Alphabetical Films

Traditionally, here on the blog, January would mean looking back on either the previous year’s documentaries, or art and setting some challenges or resolutions for the new year of writing about various kinds of media and art. I did fairly well at writing about the art I saw that left me feeling as though I had something to say about it, but outside of film festivals I haven’t really had much to say about the films I saw in general let alone the documentaries. So having squeezed in a last look at last year’s art, it’s high time to start looking forward to this year’s films. 

Last year I felt a bit uninspired by my film watching choices, there was a lot of film festival fare for both good and ill, and I’d just like to be excited about films again. I generally watch between twenty and thirty films that I hadn’t seen before in any given year, so in an attempt to inject some fun and whimsy back into the process of picking films from the DVD pile or the ever changing streaming offerings, I’ve decided on an utterly arbitrary challenge. I plan to watch a new-to-me film with a title starting with each letter of the alphabet.

P

Starting in with a documentary. Pina is technically a documentary about the life and work of choreographer Pina Bausch. I first saw the trailer for this film, in the MacRobert Centre, ahead of another documentary around about it’s release in 2011, and it looked absolutely breathtaking. Unfortunately, it was one of those documentaries that only got one screening and I missed it. I always felt that it was a film that ought to be seen on the big screen, so I’ve kept a weather eye out for opportunities to see it on the big screen. Which unfortunately means that I know of at least three occasions when I’ve missed it in the cinema. I spotted it on sale a few weeks back and decided that I’d accept defeat if it meant I’d finally get to see it. It’s a beautiful film, every bit as visually stunning as the trailer implied, though it’s more a film that you experience that one that you watch. (I’d definitely still like to see it on the big screen where I could properly immerse in it.) I don’t feel like I learned all that much about Pina Bausch or her life and work, there are interviews with various dancers and other artistes that worked with her over the years, but there’s next to no narration, and no real narrative through line. It feels much more a love letter to her and her work, co-authored by the director and the dancers. Almost like some kind of mediation on grief and loss, both specific to Pina Bausch but more generally as a metaphor for facing the reality of dancers bodies breaking down in the face of time and illness. It’s beautiful, swinging from exuberant joy to deep sadness, as though they are dancing all the more defiantly for having had to face the reality that they too will die.  

Lots of people have blind spots about directors that they keep mixing up in their heads – Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson are a not uncommon mix-up, while Bryans Singer and Fuller are too – but mine has always been Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Now in the last decade or so, Werner Herzog has been mostly making documentaries. Weird, intense and excellent documentaries, that I’ve really enjoyed but as that’s mostly his schtick these days, I had finally managed to get the two of them straight in my head. Werner Herzog was the documentary guy, Wim Wenders was the Wings of Desire guy. During November’s edition of the Inverness film festival, I saw Anselm, and went into the film thinking it was by Werner Herzog, only to discover that Wim Wenders has started making documentaries too and that I apparently can’t tell them apart even when they’re narrating their own films! They’re from opposite ends of Germany, presumably if I heard them side by side the differences would be obvious but as it stands they’re now even more entangled in my head then they were before. So imagine my chagrin when I discovered that this film, is also by Wim Wenders, and that having come out about a year after Cave of Forgotten Dreams is probably the source of my Wim Wenders/Werner Herzog confusion!

T

Next up was 2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004)- do we consider it two thousand and forty six? Twenty forty six? Two zero four six? Either way, in English all the possible combinations start with T. This was another film I’ve wanted to see for a long time – in this case, since it came out twenty years ago. I remember seeing the post advertising it’s screening as a student, and the classmate I suggested it to, telling me that it was a sequel to In The Mood for Love (2000) and that I ought to see that first. For some reason they’re never both on special at the same time, so I’d never acquired my own copies, and while I’ve seen and loved a variety of other Wong Kar Wai films in the interim, I’ve never got round to either of this pair. However, at New Year I’d treated myself to a book on film noir, that had not only a chapter specifically on 2046 but talked about it enough that the cover image was from that film. For some reason it doesn’t show up on any of the major streaming channels available to me, so I went DVD raiding and I have no regrets as this is clearly a film I’ll be revisiting. It’s a beautifully shot neo-noir, with an equally beautiful and even stranger science fiction film within a film inside it. 

