes allows glimpses of a better nature to come. Teardrop’s sense of kinship is much more authentic than the selfish terrorism of family duty enforced by clan ‘Godfather’ Thump Milton or Ree’s avaricious neighbours. However, this rehabilitation is never secured at the expense of softening the character - he scares us from his first scene to his last.

The men in Winter’s Bone exist to disappoint us; it is the females who structure this tattered social fabric. Lawrence’s performance balances vulnerability with astonishing reserves of courage and occasional ruthlessness. There are no drop kicks, daring escapes or witty asides - just dogged determination, cold pragmatism and a willingness to follow the task through to the end. Lawrence creates a dense, storied character that gives the film its sense of truth, avoiding easy caricature or disdainful metropolitan judgement. She withholds just enough to make the audience wonder what else lies beneath and where this self-made resilience comes from.

Ree’s constant refrain - and, in some odd ways, her strengthening mantras - are ‘don’t take what’s not offered’ and that she is ‘a Dolly, bread and buttered’. She is as much of this world as her adversaries and understands the terms of engagement well enough to challenge them. This brings her into inevitable conflict with Thump’s wife and intermediary Merab (Dale Dickey). Self-contained and cunning, as ‘bread and buttered’ as the protagonist, there is nevertheless a motherly side to Merab and hints that she takes her husband’s part in order to spare the girl the far worse consequences of dealing with him directly. The climactic and horrific boat scene brings the older and younger woman together into what could be a moment of closure, but could also be a form of initiation.

The value of Granik’s film may be better appreciated in years to come. By showing that cinema can depict a culture in a way that is authentic and aware of local sensitivities without sacrificing narrative drive and dramatic intensity, Winter’s Bone breaks with the increasingly smug, self-consciously hip, deracinated and mannerist trends dominant in current ‘Indie’ cinema. Sure, it pays homage to neo-realism and nouvelle vague, film noir and even the formalism of Yasujiro Ozu, but it crafts these elements into something very distinctive.

Above all, Granik has gifted us a true existential hero unseen in American cinema since the seventies. Knowing fully that every decision leads to pain, and setting aside her adolescent desires (subtly hinted at throughout), Ree bears the physical and emotional brunt of her decision. She does not run away or escape but claims her culture back from thuggery and indifference. We could do with more like her: an inspirational figure for these post-aspirational times.

Mitch Miller, Editor of The Drouth (www.thedrouth.org)
September 2010

Programme Note: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

2010-09-16T02:25:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog once confessed to struggling with human contact as a young man and said the only way he could relate to people was by pointing a camera at them. It is no coincidence that his most famous characters are loners. Aguirre tramples a mad path through the jungle oblivious to the suffering of those he drags along with him. Juliane Köpcke retraces her long, lonely journey to safety after finding herself the solitary survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian wilderness. Even in those films in which Herzog depicts a community of people in detail, affinities prove impossible. The ultimate example is a crew of dwarfs who stage a revolt against the institution where they have been confined and end up inflicting violence and anarchy on each other (1).

So it is that the Bavarian director has garnered a reputation as the enigmatic artist alone in his tower of ecstatic truth (2). For his latest film, Herzog tells the tale of Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon), a man who murders his mother with a sword and then engages in a standoff with the police, led by Willem Dafoe’s Detective Havenhurst. Brad is at first glance a typical Herzogian protagonist. He is hermetic and eccentric. We are introduced to the character as he waves a mug in Havenhurst’s face, inexplicably entreating the detective to 'razzle them, dazzle them'. His fiancée Ingrid (Chloë Sevigny) later relates how Brad avoided a fatal white water rafting expedition which killed his friends in Peru because he heard an inner voice telling him not to go on it. The film’s plot, however, stands out from Herzog’s other works in featuring a close relationship between a child and their parent: Brad and his mother.

Mrs McCullum is played by Grace Zabriskie, purveyor of creepy roles in the films of David Lynch (producer of My Son, My Son). As Brad’s maternal unit, with her gaunt cheekbones and bulging eyes, Zabriskie is oppressive and sinister. When Ingrid has dinner with them, Mrs McCullum tries to spoonfeed her son and takes offence when he refuses to eat her Jell-O dessert. Brad appeases her by calling her 'the greatest mother in the world'. The disturbed nature of this familial set up is suggested by the several moments in which the three characters freeze in an unnatural pose. Brad is flanked by his girlfriend and literally overbearing mother, who leans over her son with her plate of lovingly prepared Jell-O hovering in front of his face.

The director’s previous depictions of oddballs have been lacking in any such family ties. In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), the titular hero is devoid of parentage altogether, having been locked in a barn and cut off from the world for most of his life. Brad Stevens points out, though, that Herzog’s 2009 film The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans contains a spattering of allusions to the family. Central character Terence McDonagh must look after his father’s dog and a blackmailed football player wants to buy his ‘mama’ a house. Stevens concludes that these manifestations must be the influence of the screenwriter as Herzog has conspicuously avoided domesticity throughout his oeuvre (3). It’s possible, however, that these two most recent productions indicate a sea change in their creator’s outlook. Brad in My Son, My Son reveals that his mother lost her husband when he was two years old. Herzog’s own father never played a part in his life (4). If we take the individualistic obsessives of his films as the director’s alter egos, Brad may represent a softening in his outsider status and a willingness to explore the parental bonds which are crucial to a person’s lifelong relationship with others.

