Glasgow Film Festival: Short Film Fest Part 2

Tags

films, short films

As promised the second half of my reviews of the Saturday screenings at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (if you missed it you can find the first half here)

Apparently, I stopped writing down my ratings for the films after the 2^nd screening of the day. Which matters less for the 3^rd screening, as I wrote reviews of them during my break for food (Japanese, very tasty). However, as I was tired and all filmed out by the end of my last screening, I didn’t write the reviews at the time…and writing them now I was cursing my lack of star ratings. My opinions about the 2^nd screening were much easier to retrieve with the stars as a guide…

Mutations: International Competition 1
Mutations was my favourite of the screenings. It was certainly strange but a good strange I felt. Half the films were animations and that always predisposes me to view positively. Overall it managed to balance the dark with the light well.
Edmund was a Donkey/Edmund était un âne (2012, Franck Dion, France/Canada)
Edmund was a Donkey is a definitely both the strangest and the saddest film in the collection. A small man, who has been by turns contentedly miserable and quietly happy comes to believe, after a cruel office prank, to believe himself to be a donkey. It’s a film about escapism, madness and more about how we treat those who we perceived to be ‘mad’ or ‘different’ and how thin the line between cruelty and kindness can be.
The Pub (2012, Joseph Pierce, UK)
The Pub is an animation and not an animation, as far as I can tell, it was filmed live with actors and then had animated effects added – rotoscoping perhaps? There’s an ugly beauty to the animation that lends it an extra power. The landlady of this particular pub can see the animals and monsters that lurk under the skins of her punters (and perhaps even under her own) which can be both a blessing and a curse.
Stammering Love/L’Amour Bègue (2012, Jan Czarlevski, Switzerland)
Stammering Love was my least favourite of this set, largely because handsome young man angsting about girl and how they are so shallow and can’t see past X thing about them, got old when I was still a teenager myself. The most interesting thing about the film is the way the central character fights to assert that it is the shallow casual hook-up culture itself that leaves him sad and depressed, rather than his lack of success in it.
Trans (2012, Mark Chapman, UK)
Trans is a documentary of a sort, built entirely of still photographs taken with very long exposures. The film grew from a conversation between the subject Callie and the film-maker, about Callie’s trans-ness. Which evolved into him documenting Callie’s transition to where she is now, which is comfortable. This gives the film’s narration an intimacy that would be hard to achieve otherwise, it feels like someone explaining something quite complex but very close to their heart to a friend, it presumes an audience that doesn’t understand but wants to. The nature of the photographs, always slightly blurred, matches well with the topic of gender fluidity and also serves to disguise a lot of the process of changing that both steers it away from seeming exploitive, and denies the inherantly voyeuristic nature of cinema.
Through Ellen’s Ears/Door De Oran Van Ellen (2011, Saskia Gubbels, Netherlands
Through Ellen’s Ears is a documentary following a young deaf girl, and to a lesser extent her deaf and hard of hearing classmates, as they face decisions about where they will go to secondary school: the hearing school, at hard of hearing school or to a boarding school for deaf children. Having grown up in deaf society she is keen to learn to interact with hearing society to help her cope with wider society once she leaves school. Whereas her parents and classmates are keener for her to go to deaf school where she will have community and better academic prospects. Making the whole process harder is that her best friend (from whom she is inseparable) is hard of hearing so cannot go to deaf school. Can they find a way to stay together and still get their educational needs met?
Fear of Flying (2012, Conor Finegan, Ireland
Fear of Flying is a charming little Irish animated film about a bird with a fear of flying. This, as one can imagine is rather a major problem for a bird in general life but worse when the rest of his kind fly south for the Winter. It was light weight and light-hearted and generally a bit of a relief after the intensity of the previous films in the screening.