And yes, perhaps there were a couple of scenes that might have made more sense or packed more emotional punch if I’d seen the first film, but it’s such a strange dreamy little film that it stands alone just fine. I still want to see In the Mood for Love but in the same way I want to see all of Wong Kar Wai’s films, because I love his films and the themes he keeps coming back to are ones I continue to find compelling.  

Z

I didn’t pick The Zen Diary (Nakae, 2022) just because it’s title started with Z, there were a whole pile of reasons why I fancied this film. However, the rarity of films starting with the letter Z did motivate me to actually leave the house and go and see it in the cinema, on a cold, wet and miserable February evening. The film had the fortune to be exactly the kind of film I was in the mood for, sweeping me up and towing me along gently in it’s wake, setting me back down carefully at the end of the film and leaving me ravenously hungry on the shore. The film follows a year in the life of an author (Tsutomu) as he writes a book about zen cookery and his experiences learning to do it as a novice monk half a century before. (The film was filmed over the course of the year so if the film says it’s a particular month, that’s when it was filmed.) Not a lot happens in this film but it happens in a deeply compelling fashion. The film has an oddly timeless quality, probably because it’s based on a book that was written in the late seventies, there’s a sense that the events could be taking place at any point in the last forty years. (I’m sure if you’re Japanese or have lived there there are things like car models and ambulance styles that date it, but I don’t have those references.) For me, this film felt like it hit that contemplative dreamy mood that I suspect, Evil Does Not Exist (Hamaguchi, 2023) was trying to create in it’s viewers. I suspect part of  why this film worked for me and that one did not, is that this one wasn’t trying to do quite so many things, so it was able to do one thing well. 

There’s so much food in this film, being grown, foraged, cooked, pickled, eaten, shared with others, talked about and written about that while there were definitely other things happening in the film, and I was definitely interested in them when they were happening, the food is the bulk of the impression that the film left on me. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a film that made me so hungry – the snacks I bought to accompany it did NOT cut it – or so inspired to cook Japanese food! A delicious side effect. 

Celtic Connections – Standing Room Only

It’s Celtic Connections season, and it’s been far too long since I last attended, so obviously I’m overcompensating by seeing more gigs than might be reasonably expected! But in my defence when one of your New Year’s resolutions is to see more gigs, there are few better ways to get a head start on it. In light of that, I’m seeing too many gigs in too short succession to either be able to write individual reviews that both stand alone and do the gigs justice, or to be able to fit them all into one blog post without it getting unwieldy. Therefore as I have to split them up arbitrarily anyway, I’ve decided that splitting them between standing gigs and sit-down gigs is as good a division as any.  

Heisk @ The Tramway

Contenders for the sparkliest band of the festival – and there was some strong competition on that front, it was a good year for glitter – this gig turned me from being a casual enjoyer of this band into a full blown fan. Heisk were pretty much the opposite experience to the one I had seeing Skippinish at Celtic Connections in the early 2010s where a folk band appeared to be trying to turn themselves into folk flavoured boyband. (Thankfully that phase didn’t last, but it was certainly a weird gig.) Here instead appeared to be indie pop girl band from the late 90s/early 00s who’d decided to turn their back on the pop world because folk music was rather more fun. (Josie Duncan’s guest appearance definitely added to the Kenicke play folk music vibe, her hairstyle was very Daisy from Spaced and I mean that as a compliment.) They’re a much rockier, upbeat outfit in person than they are on record, I wasn’t prepared for quite what a good time I was in for coming in the door.  

I do feel a bit sorry for the Calum Stewart Band who preceded them, and who I enjoyed while they were on, but who have faded from memory quite considerably in the shadow of Heisk – which takes quite some doing, given that they had an incredibly sparkly step dancer called Sophie performing with them! 