My Son, My Son is, of course, hardly a touching depiction of kinship, featuring as it does a brutal slaying. Nevertheless, it is new territory for Herzog. The film also contains more explicit references to the alienating factors in the loner’s life than in Herzog’s previous work. Brad plays Ingrid a recording of an evangelical preacher and tells her they are listening to God. He subsequently locates his deity as the promotional picture on a box of ‘Puritan Oatmeal’ (Quaker Oats thinly disguised). When Havenhurst attempts to negotiate with Brad, the fugitive pushes this product under his garage door and it rolls down the driveway to the feet of the perplexed policemen. Brad informs them that he doesn’t need God anymore. The latter’s location on the packaging of a breakfast cereal tells us that Brad’s disillusion extends to consumerism as well.

A series of flashbacks also explains Brad’s dissatisfaction with his fellow travellers’ hippy agenda on their trip to Peru. He announces that he won’t be drinking herbal tea, taking vitamins or 'going to a sweat lodge with a 108-year-old Native American who reads Hustler magazine and smokes Kool cigarettes'. It’s at this point that Brad whimsically decides to become a Muslim and turn to God, before abandoning him again following his act of matricide. Thus, religion, money, and new age self-discovery are all subject to ridicule and rejection as Brad’s introversion from society is completed.

My Son, My Son marks a slightly altered direction for Herzog but his philosophical approach remains the same. The director admits that he identifies with his outsider characters but denies that they really are on the outside. 'These people are not pathologically mad; it is society that is mad. It is the situations they find themselves in and the people who surround them who are mad,' he claims (5).

Helen Wright, researcher and freelance writer, University of Glasgow
September 2010

1 - The three films referenced in this paragraph are Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), Wings of Hope (2000) and Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970).
2 - Herzog’s definition of his famous ‘ecstatic truth’ can be found in Werner Herzog, 'The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and fact in documentary cinema', Herzog on Herzog ed. Paul Cronin (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 301.
3 - Brad Stevens, 'The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans', Sight & Sound, 20.6 (2010): 62.
4 - Werner Herzog in Herzog on Herzog ed. Paul Cronin (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 3.
5 - Herzog (2002), 69.

Home for Christmas

2010-09-16T02:01:00.001-07:00

No Festival could want a better guest than John Sayles. When he and producer/partner Maggie Renzi came to Glasgow in 2008 they were gracious, undemanding, good companion and generous with their time for audiences and for young filmmakers in Scotland. You might just recall that there was a Hollywood writer's strike at the time. In most cases that probably would have meant a chance to catch up on mail, do some paperwork, mow the lawn, go fishing or just provide the perfect excuse to do nothing. In the case of John Sayles it meant that he started writing an epic novel on the colonialist misadventures of America during their occupation of the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century. I'm not sure if Sayles ever found a publisher for his novel but he all his research has not gone to waste as Toronto has played host to the world premiere of his new film Amigo which concerns itself with those very same events.

Amigo is a typically intelligent, even-handed work from Sayles charting all that flows from the moment a squad of American soldiers start to occupy a small rural village. Their aim is to win hearts and minds, imposing hazy notions of democracy on the local population. Inevitably this little remembered conflict has all kinds of contemporary resonances in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hopefully some committed distributor will acquire this for the UK, as long as they wait until next year to release it so we have a chance of screening it at GFF 2011.

Sayles isn't the only Glasgow favourite with a new film at Toronto. A couple of years back our surprise film was Bent Hamer's lovely O'Horten. Hamer's latest is called Home For Christmas and is a cross between Love, Actually and Short Cuts that takes place in a small Norwegian town on Christmas Eve. Sparkling snow covers the ground beneath steely blues skies, bright lights twinkle from cosy family homes and there is a sense of a community wrapped up in the bleak mid-winter. A bittersweet but tender-hearted seasonal ensemble Home For Christmas delicately interweaves tales of love and longing, new life, fresh hope and sad farewells. It is delightful.

Films like Amigo, Home For Christmas and the jaunty Africa United prove that Toronto isn't just about big Hollywood studio titles, blockbuster mainstream movies and stars although stars are mighty important here. Celebrity gazing went into overdrive yesterday with the arrival in town of Bruce Springsteen for a screening of the documentary The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of The Town which includes previously unseen footage shot between 1976 and 1978 during the rehearsals and recording of a pivotal album in the career of Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Celebrity truly is ubiquitous in Toronto. Drifting through the department store Sears a loud speaker announcement invites you to "Join Eva Mendes this Friday as she launches her new range of bedding. She will be signing autographs". Sounds like an offer you can refuse and a sign that it might be time to leave town.

Allan Hunter, GFF Co-director

Drowning in Celebrity

2010-09-15T02:24:00.000-07:00

The Toronto Film Festival is currently drowning in celebrity. Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Rachel Weisz, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Stiller, Ben Affleck... The list is endless and a testimony to the power and influence of what feels like the biggest film event on the planet. There are a good number of Scots who are also making a big impression in a Festival that has something of a reputation as a launching pad for Oscar contenders.