Bottled Up: International Competition 2
This was the last screening of the day, and its late night slot was clearly intentional, as it was more consistently dark and the themes were definitely post-watershed. It was my least favourite of the screenings though whether that was due to the subject matter or if I was just burned out by that point, I can’t be sure. There were some very good films involved, I just got to the end of it feeling a bit ground down by them.
The Curse (2012, Fyzal Boulifa, Morrocco/UK)
The Curse is a rather depressing little film, in which a young woman has sneaked away from her village, to make a last rendez-vous with her older lover who is going abroad for a while. Having been caught by a young boy from her village, she begins the long walk home trailed by an increasing number of inexplicable village children, who taunt her with their knowledge and demand sweets in payment for their silent. Getting hold of said sweets proves more costly than she could have imagined or that they could understand.
This Charming Couple (2012, Alex MacKenzie, Canada)
This Charming Couple is odd and purposefully so. Created from water-damaged, found footage, from an old educational film, it transforms the footage for its own purposes, undermining the original message. But quite what the intended message of the new film is, remains as opaque and unclear as the footage itself.
The Buried/Sepulte (2012, Jonathon Pop Evans, USA)
The Buried is a film about a murder, or at least the aftermath. It’s apparently based on a real-life hate crime, from the evidence of the film, a traditional ‘gay panic’ effort. The film focuses on the awkward messy aftermath of trying to dispose of the body and facing up to the horror of what they’ve done in the cold light of day when the violent passions of the night have passed.
Under the Colours/Zur-e Parcham (2012, Esmaeel Monsef, Iran)
My favourite from this screening, by a long way. A red skirt is found caught on the barbed wire around an army barracks, having presumably blown off one of the washing lines belonging to the surrounding blocks of flats. A group of the soldiers rescue it and attempt to solve the mystery of where it came from and to return it to its rightful owner.
Softly One Saturday Morning/Mollement, Un Samedi Matin (2011, Sofia Djama, Algeria/France)
Softly One Saturday Morning is definitely one of the better films from this selection, even if I remain a bit leery of it for the whole ‘attempted rape’ as metaphor for the state of the country thing. The film is well-shot, atmospheric, and the lead actress’ performance was compelling and her character interesting and intelligent. The best of the film is undoubtedly the confrontation/debate between her and the police chief, I just feel there should have been a better way to get there, but perhaps that says more about the world the director lives in rather than the director herself.

Glasgow Film Festival: Short Film Fest Part 1

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cca, films, gff, short films

It’s that time of year again, or at least it was when I started writing this in February, the Glasgow Film Festival was upon us and with it came the Short Film Festival. Either way, for once I’m not posting about all the interesting shorts I’d like to be watching but am not. (Though last year I did manage to see some Gaelic short films – which given the lack of excited email from FilmG I presume didn’t run this year.) This year I was prepared – ok, actually I was just paying attention when @glasgowfilmfest tweeted that tickets were selling out fast for the Frightfest strand. Having discovered that a high percentage of the programmes had a screening on a Saturday, most of them in the same screen at the CCA (no danger of making over-lapping bookings) I decided to embark on an epic day of short film watching.

It would actually be possible to see 6 of the short film programmes in one day – but you’d probably either need to bring your own sandwiches or be very good at eating very hot soup, very fast. Good sense, thankfully prevailed, I only booked for and I scheduled in time to actually have lunch and dinner.