Kinnaris Quintet @ The Old Fruitmarket

Oddly enough this is probably the first gig I’ve seen at the Old Fruit Market that wasn’t part of the Tectonics weekender, which is an odd thought to have about what is one of my favourite gig venues – anywhere, not just in Glasgow. Because of this I haven’t actually been to a gig there were the balcony was in use for the audience – I’ve seen various artists, most notably Hanna Tuulikki made excellent use of the stairs between the main room and the balcony for her performance in the festival’s first year – which definitely added to the sense that the gig was in fact full to the rafters. Especially when Karine Polwart lead the audience in an unexpected cover of Emeli Sande’s Read All About It. But I’m getting ahead of myself, The Kinnaris Quintet are a fabulous string five-piece and their stylings are a joy in their own right, however they had some sneaky support from both Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. (If I have any critique of the gig it’s that I could have done with both vocalists, Julie in particular, Karine can belt it out when she needs to, a bit louder in the mix, I appreciate that the strings are the main event, but they sounded a bit drowned in there.) I wouldn’t have pegged Massive Attack as an obvious choice for a folk cover version, but once you’ve heard this folk string quintet do it, it seems eminently sensible. (Also I’ve loved Teardrop since it came out in the late 90s, and in all that time I never knew, that ethereal, wonderful vocal was courtesy of former Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser. Just when you think you can’t love a song more.) Given the involvement of both Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart with the Spell Songs ensemble it was perhaps an obvious choice to do a version of one of those tracks at the end often the set, but it was no less joyous to hear it done live for all that. 

One of the great joys of Celtic Connections gigs for me, is in the bands you only see by accident. Quite often, there’ll be an extra support act not listed on the tickets or the online listings, so if you turn up for the actual start time you get a wee extra surprise treat. There’s apparently a sizeable Norwegian delegation at Celtic Connections this year, and this gig’s bonus band was a Norwegian folk rock band. Actually folk rock doesn’t begin to do Gangar justice, I feel as though folk heavy metal is a better term – but old school heavy metal, Black Sabbath, early Metallica kind of thing – there was a lot of rocking out, driving bass, head banging and some truly excellent cravats on display. Oh and a fiddle player who danced like he’d made a crossroads deal, and frankly that saxophonist had the moves too. It was absolutely nothing like what I – and from the looks of it most of the audience – was expecting but they definitely showed us all a rollicking good time. 

I did feel a little sorry for the Ciaran Ryan band who were on between them and the headliners, they were objectively a really good band, putting on a cracking set, but they just couldn’t compare  with what came before!

An Dannsa Dub @ Oran Mor

Oran Mòr on the other hand is a much more familiar gig venue, though not one I’ve been to for a while – I realised while I was there that the last time I’d been to a gig there was also the last time I’d been to a Celtic Connections gig…nine years ago. This one was the choice of the friend I went with, but nonetheless it was very much my kind of thing. We were spoiled for choice on Saturday night – so spoiled that I had to narrow down the options for my friend to pick from as she was overwhelmed with the choices! 

An Dannsa Dub are sitting neatly on the intersection of dubstep, Scottish trad music and Argentinian folk music, apparently, which makes them practically unique, and highly enjoyable. (The influence of Martyn Bennett is strong here, but it’s not the only one at play here by a long shot.) Most of my experience of dubstep has been rather heavier on the bass, definitely more intense, and less accessible more generally. I appreciate the irony of describing a set that involved samples from archive recordings of Gaelic poetry as more accessible but given the way the numerous more old school folk fans in the crowd – hand knitted jumpers, with hand knitted beards – were grooving to the beats, I stand by that assessment. For all that it was definitely a very loud, very packed and very sweaty gig, it was a decidedly mellow experience – the kind where you never stop dancing but don’t ever quite need to sit down for a rest! 

The support act was the very tall and extremely sparkly Joy Dunlop, mostly playing songs from her solo album Caoir, bringing a vibrancy and her own inimitable style to various traditional Gaelic  standards, and to an audience that was, eclectic to say the least! 