Ewan McGregor has one of his best American roles in Beginners, a wistful, touching romantic drama in which he plays a lonely graphic designer desperately striving to find reasons to be cheerful. A heavily autobiographical tale from Thumbsucker director Mike Mills also features a delightful performance from Canadian veteran Christopher Plummer as McGregor's elderly father. Following forty years of devoted marriage and the death of his wife, Plummer's character finally comes out as gay and starts to embrace the life he has always wanted, including finding himself a boyfriend played by ER veteran Goran Visnjic. His example may be all that McGregor needs to make the best of a relationship he starts with French actress Melanie Lauren in the wake of his father's death.

James McAvoy has always impressed by the shrewd career choices he has made. In Robert Redford's The Conspirator, McAvoy stars as a true hero of the American Civil War. In the wake of Lincoln's assassination, he is called upon to defend the one woman accused of participating in the conspiracy to bring about Lincoln's death. He shares the nation's disgust that her boarding house provided sanctuary for the conspirators but gradually finds himself at odds with a government that is more intent on a quick trial and a certain verdict than the pursuit of justice or the belief in innocence until proved otherwise. Although The Conspirator starts off feeling like a staid history channel-style documentary it develops into a compelling tale of injustice that resonates with contemporary parallels. Ironically, McAvoy's impassioned character wound up becoming the first city editor of the Washington Post, the journal that would one day hire Woodward and Bernstein and that gave Redford one of his biggest 1970s hits in All The President's Men.

Toronto has been full of crowd-pleasers, not least The King's Speech in which Colin Firth seems a likely Oscar candidate once again as King George VI, a man whose chronic stammer was tackled by the unlikely and unorthodox speech therapist Lionel Logue, played to perfection by Geoffrey Rush. His character has the temerity to ask that the King treats him as an equal in a splendidly entertaining and moving true story. A surefire audience favourite has been Potiche, the latest delight from French director Francois Ozon in which Catherine Deneuve is on top form as a trophy housewife in 1970s France who suddenly finds a sense of empowerment when she wrestles control of the family business back from her astonishingly sexist husband Frabrice Luchini. Gerard Depardieu co-stars in a film that is light, witty but fully of substance and might even secure Deneuve a rare Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Allan Hunter, GFF Co-director

Neds On The Streets Of Toronto

2010-09-14T02:06:00.000-07:00

It seems strange to travel all the way to Canada to watch a Scottish film but when the film is as good as Peter Mullan's Neds then no journey is too long. Neds received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend and is a blistering portrait of a teenager coming of age in the Glasgow of the 1970s.

Mullan has described the film as " personal but not autobiographical" but there is the sting of truth in his account of a shy, bookish, Catholic Boy bullied and seduced into embracing the culture of violence and tribalism that surrounds him and starts to define his expectations of life.
The film is violent, foul-mouthed and filled with painfully funny moments, moving from chilling menace to raucous hilarity in a heartbeat. Mullan and his ace production team achieve a spot-on recreation of the way we were from the wallpaper to the facial hair, the clothes and the pop culture references - T. Rex on the soundtrack, Robinson Crusoe on the tea time television. It never feels obtrusive but does feels true to the memory. The centre of the film is a charismatic, star-making performance from Conor McCarron as the young man suffocated by an education system unable to nurture him, a household living in the shadow of his alcoholic father and a culture more likely to celebrate a throbbing knife scar than a glowing school report.
Exploring class prejudice, religion, peer pressure and so much more, Neds is a brilliantly compelling piece of drama from Peter Mullan that is currently scheduled to open in Britain at the beginning of January 2011. Make a note in the diary now.

There are more than 100 high profile, irresistible world premieres at Toronto prompting impossible choices for even the most insatiable cineaste. It is an important year for the Festival as it moves into a shining new headquarters at the Bell Lightbox complete with state of the art screens, offices, archive space and the kind of facilities that cash-strapped Scottish organisations can only dream about. Private donations have played a vital part in the creation of this enviable building with Ivan (Ghostbusters) Reitman and his family making a staggering donation of $22million to the costs. There must be plenty of wealthy Scots who might like to support the cultural wealth of their nation in the same way.

Neds has been one of the highlights of Toronto thus far alongside a haunting, melancholy adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed novel Never Let Me Go, a tale of impossible love in an imagined dystopian version of Britain's recent past starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield and the wonderful Sally Hawkins who really shines in Toronto world premiere Made In Dagenham which screens at the GFT later this month.

Low point of the Festival thus far? Stone-a tawdry, misguided morality tale pitting guilt-ridden parole officer Robert De Niro against wily convict Edward Norton giving such a mannered and actorly performance that he never for a moment encourages you to suspend your disbelief. He should watch the impeccable larger non-professional cast of Neds who earn your belief in every chilling taunt and feral act.