Hooray for Hollywood: International Competition 7
I’ve been to a few film festivals over the years and while I was nominally aware of audience awards for films it wasn’t something of which I had any experience. However, low and behold, a member of festival staff came round the screening, presented me with a ballot paper and a pen, explained the voting system and there I was, part of the system. So if some of the reviews seem a little as though I’m awarding and deducting points as I go – that’s because I was.
Hollywood Movie (2012, Volker Schreiner, Germany) ****
Hollywood Movie is a construction, or possibly more accurately a reconstruction of an existing text. The text is a mediation on a different way of engaging with cinema and the text is constructed from clips of Hollywood movies to form the monologue from cut up snippets of existing movie dialogue. It’s cleverly done, well edited and the juxtaposition of original and constructed context is by turns interesting, poignant and at times humorous. It’s rather meta and honestly I think its more a work of video art than a short film but the more I think about it the more I think it needs to be seen by a cine-literate audience that appreciates it fully. It really needs being projected in the dark into that shared audience space.
Jerry and Me (2012, Mehmaz Saeedvafa, USA) ***
Jerry and Me is an autobiographical documentary about the relationship between and the impact on an Iranian film-maker by the films of Jerry Lewis. Given that she has been living and working in the US for a long time now and the times that we live in, its also about her wider relationship with cinema and with the US. It’s an interesting little documentary, and the archive footage of Iran is fascinating, but in the end I wasn’t exactly sure what message it wanted its audience to take away from it.
The First Hope (2012, Jeremy White, USA) ***
The First Hope is odd. It looks good, the dialogue is minimal and its a fairly tender view of first love and growing up. It’s also a bit about obsession with movies you watch repeatedly, with your first crush, all the little transgressive pleasures of early teen love/crushes. And I’d probably have like it far better if I hadn’t seen so many art films with implied or subtextual incest in the background…
Warning Triangle (2011, Virgil Widrich, Austria) ****
Warning Triangle suffers from the same issue as Hollywood Movie, except more so because it doesn’t have a clear through-line of narrative. It’s very effective at what it does and I enjoyed it but it didn’t feel like a film? It probably doesn’t help that it started out as an installation in a museum demonstrating autophillia…
Burning Hearts (2011, James McFay, Japan) *****
Burning Hearts is my favourite from this selection. It starts out as a tale of urban ennui and disengagement. A depressed taxi driver mourns the loss of his ambition and dreams, a mysterious woman discovers her lover and her best friend are having an affair. Her tattoo fascinates the taxi driver and her lover promises her will ‘take care of her’ only for her to mugged by a gang moments later. The fight scene that follows is almost comic yet brutal enough to avoid parody. There’s something almost computer game-esque about the fight-scene. And it has the best pause in a fight scene I’ve ever seen. It’s not clear how much is real or fantasy or quite what those linking tattoos on their wrists mean but they’ve clearly found whatever they were looking for and somehow, that’s enough.

Adrift: International Competition 4
Adrift seems a particularly appropriate title for this programme of short films, as their protagonists are all somewhat adrift in their very different ways.
Echo (2012, Lewis Arnold, UK) ****
Echo has a clever and rather strange conceit, which is hard to explain without ruining the reveal of the film. The reveal comes early on in the film but its worth seeing unspoiled. It’s an interesting take on grief and how we deal with it after the initial shock of it, how it can trap us and consume us if we let it. And that ring tone will haunt you afterwards.
The Globe Collector (2012, Summer De Roche, Australia) *****
The Globe Collector is a charming if odd documentary about an Australian eccentric. A man who collects lightbulbs (light globes) of every kind. He’s passionate about electronics and determined to preserve the legacy of their innovation before they are eradicated to give way to the more ecofriendly energy-saving variety.
Secrecy/Sigilo (2012, Karla Gomez Keep, Argentina) ***
If The Globe Collector is odd in a good way then Secrecy is odd in a bad way. It’s the sort of film people describe as ‘dreamlike’, melancholic or contemplative when actually they mean beautifully shot but almost nothing actually happens. The children are interchangeable, none of the characters get developed, there’s no apparent plot and nothing actually happens until the denouement at which point I was a) baffled and b) keen to follow the small girl’s course of action if it meant the film would end.
Vanishing Point (2012, Abhijit Mazumdar, India) *****
Take all your expectations about Indian cinema and leave them at the door. This is not an India that most people reading this will have seen on screen. There is no Bollywood glamour here, nor is there any ‘poverty porn’ to feel voyeuristic watching, Vanishing Point owes more to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas than anything else (if Hunter S. Thompson had been Indian and smoking cannabis rather than all the psychotropics he could get his hands on and Dr Gonzo had been sane, sober and rather put upon…). It’s the story of two young film-makers – very different people, and arguably friends who are slowly drifting apart – on a location scouting trip in the countryside, they’re in search of the perfect bus stop but they find (and lose) all sorts of other things along the way.
I Am Tom Moody (2012, Ainslie Henderson, UK) *****
I Am Tom Moody is a weird but compelling stop motion film, that’s a bit about a childhood, but definitely not for kids. It’s about pursuing lost dreams, and facing your demons, about facing the little voice that says you can’t and facing up to where that really comes from. It’s touching and sad, and worth sticking with despite the un-promising beginning.