Allan Hunter, GFF Co-director

Five Questions for Amy Hardie (director, The Edge of Dreaming)

2010-09-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Dreaming is the story of a woman who enjoys her life: husband, three children, house in the Scottish countryside. As a sceptic and hedonist, when she dreams of her horse’s death, and wakes up to discover him dead, she tries to ignore it. But when she dreams of her own imminent death, she begins to explore every avenue to avoid this dream becoming reality.

The film explores life, dreams and death in the context of a warm, loving family whose happiness is increasingly threatened as the dream seems to be proving true. Eminent neuroscientist Mark Solms gets involved, and a shaman, which reveals a surprising twist to the tale.

GFT will be screening this inspirational documentary on Monday 6 September (6.00), followed by a Q&A with director Amy Hardie.

We asked Amy Hardie some questions about the film.

The Edge of Dreaming was prompted by two powerful dreams of death. At what point did you decide to make the film – immediately after these dreams occurred or later, when you found yourself unwell?

I ignored the first dream that my horse was going to die even when I found him dead. I thought co-incidences happen all the time and our model-making brain is always looking for meaning. I reckoned dreams were just random firings across your neural circuits as the brain lays down memories before it switches itself off to be able to reboot the next morning.

Talking to a scientist even more hard headed than me, Professor Weissman, surprised me when he pointed out that dreams must do more than that otherwise we would not have retained them through evolution. He then gave me examples of people who have learnt skills, or solved problems in their dreams. That’s how the structure of carbon, for instance, was discovered.

I then had a second dream that told me I was going to die. When I started to get ill, and the doctors could not work out why my lungs were failing, I began to look into dreams in every way I could. At that point I committed to making a film about what I was going through.

The film is visually very inventive – can you explain some of the tricks and imagery you use to tell your very personal story?

The film is seen through my eyes. That gives it the intensity of looking at a year possibly for the last time. As I became increasingly unwell, filming the landscapes, light, and family were a comfort. The nurses in the hospital took turns filming me, and we used footage of my horse shot by cinematographer Ian Dodds. I also had to show what was happening inside my head. I worked with animator Cameron Duguid to keep the home movie feel of the film, and printed out images I had already shot, and inked and painted on them to create the dream and shamanic sequences. Cameron also made original drawings of neural pathways in the brain based on Adam Zeman’s neural mapping. Colin Monie, one of the three editors on the film, brought an existential freedom to the storytelling, further intensifying the images with sound design by Gunnar Oskarsson. Sound intensifies images and changes them: I worked closely with Jim Sutherland and his score is both inventive and lyrical.

You describe yourself at the film’s outset as rational and skeptical, what are your thoughts on dreams now?

It felt important to me to be accurate to what I saw and experienced that year. Some of the images ‘make no sense’ but I included exactly what I saw. There is also a lot of space for the audience to bring their own understanding and experience to the film. My hope is that some people in the audience may have better explanations for what I went through than I did. During the research for the film I learnt about the 17th century Iroquois Americans who talked about their dreams every morning.When they had a fearful dream, they would ask people in the community to enact it with them, keeping the energy flow of the dream, but substituting a less severe outcome. For instance, if they dreamt their legs were broken after an attack, their friends would simulate the attack but only bruise their legs. I began to think I was doing a similar thing with this film: going through the experience of facing my own imminent death, and sharing it with the community by making a film about it.

Your children feature heavily throughout. What was their reaction to the final film?

Each of my children responded differently. I also decided not to tell my two youngest about the dream. I felt they would worry about me. I started filming them a lot. I wanted to document raising them just in case the dream death sentence was fulfilled. I felt better knowing that there was a comprehensive archive of their mother, that, if necessary, they could then show to their children to say – this is how your grandmother raised us. I wanted the texture of our ordinary life. They were mystified that I filmed so many meals, bed times, playing on the computer, quarrelling. Eli made some music for the film. My middle daughter filmed the snake for me, as I kept running away, whimpering. My youngest daughter said the most amazingly pertinent things on camera, although she had no idea about my dreams.

This film is extremely personal compared to your previous science documentaries. How has your approach to filmmaking altered since completing this film?

I loved making this film. I loved being able to really look, with no time constraints. It also took a long time to edit. I worked with 3 editors, Ling Lee, Colin Monie and Michael Culyba. Each was invaluable. I was also in the grip of a paradox: instead of looking at the events and creating a story out of them, the dreams were creating a story out of my life. My job was to keep up.

The Edge of Dreaming will also be screening on Saturday 18 (4.15), Tuesday 28 (12.45) & Wednesday 29 September (8.30)

Programme Note: Cinema as Poetry: František Vláčil Season

2010-09-01T02:55:00.000-07:00

Although František Vláčil’s opus is perhaps one of the most distinguished of the Czechoslovak cinema of the 1960s, in Western Europe it nonetheless awaits to be discovered, not only by the wider public but also by experts and admirers of film.

During the 1950s and 1960s Vláčil remained an isolated and solitary figure within the Czech New Wave (marked by works of filmmakers such as Miloš Forman, Ján Kádar, Ivan Passer and Vojtěch Jasný) because of his specific visual aesthetics and poetic influences.