Modern Languages @ The Lighthouse

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lighthouse

I came across this exhibition slightly by accident, as per the luminous signs above, I knew there were some MacIntosh exhibitions on at the Lighthouse at the moment. Having an hour to kill before meeting a friend, I thought I’d pop in and see them. Oddly enough, that evening’s official entertainment was to be a discussion panel on the history and future of Scotland’s languages, so the title of this exhibit caught my attention as I ascended the first escalator and ensured that I ascended no further.

(Deidre Nelson takes on the tradition of knitting charmingly kitsch traditional style houses for the tourists, this is the type of house generally found on the ‘ghost estates’ dotted around Ireland in the wake of the housing boom and crash.)

The exhibit is less about language than the title suggests, instead focusing on the reinterpretation of traditional Irish crafts by modern artists. Nonetheless, it was an interesting exhibition, and produced some lovely pieces of work in its own right. Each of the artists included in the exhibition (from Canada, Japan, Ireland and Scotland) used their own myths and materials to create new meanings and stories by combining them with elements taken from traditional Irish crafts and cultural items.

(Barbara Ridland takes on the traditional basket weaving traditions of her Shetland home and Ireland, in a more modern material that often serves the same purpose – cardboard.)

As part of the exhibition, there is a short film of archival footage of the crafts that inspired the artists, with the artists in voiceover talking about how the material influenced them and their art. The footage is fascinating in its own right but regardless of whether you share my affection for that sort of thing, I’d recommend watching the film before you walk round the rest of the exhibit, as it lends the artworks created an extra dimension – Nao Matsunaga’s work in particular makes a great deal more sense after hearing him talk about the boat building tradition that inspired him.

Modern Languages: Reinterpreting the Irish Vernacular, is at the Lighthouse Glasgow until . It is a touring exhibition from the National Craft Gallery of Ireland, more information on where else it will be stopping off, can be found here.

Niki de Saint Phalle @ the GOMA

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GOMA, niki de saint phalle, sculpture

Over the New Year, I dropped into the GOMA who are holding an exhibition of Niki de Saint Phalle work, a highly appropriate location given that she designed the mirrored entranceway and mirrored tympanum (if you like me are baffled as to what a tympanum is, I can now enlighten you that it is a triangular or semi-circular decorative wall surface over a door) of the GOMA itself.

Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930, educated in New York (appropriately enough she was apparently expelled from boarding school for painting the fig leaves on the school statuary red), and worked as a model for some time before becoming an artist after having a nervous breakdown. Starting with collage and working through painting into sculpture. Throughout her life she used art as a mean to express and come to terms with her dreams and nightmares, and her artwork bears many hallmarks of the whimsy and horror that populate our unconscious minds. Her organic, self-taught style being well-suited to the archetypal subjects she often worked with.

The exhibition came about due to a donation to Glasgow Museums by art collectors Eric and Jean Cass, of 14 outworks and a host of related ephemera. These were added to the works by Saint Phalle that Glasgow Museums already owned, to create a colourful and compelling exhibition that gave visitors a proper feel for the variety of her career and work.

It was really nice to see her work in context, as all my previous encounters with her work (instantly recognisable as it was, even if I didn’t know her name previously). Because a great deal of her sculptures were created for outdoor display, her work is often seen in public parks (Over the years I’ve seen pieces I can now pinpoint as hers in parks in Paris and Brussels, high above me in Zürich Hauptbanhof and on the streets of Chicago) so doubtless I’m not the only visitor who has seen and admired her work without having a clue as to who the sculptor behind it was. This is the only exhibition I’ve reviewed for this project where I was familiar with the artists’ work prior to going to see it, albeit only in the sense that I saw the pictures on the website and responded ‘oooh, them, yes’. Oddly enough it provided the most autobiographical information and context of all the exhibits I’ve seen so far. Perhaps the curators presumed the familiarity of her work would draw a larger percentage of casual visitors who’d want to know more, as opposed to arty types who would already know.