Michael Atkinson suggests that Vláčil’s work not only followed the aesthetic impulses of foreign cinemas but was also deeply embedded within Czech artistic and literary tradition. He observes, ‘amid a movement renowned for its gritty intimacy and keen social observation, [Vláčil] trumped his compatriots’ notions of “nouvelle”-ness with 1967’s adaptation of [Czech avant-garde writer] Vladislav Vančura’s novel Marketa Lazarová’1 along with range of foreign influences, especially ‘a concern for composition within the frame reminiscent of the later Eisenstein’2 and the aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman. The selection screening at Glasgow Film Theatre, mainly based on adaptations of the work of Czech writers, showcases Vláčil’s interest for the Czechoslovak interwar experiments in literature and arts, as well as the literary works of his contemporaries, such as Vladimír Körner, with whom he closely collaborated in the creation of his films.

The journey through Vláčil’s visual aesthetics begins with The Glass Skies (Skleněná oblaka, 1958). Awarded at the Venice Film Festival, this short lyrical creation emerged after a series of propagandistic films Vláčil made during the 1950s for the Czechoslovak Army. Its visual features foreground the filmmaker’s background in aesthetics and art history, as well as his interest in animated films and the traditional Czech puppet theatre.

These traits continue to appear in The White Dove (Holubice, 1960), which inaugurated Vláčil’s cinematic production of the 1960s. The White Dove introduced a number of aesthetic and thematic tendencies that were to become the main features of his later films: photographic quality of images, specific use of sound, simultaneous existence and subversion of spatialtemporal structures. The film also contains a visual, philosophical and lyrical examination of the universal nature of self-liberation and belonging, a theme which applies especially to Vláčil’s aesthetic approach to the representation of history.

The Devil’s Trap (Ďáblova past 1962), the filmmaker’s interpretation of Alfred Technik’s novel, and The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel 1967) and Adelheid (1969), the two adaptations of Vladimír Körner’s stories, demonstrate how Vláčil was distinguished from other Czech New Wave filmmakers because of his philosophical preoccupations rather than his ‘preference for historical subject matter.’3 Inspired by 18th century Moravian folk beliefs, The Devil’s Trap outlines the historical context very loosely and offers a series of suggestive images, especially of human faces, which capture the clash between the world of nature and religion and a search for human love.

The Valley of the Bees and Adelheid examine the topics of return and home, and explore the (im)possibility of belonging for those who establish their identities in relationships deemed incestuous or inappropriate. In Valley of the Bees, these longings are presented in the return of an uprooted young man to his former home in mediaeval Bohemia. An outcast from a rigid religious order he hopes to reach ontological security in a relationship with a woman (his widowed step-mother) and nature, having found only remnants of the shattered physical home of his childhood. In Adelheid, young colonel Viktor Chotovický, displaced by the war, travels to an anonymous village in the border region of Sudetenland after the expulsion of ethnic Germans in 1945, hoping to find solace and shelter but encountering an unexpected and forbidden relationship with a German woman.

Both films foreground Vláčil’s interest in the simultaneous representation of different aesthetic and ideological layers using sound and music. While in The Valley of the Bees the buzz of the bees (the bees being a pagan symbol of fertility, spring and chaos who, according to the local priest, can predict storm and disaster) counterbalances Gregorian chant, in Adelheid, the simultaneous existence of the memory of the glorious past and the present time is represented through German classical music: the return of the young colonel in search of his identity and the tragic reality of ethnic displacement and postwar existential crisis is accompanied by Johannes Strauss and J.S. Bach’s music.

An adaptation of an avant-garde interwar novel, Marketa Lazarová (1967) is an ‘unorthodox’ historical film considered the best Czech film of all time. The film exercises a dialogic relationship with its textual counterpart, whereby the use of elements of Biblical Czech is combined with an absence of corresponding pathos in its representation of characters and scenes, which subverts the traditional seriousness of the genre of the historical novel. While Vančura’s novel might be read as an intertextual response to representation of history and national mythology in certain works of Czech literature, in Vláčil’s version, ideology is put aside and atmosphere is foregrounded.

Sirius, filmed in 1974, offers an insight into Vláčil’s film production for children. Children’s film was an ideologically ‘innocent’ genre which allowed the filmmaker certain freedoms from the unfavourable political conditions in the country. The story of a boy who refuses to hand over his dog to the German army, Sirius is an illustration of the theme of the heroism of children during the time of occupation, which was widely ideologically and pedagogically exploited in the films of Communist era and Socialist-Realist art. However, it is again characteristic of the filmmaker’s specific visual poetics.

Finally, while history is completely absent in The Shadow of a Fern (Stín kapradiny, 1985), an adaptation of interwar artist and playwright Josef Čapek’s story, the film preserves an emphasis on visual representations of characters, their (selfimposed) outsiderism, as well as melancholy and psychology of landscapes as a signature of Vláčil’s poetics.

In Vláčil’s film opus, then, form characteristically dominates story; his films show a remarkable privileging of visuality over narration, the liberation of poetic image over words. The various historical backdrops in the films, along with the historical circumstances that often affected the filmmaker’s choice of topic, have been used primarily to foreground the filmmaker’s interest in image composition. As Vláčil himself observed, listening to the same musical composition in different contexts, circumstances and environments leads to a discovery of different experiences.4 The same could be said for the visual poetry of the image; applied against different historical backgrounds, it provides a frame for exploration of different philosophical and poetic worlds.