Gaudi was an acknowledged influence on her work and it shows, her sculptures falling somewhere between Gaudi and the artwork for Yellow Submarine on the pop/art culture scale. Charming, colourful, playful and not a little sinister at the same time.

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Eric and Jean Cass Gift, is at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow until 16th November 2013.

12. Rouge Parole

Tags

12 films, documentaries, Elyes Baccar, tunisia

Given that it was the films that I saw when the Africa in Motion festival tour reached my local art-house cinema four years ago that spurred me to sign up for this project the first time round, it seems fitting that the final film of this round should be a film that arrived at my local cinema courtesy of the Africa in Motion festival once again. Like most of the films on offer that first time, this one was a documentary too. Rouge Parole tells the story of the revolution that rocked Tunisia and kick started the ‘Arab Spring’. Or rather it tells stories of the revolution. There is no central over-arching narrative or voice-over to guide us. Instead the film-makers present their audience with different people’s, often contradictory, accounts of flash-points and significant moments of the revolution. The differing accounts are often laid next to each other in the film, interspersed with television news footage, shaky camera phone footage and surreptitiously filmed contemporary recordings by local guerilla film-makers. There doesn’t seem to be any judgement in the inclusion of contradictory accounts, or differing opinions on what action sparked what event, or where the birth place of the revolution truly was. Instead it feels like a statement on the subjectivity of truth, the unreliability of memory and the way in which different things may be true for different people, especially within an oppressive state.

The impact and importance of social media on the fledgling revolution, is an important part of the official narrative we hear of the Arab Spring. The film gives social media credit for empowering ordinary people to act, but also gives it a place within many other important factors. Perhaps the moment when the film first opens up away from the story we expect to see, is when the film visits the office of some local film-makers, they talk about who they are and their experiences of filming the progressing revolution, the tiny space packed with equipment and the wall behind them lined with tapes. Suggesting months, if not years, of careful, circumspect work, recording and logging the brutalities of the regime and countless acts of protest. That one of the film-makers appears to be the cousin of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young man who infamously immolated himself into the history books tells its own story. Implies a refusal to let the act go unnoticed, forgotten or its meaning defamed by the authorities the way others had. It leads us on to other young men who had killed themselves in public acts of protest at the system that had crushed them. Which in turn leads to other ‘martyrs’ in other cities, of a fuse running further back than the official narrative acknowledges.

Having spent so much time over the last few years seeing the revolutions in Egypt and Libya through mostly European perspectives – and even the reports from the locals or ex-pats were largely mediated through Western media – it was a welcome change to hear viewpoints on those revolutions from a neighbouring country. To see the joy on a bookshop owners face as she proudly sells previously banned books, the consternation and struggles to adapt of local journalists, faced with an end to the censorship they’ve worked under for so long. In particular when we hear so much about Western aid it was nice to see the practicalities of even small parts of the relief effort for refugees arriving in Tunisia from Libya.

At the heart of this film for me, was a questioning of the idea of the single narrative, of the fallacy of trying to apply the same model to all the countries impacted by the Arab Spring. It begs the question: if this many stories can be told from Tunisia, how many more are waiting to be told and heard from across the region? How many will we be allowed to hear, and how many have already been silenced?

Tracks – Walking the Ancient Landscapes of Britain

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but is it art, landscapes, pathfoot, philip hughes, stirling, stirling uni library

Embarrassing art admission #4: I spent the vast majority of my four years of undergraduate study, going to class in a museum and never knew it.

In my defence my uni was built in the 1960s and it really shows in the architecture. There was certainly a fair amount of art on the walls of Pathfoot (and I was vaguely aware of the art collection) but I thought of it mainly as bequests to compensate for the building, rather than any sort of curated collection. (No offence to the actual curator, on the strength of this exhibition she’s clearly good at her job.) Art at the university was something we stumbled upon, in obscure courtyards, unexpectedly in stairwells and on ambles round the loch. Part of the fabric of the place, we took it for granted and occasionally competed over who had found a piece of sculpture that no one else we knew had. I suspect that’s always been the point of their approach to art and university life, making it part of everyday life rather than something that you go and look at.