Dr Mirna Šolić, University of Glasgow

September 2010

1 www.villagevoice.com/2006-03-28/screens/bees-season-a-forgotten-classic-of-the-czech-new-wave/
2 Hames, Peter, The Czechoslovak New Wave (Wallflower Press:London; New York, 2005), p.53
3 Ibid.
4 www.nostalghia.cz/webs/vlacil/texty/filmova_rec_1984.php

Programme Note: The Illusionist

2010-08-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

Vaudeville Rendezvous

Throughout cinema’s short history several mentor/protégée bonds have formed between directors – some official, some unofficial. These relationships create conversations between filmmakers: one who has been absorbed into history and memory, and another who uses certain of the elder artist’s tropes as a prism through which to filter his own sensibilities. Through these cinematic ties fresh life has been given to abandoned projects and outdated ideas. Three years after Stanley Kubrick’s death Steven Spielberg brought the reclusive filmmaker’s abandoned A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) to the screen; Claude Chabrol and Brian De Palma have spent much of their careers developing the themes and techniques of their self-appointed mentor Alfred Hitchcock; with Gosford Park (2001), Robert Altman paid tribute to Jean Renoir, his biggest cinematic influence; and Altman himself lives on in the work of his disciple Paul Thomas Anderson, who helped complete Altman’s posthumous film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006). With The Illusionist (2010), French animator Sylvain Chomet continues this tradition by reworking an unproduced script written in the late 1950s by the filmmaker who has influenced him the most, French icon and cinema’s finest post war comic, Jacques Tati.

In Tati’s original script the eponymous conjurer, to be played by Tati, forms a paternal bond with a young Czech girl who, after seeing him perform, naively mistakes his slight-of-hand for real magic. The illusionist, moved by the child’s innocence, endeavors to use his trickery to distract her from the realities of life in Prague, the film’s original setting. In 2000, shortly before her death, Tati's daughter Sofie presented the forty-year-old script to Chomet after he had approached the Tati estate for permission to use a clip from Jour de Fêtê (1949) in his debut feature, Belleville Rendezvous (2003). Chomet’s most significant change to the script was moving the principal locations to Scotland. The French magician, Jacques Tatischeff (Tati’s birth name), now meets his young ward, Alice, on the Isle of Iona, after which the young Gael follows the Gaul to Edinburgh where they live, for a short time at least, in wordless domestic contentment.

The Illusionist opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June this year, and it is as much a paean to the festival's host city as it is to Tati. Chomet made the Scottish capital his home during the film's tumultuous 5-year production, moving his family there and setting up animation house Django Films in the heart of the city: “I believe it’s important to live in the same environment you are trying to animate, because your inspiration is then around you...a lot of my personal experience of Edinburgh is in this film”. Chomet and his animators have rendered the Scottish capital’s dramatic geography and beautiful sandstone architecture with soft pastel colours; its ethereal light is ever changing. It is a romantic evocation, but as the film progresses the city’s gritty underbelly, as explored by the likes of Robert Wise (The Body Snatcher, 1945), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 1995; Shallow Grave, 1994) and David MacKenzie (Hallam Foe, 2007), comes to the fore, with Tatischeff and Alice being joined in the twisted alleyways of the Old Town by suicidal clowns, homeless ventriloquists and seedy hustlers.

The visual style of The Illusionist marks, perhaps, the biggest shift in visual esthetics between films from any director in living memory. Belleville Rendezvous was a hyperactive phantasmagoria set in an imagined gothic metropolis on the edge of time, populated by the distorted and the grotesque – the work of a card-carrying surrealist, surely. Its follow-up, meanwhile, is a fastidious recreation of a real-life city, and Tatischeff is no caricature. He is the double of Tati in his autumn years – that stoic face, the hunched posture and his paradoxically ungainly yet graceful movements are all expertly captured by Chomet and his animation team. Deeply rooted in the realities faced by music-hall acts at the fag end of the 1950s, The Illusionist is a bleak look at a dying art form and its scrapheap bound practitioners. Life for these characters is as hard as in any social-realist film. Only at the film’s peripheries do Chomet’s trademark strange bodies appear: a tiny hotelier who cannot see over his reception desk; an enormous, Viking helmet-wearing opera singer; a perpetually drunk, omnipresent highlander.

Although Tatischeff has the physical characteristics of Tati, Chomet’s incarnation does not share the easygoing optimism of Monsieur Hulot (Tati’s on screen persona for four of his six features) or Jour de Fete’s ebullient postman. There is none of Hulot’s trademark spring in Tatischeff’s step. Instead the concert hall entertainer is browbeaten, worn down by rejection and failure and the prospect of a hardscrabble retirement. At Tatischeff’s lowest point he visits Edinburgh’s legendary Cameo cinema and stubbles into a screening of Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) where he is confronted with his live action doppelganger. For the audience it is a delicious moment of self-reflexivity, but for Tatischeff it is like being confronted with a ghostly specter. The misadventures of Hulot do not offer him comfort, as the Marx Brothers’ antics do for Woody Allen’s nihilistic Mickey in Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986). Rather, it is a reminder of another form of mass entertainment, along with pop music and television, which has made his vaudeville profession obsolete.