In the spirit of this, there’s currently an exhibition of landscape art on, in the University Library of all places. Not in some side room or seldom used classroom, but scattered around the building. Most of it congregates on the walls of the lower floor, leading from the printers round into one of the reading nooks, but other pieces lurk in unexpected places, and I strongly suspect I may have missed some of them – I found a whole staircase I didn’t know was there last week. A particularly striking piece on the stairs drew me to attend a lecture by the artist Philip Hughes (a former visiting lecturer with a long connection to the university) as part of a series of biannual arts lectures.

He spoke interestingly about his walks and this work, the way in which he is fascinated by geology but didn’t understand it at all. Many of his works are accompanied by maps, technical drawings showing cross sections of hills, or geophysical maps more at home on an episode of time team. He spoke of his enjoyment of walking in winter, of low light and the bones of the earth showing through. His ongoing interest in how ancient sites like Stonehenge and Maes Howe fit into their landscapes. I suspect some of the audience were looking for more explanation than he was able to give, but where his words ran out the slides of images not included in the exhibition filled in eloquently for him. The exhibition, and in all likelihood the book too, – with the constructed, layered mixed media pieces, with their scrawled observations by the artist, and in one inexplicable case a carpet – is an exploration of how people make sense of these ancient landscapes. The art is his response to these places, we don’t really need his words, he’s already told us what they make him think and feel. They certainly made me want to walk where he’d been to see them through my own eyes and compare them to what I’ve now seen through his.

Of course the rather sad thing about this whole situation is that Philip Hughes is a man after the university’s first Principal’s heart, both scientist and artist. The tradition of combining science and the arts at the university has been increasingly falling by the wayside, with departments in the Arts Faculty (largely based in Pathfoot) falling to cuts like dominos.

The exhibition is taken from works included in a book the artist wrote recently around his artistic impressions of 11 iconic walks across the UK, from Orkney to Cornwall. The exhibition contains mainly pictures from the North-west of Scotland and is part of a wider project of seven displays across the UK, each focusing on their locality.

Tracks: Walking the Ancient Landscapes of Britain, is on at the University of Stirling Library from now until the end of December.

A Chadian Double Bill – 10. Abouna & 11. Daratt

Tags

12 films, african, chadian, mahamat-saleh haroun

Watching African cinema is always a bit of a haphazard experience for me as its shaped by the vagaries of, on the one hand what films have been released on Region 2 DVD and on the other that have come to the attention of the jury of a big film festival. The annual Africa in Motion film festival in Edinburgh (this year running from 25th October to 2nd November) is pretty much the only opportunity to see anything approaching a representative selection of any particular country’s filmic output or of any particular director’s oeuvre. So imagine my excitement when I was browsing the library shelves and discovered not only a copy of Cannes winner from two years ago A Screaming Man but also two of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s previous films, Abouna (Our Father) and Daratt (Dry Season) which I pounced upon while I could.

Chad itself is a somewhat geographically diverse place and between Abouna (2002) and Daratt (2006) Haroun uses quite a variety of both urban and rural locations. The films were made either side of the most recent civil war to rock the country and in some ways the different preoccupations of the films show it. Yet in others, the latter film is more hopeful than the former – in the first, two boys going looking for their father and end up loosing much more, in the second a young man goes in search of vengeance for his father and finds things worth far more. Neither of the films is burdened with excess dialogue, nor do they shy away from the spaces and silences between people and conversations. Whether you choose to see that as demonstrative of the failures in communication between generations or communities is up to the viewer and their opinion may fluctuate from film to film. Perhaps it is telling that the deaf mute girl, Khalil, seems to have the least trouble making herself and her feelings understood of all the characters in the films.

But perhaps it is the similarities between the two films that is the most significant. The protagonists of both films are trying and failing to make a peace, however temporary or transient, with their unwilling circumstances. They are both films about coming of age, of facing responsibilities and failing in them, their young protagonists torn between their own desires and the needs of their families. The latter more than the former, suggesting that there might be a third way, a way to balance following one’s heart, with fulfilling one’s responsibility to family. Whether that can be mapped out onto the hearts of an entire nation, to draw a path like Atim’s between brutal revenge and complete amnesty, to make a true peace with the opposition even if forgiveness is beyond reach, is another question. But it’s nonetheless a hopeful question. One that puts the power back in the hands of those who have been buffeted and damaged by the violence and destruction of forces more powerful than they. It suggests that lasting peace will not come through grand gestures of governments and tribunals but through small individual actions and gestures over a long time.

Perhaps making bread is a more effective metaphor for making peace than it seems initially, requiring as it does a firm hand but a light touch, a lot of patience and being a rubbish way to exorcise your hate. (Bread will apparently taste bad if made with hate in your heart.)

Short Scottish Documentaries

Tags

cameo, documentaries, eiff, scottish

After many years of trying and failing to get to a screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival – the films I want to see are always sold out by the time I find out about them – and much juggling of the diary to find something that I wanted to see, was on at a time I wasn’t at work and wasn’t sold out, I finally made it to a screening. A screening of short, Scottish, documentaries which regular readers of this blog may identify as being pretty close to everything I want in a film screening. The screening was organised by the Scottish Documentary Institute. For those, like myself, who’d never heard of them before, they’re a research centre based at Edinburgh College of Art specialising in training, production and distribution of documentaries since their founding in 2004. The films screened were all the products of this year’s Bridging the Gap initiative – a new talent initiative where four Scottish-based filmmakers are commissioned to make a 10 minute documentary, receiving training and support along the way from development to post-production. In previous years all the films have been based around a theme, but this was the first year when the filmmakers hadn’t been given a theme, and yet they all seemed to have a theme despite that; of men in isolation.

Polaris (Chico Pereira)
Polaris is set amongst the Filipino community in Fraserburgh, and in particular on the trawler from which the film takes its name. The use of sound and equally of silence is brilliant, at times the sounds of the ship feel like a physical presence. It’s a contemplative and poetic piece with minimal dialogue, following the lives of the crew both on board and on shore without telling a particular ‘story’. Instead mediating on ideas of isolation and companionship, leaving the audience wanting to know more about the community into which we get the briefest of snapshots.

Pouters (Paul Fegan)
Pouters on the other hand is a film about the idiosyncratic and apparently ancient sport of Doo Fleein. Put aside your images of men in flat caps racing pigeons, this sport requires far more, cunning, dedication and sheer bloody minded trickery than its more refined cousin. This is a film about a 25 year rivalry, an all-consuming passion and a really obscure sport. The characters are charming and larger than life; the humour both broad and subtle. Not a lot happens in the film but there’s plenty of dramatic tension nonetheless, and maybe a wee bit of an insight into the West of Scotland sports fan mentality in there too.

In Search of the Wallaby (Alasdair Bayne/Andrew O’Connor)
In Search of the Wallaby is probably the weakest of the three films, mainly because, by the filmmakers own admission, the film is torn between what it wants to be. Back in 2004 a Wallaby was mysteriously found dead on Islay, how it got there in first place and what killed it was never resolved. The film starts as an X-files-style investigation into the mystery and runs into a dead end pretty quickly, and ends up as film about a young farmer with the Wallaby as a somewhat inadequate metaphor for his feelings about his life on the island. I couldn’t help feeling there was a far better film in there somewhere and it was a shame they hadn’t had the freedom to ditch the failed idea and more fully develop the more interesting one.

Takeaway (Yu-Hsueh Lin)
Takeaway is the most solitary of the films, quite an achievement given the company it found itself screened in. It follows a Chinese Takeaway delivery driver on his rounds one night and his musings on his job, his life in Scotland, the city and how much of a different world it becomes at night, takes us on a journey through an Edinburgh that is at once familiar and utterly alien. The cinematography of the world outside the fishbowl world of the car reflects this, the shooting creating a distorted world that is both intimidating and tempting.