As Tatischeff’s world crumbles, Alice’s blossoms. Her Edinburgh is a town of bright lights, beautiful shop fronts and handsome strangers. The film’s cruel irony is that the gifts that Tatischeff bestows on Alice – trinkets she believes to be conjured from thin air but which are of course expensive luxuries that her surrogate-father is working several jobs to pay for – transform her to the belle of Auld Reekie but cripple him financially, physically and emotionally. In the end Tatischeff can no longer keep up the illusion and his final gift to Alice is a bitter four-word note.

Throughout his career, Tati gleefully mocked mankind’s devotion to technological follies and cultural fads. At first glance Chomet does not appear to share his hero’s anger at fast-paced modernity’s erosion of life’s simple pleasures. But that would be the wrong conclusion. While the French animator’s film chooses bitter melancholy over biting satire, it is his chosen medium – traditional, hand-painted animation – that continues Tati’s rebellious legacy and best evokes his themes. Faced with an industry overeager to embrace the wonders of stereoscopic CGI, Chomet has challenged the film establishment in the most emphatic way possible. By crafting, with considerable confidence and skill, a masterwork of 2D hand-drawn animation.

Jamie Dunn, co-host of Screen Shrapnel, a film-based radio show on Subcity radio
– www.subcity.org/shows/screenshrapnel

[1] Demetrios Matheou, “Why Sylvain Chomet chose Scotland for the movie magic of The Illusionist”, The Herald: 15 June 2010 (http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/more-arts-entertainment-news/why-sylvain-chomet-chose-scotland-for-the-movie-magic-of-the-illusionist-1.1034933)

Five Questions for Jim Hickey (director, William McLaren: An Artist Out of Time)

2010-08-16T03:40:00.000-07:00

When director Jim Hickey investigated the story behind the 1944 short film And So Goodbye, he came away with another fascinating tale – that of William McLaren, painter, illustrator and decorative artist. In William McLaren: An Artist Out of Time, Hickey traces the story of an artist who was ahead of his age in many ways, but who would have been a fascinating character whatever the era.

GFT will be screening the documentary on Wednesday 18 August (8.30) as part of the Great Scots series, highlighting some of the best Scottish-made films from Glasgow Film Festival 2010. Award-winning director Jim Hickey and producer Robin Mitchell will be taking part in a Q&A after the screening.

We asked Jim Hickey some questions about William McLaren and making the film.

1. Despite being a prolific artist, William McLaren is relatively unknown, even in his native Scotland. What made you decide to make a film about him?

Six years ago when Robin Mitchell and I made our short film, And So Goodbye, we came across William McLaren as an illustrator who had created the titles on a film in which Robin's dad had acted in the 1940s. The only article we could find about McLaren was in The Scots Magazine and its author Tom Kirk was able to give us some initial leads. Through a network of contacts in Fife and Edinburgh we began to build up a picture of the man and also started to shoot some interviews, initially to keep an accurate record. We quickly became convinced there would be enough material for a film; certainly a documentary but maybe even a feature film. McLaren is relatively unknown because he was a painter, illustrator and decorative artist and few people that we spoke to had any idea of his extensive output. Sometimes he is an artist of high quality and other times a journeyman. He's not easy to categorise and we therefore had to construct a coherent narrative.

2. Did you discover anything surprising about McLaren while you were making the film?

The biggest surprise was the continual uncovering of a wide range of work including works of high quality in private houses. He created many objects as gifts; engraved glass, miniature pianos and trompe l'oeil marble obelisks. For McLaren, any surface that could be painted was painted. We have now compiled a chronology of his work that runs to eleven pages and there are still numerous items that we know of that are not securely dated. We were also surprised that his grave in Cardenden was unmarked and, since completing the film, we have raised money for a new headstone for the grave.

3. After the film screened at Glasgow Film Festival in February, you were put in touch with a family McLaren used to stay with in Paris. What did you learn from them?

We had very little information about McLaren's trips to European cities from the 1940s onwards. After the Glasgow Film Festival screening we were contacted by someone in Killearn who had met McLaren on trips with her mother to the house in which he stayed on his trips to Paris. We have now seen new photographs of him, some letters and painted objects as well as a watercolour of the Paris house and a painting on glass of the Arc de Triomphe. These have recently been added to our chronology. Maybe after this GFT screening we will learn even more!

4. How have your previous roles as Director of Edinburgh Filmhouse and the Edinburgh International Film Festival influenced your work as a director?

I have always been conscious of how difficult it is to produce films that are totally original. There are tens of thousands made every year. When programming Filmhouse and the Film Festival, the films that always stood out were those with compelling stories to tell and which also found ways to tell them cinematically. Whether fiction or documentary, the story and the manner of its telling were paramount. The filmmaker has to respect his subject. With the McLaren film the challenge was to represent sufficient examples of his work and to knit together the testimony of people into a kind of conversation about him. In this way, the accumulation of detail leads the audience to make an emotional connection with the subject and the film isn't merely a catalogue of events and objects.

5. What projects are you currently working on?

Working again with Robin Mitchell I have just directed another documentary, About A Band. This is the story of the Columcille Ceilidh Band in Edinburgh that has musicians with learning disabilities. We filmed the band over the last year performing at various gigs. Our next task is to continue submitting our films to selected film festivals. We have two other documentaries in development. Over the last year we have also been writing a feature film script, a Scottish comedy with some familiar characters in unfamiliar situations.

Programme Note: The Secret in Their Eyes

2010-08-13T04:32:00.000-07:00

For a number of years, Argentina has been sending strong cinematic works to the Oscars for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film category. Its 2009 entry, The Secret in Their Eyes not only won this international award but also picked up a number of prizes at Spain’s equivalent ceremony, the Goyas. Based on Eduardo Sacheri’s novel, La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question in Their Eyes), this was the second Argentine film to gain Best Foreign Language Film following the success of The Official Story by Luis Puenzo in 1985. Both films mark a remarkable achievement for Argentine cinema as no other Latin American country has achieved an Oscar winning film to date. Along with director Juan José Campanella’s earlier work, The Son of the Bride (also nominated for an Academy Award in 2001), these films can be seen to represent a broad trajectory in Argentine filmmaking over the last thirty years. In particular, they each represent a filmmaking tendency within the country that seeks new ways of coming to terms with Argentina’s political past, often with an eye on presenting these images to audiences overseas.

Although Argentina has a history of political filmmaking reaching back at least as far as Fernando Birri’s documentary work in the 1960s, the Dirty War of the 1970s and early 1980s provoked the need for a critical reaction across the cultural sphere. During this period, Jorge Rafael Videla controlled the country through a military dictatorship that responded to left-wing activism with state-sponsored violence. Certain filmmakers such as Fernando Solanas were critical of the country’s military regime and could only continue their work in exile while many others waited for the return to democracy to film their stories. The Official Story was one such film and was part of a wave of works that came out in the years immediately after the Dirty War. It was an attempt to criticise the military junta but also acted as an exploration and investigation of what had happened, particularly as large numbers of Argentine citizens had disappeared without trace. Other films of the same era such as Funny Little Dirty War (1983, Héctor Olivera), Night of the Pencils (1986, Héctor Olivera), and Tangos (1985, Fernando Solanas) displayed a sense of the national identity crises that emerged from Argentina’s internal conflict. Many of these films were sent to international film festivals and the nation’s identity was thus interrogated on the international stage as much as at home. At the same time, there was a sense of immediacy to these films rather than the reflection that comes with time.

In the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, there was a general shift towards a more introspective examination of the contemporary national psyche, albeit one that recognised the way in which the on-going social conflicts and identity crises had roots in the upheaval of earlier decades. In many ways the Nueva Ola (new wave) appeared to be putting direct examination of political events behind it. A number of films that not only did well on the international film festival circuit but were also produced in part with film festival funds emerged, such as Pizza, Beer and Cigarettes (1998, Adrián Caetano) and Crane World (1999, Pablo Trapero). They were inclined to present a gritty, neo-realist style that portrayed a dilapidated country. Concurrently, a number of gentler films such as Lost Embrace (2004, Daniel Burman) and Minimal Stories (2002, Carlos Sorin), attempted to show the tensions and strains in Argentina while emphasising the underlying humanity of their characters. Campanella’s first feature film, The Son of the Bride, was very much a part of this development. In this film, the protagonist Rafael tries to maintain control of the restaurant that he owns. Due to severe economic difficulties, Rafael’s problems are insurmountable and the only way for him to overcome the psychological strains imposed by his situation is to sell the restaurant to foreign investors. Significantly, a number of scenes depicting Rafael’s youth are nostalgic for a better time in Argentina. In this way, the film bypasses the need to deal with specific political events of the 20th century but in doing so, does not render them unproblematic.

At first glance, The Secret in Their Eyes seems to be following a similar vein to The Son of the Bride as it looks back at the Argentine justice system of the 1970s in a way that follows the tight, personal dramas of the characters rather than the political backdrop. Universal themes emerge such as the need or value of the death penalty and whether it is advisable or moral to ‘soften up’ the accused. The aesthetic set up of the judicial courts and the interior offices give a classical feel to the film’s setting that could take place in a variety of locations across the world. For Juan José Campanella, this film marks a return from directing television series in the US and the quality of the images along with the way interpersonal relationships are represented seem to be the outcome of this background. However, the film does takes an important turn around half-way into the narrative and Argentina’s political context suddenly becomes important. This means of introducing the personal themes of the narrative before undertaking the political backdrop makes the film particularly accessible for international audiences. It also allows the film to join up with other recent films such as Lucía Cedrón’s Lamb of God (2008) which focuses on the children of the Dirty War generation who have now grown up and are interrogating what happened from a distance that was not afforded to their parents. Films such as these thus represent maturation in a strand of Argentine cinema that has difficult and complex events to deal with.

Dr Miriam Ross, University of Glasgow
August 2010