Polaris and Pouters are available to watch online.

Ashes

Written one afternoon to distract myself from stressing out about another project entirely. Oddly enough the other project went much faster once I’d written this. Originally published at Ourpennilesswrite on 10/07/12.

The fragile clumps hang precariously from their perch. A long tail hangs down from them, seemingly holding them all together. Every so often one of the clumps will twitch and they all take a juddering trip a little further down the stalk, but somehow manage to cling on. If you felt so inclined to anthropomorphise them, you might cloak them in red waterproof jackets, like a string of amateur mountaineers, ill prepared for the conditions clinging together to the rope that their guide had bid them hold onto tightly. Echo’s of their unhappy and uncertain, but not yet fearful; cries as they descend unwillingly might hang in the air. But perhaps their cries are too comical for some desolate mountain cliff-face, better perhaps to think of them as first-time abseillers, caught in unexpectedly inclement weather. Better to preserve both your and their hope.

Occasionally one loses its hold and plunges to its dusty death, imploding on impact. The others are still for much longer than normal after each fall, as though they remember that each twitch could send them all to that fate. Below them the ground is smooth and cold – where it isn’t littered with the remains of their compatriots – and patient.

Slowly, slowly, they descend the tail as though the shorter distance to the ground will save them. The lowest of them touches the ground. And implodes as surely as its compatriot that fell from a height.

As though now resigned to their fate the rest give up their fight and fall to the ground, pulling down the cord that had sustained them for so long. The faint red glow of the beacon above them dims to nothing and the dust settles.

The air fills with the lavender scented clouds of their passing and for a long moment: there is calm.

The Way Things Go @ GOMA

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Embarrassing art confession #3: I don’t really ‘get’ video art.

Art cinema? Fine. Even if the message gets lost you’re generally looking at a beautifully shot piece of work. The vast majority of video art that I’ve seen has been far more focused on message than aesthetics. Which is not to say this is necessarily a bad thing. In fact I’d even argue that having something important/interesting to say is one of the best reasons to make art in the first place. But if the message is abstract or metaphorical or just plain obscure, then it really needs something else to hold the attention.

There are generally three reasons I engage with a piece of art.

1.  It’s got something interesting/important to say (whether personal or political)
2.  it’s beautiful/skilfully crafted or
3.  it’s fun. (I will forgive a lot of other failings in a piece of art if it’s mischievous art.)

The Way Things Go/Der Lauf Der Dinge (1987) falls firmly into the latter category. As a piece of video art it is essentially a record of what looks to have been a cross between a giant game of Mousetrap made of household objects and a giant Chemistry experiment gone utterly, horribly, gleefully out of control.

Prior to making the piece, the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss had made a piece called Equilibres (1984) which consisted of 80 still life photographs of household objects in precarious positions, always just on the cusp of falling over. Whereas in the video, they explore what happens when the equilibrium is broken. Objects are arranged in a precarious, almost cartoon-like assault course, like one of those mazes where a ball progresses along chutes and through loops, counterweights swinging and bridges revolving. Movement as inevitable and as precarious as a domino chain once its been set in motion. Here bags swing into tyre, containers propel themselves by emptying into other things, tubes roll into other tubes, chemicals pour into other liquids, mixing with messy or explosive results. Ropes burned through, things exploded and a flat iron made a rocket powered bid for freedom.

All the sound in the piece comes from the objects in motion yet there was something playful about them. I regularly feel at odds with the rest of the audience when watching video art, though for once it was because I was suppressing involuntary noises of glee every time something exploded in a particularly well-choreographed fashioned or made a notably silly noise while the rest of the audience sat po-faced.

The Way Things Go is presented in Gallery 2 at the GOMA until June 2013, as part of the Tales of the City series of exhibitions, which focus on Scottish artists and artists who have made Scotland their professional home and placing them within a wider context of international contemporary art. I may be rather missing the point to have fixated on two Swiss artists, but should you find yourself in Queen Street station having missed your train, The Way Things Go is an excellent way to waste half an hour until the next train arrives.