Art Oddments

It’s January, and that means it’s time to do the admin. To tidy up the loose ends of last year’s projects and start in on new ones for the coming year. To that end, I usually end up making my first post of the year on here, either a review of the previous year’s documentaries or of the art I saw at the end of the year and didn’t get a chance to write up. This year, as I was tidying away last year’s posts into their assigned folders and deleting drafts that were clearly never going to turn into actual posts – several documents containing only an enigmatic first sentence that I can no longer remember the context for – I found a couple of art exhibition reviews that I’d started but had clearly intended to pair with something else, except never had. Exhibitions I’d enjoyed but hadn’t had enough to say about for them to stand alone. It seemed a shame to leave them to moulder, as they reminded me how much I’d enjoyed their respective exhibits, so I’ve polished them up, and paired them up. Given that they’re both exhibitions I found both strange and lovely, I think they pair quite well together, despite taking place months apart in different parts of the country.

Slow Dans

I’m often quite hit and miss with video art, in fact for a long time I felt decidedly more miss than hit about it. So I was a bit hesitant when I popped into the GOMA and the current exhibition in Gallery one gave over that entire space to a video installation. Thankfully, I need not have worried.

This was a piece that took full advantage of both the medium and the space on hand to really sell it’s idea. For a start the projection screens were huge, taking up a good half of the length of the gallery, three differently shaped screens suspended from the ceiling, like a glimpse of where cinema might have evolved in a nearby alternate reality. (All too often I’m seen short films that have suffered from being projected on a full sized cinema screen, but rarely have I seen video art that would have been truly diminished by putting it on a smaller screen, each of these pieces felt the perfect size for the respective projection screen.) Each of the three short pieces took a fairly prosaic item and used it as a starting point to tell a story which was right on the cusp between ghost stories and science fiction fables. Apparently each piece (Kohl, Felt tip and The Teachers) represent a different time period – described as a fictional past, a parallel present and an imagined future – which wasn’t evident to me at the time of watching but does explain their connections rather better. I particularly enjoyed Felt Tip and the ties with their computer chip designs, the layering of references, right down to the connection between weaving and early computing was particularly enjoyable to me.

Unexpectedly the sound design on all three of the pieces was really interesting and well designed – too often video installations are spoiled for me by poor audio experiences – though it was, perhaps due to a miscalculation regarding the space, far too loud. Thankfully, the primary reason I was in Glasgow was for the Tectonics festival so I had my gig-ear plugs in my bag so could sit in the most acoustically interesting spot without giving myself a headache from the volume. Aside from that issue, the audio was a rich and delightful part of the whole experience. I know nothing about artist Elizabeth Price’s wider body of work, but I suspect if she hasn’t previous worked in audio drama herself, she’s a long time fan of the medium, as the storytelling owed a great deal to radio drama and did a lot of the narrative heavy lifting, allowing the visuals to be richer and more abstract without the audience loosing track of the plot.

An Inspired Scavenger

The subtitle of this exhibition of Leon Patchett’s work was ‘adventures in wood and (other) found objects’ and that is very much how the works in the exhibition felt. There was a determinedly playful undertone to many of the pieces in the exhibition, as though the artist had tuned into a kind of childish joy of exploring the world for inspiration and making something beautiful and strange out of the results. When so much contemporary art is terribly serious – and a bit joyless to be honest – it’s always a delight to see an artist seeming to have fun exploring a medium, seeing art as an adventure in it’s own right is both pleasing and refreshing to this particular viewer.

There’s a lot of pinecones in this exhibition, and I must admit I was surprised how many different textures and combinations they could be assembled into. In fact if there was any complaint I had about the exhibition it was that the sculptures looked so very interestingly textured that I longed to touch them and knew that I couldn’t. (Just because I completely understand why visitors aren’t allowed to touch sculptures of these kind doesn’t make me want to touch them any less. For this very reason I did give serious thought to buying one of the delightful maquettes that were on display and on sale in the foyer, but couldn’t justify it in the end.) There was something very folk art about some of the pieces in the exhibition as though the artist was tapping into something much older and stranger in his work. I was reminded oddly of the old burryman tradition from Queensferry, if I’d encountered an exhibition like this as a child, I’d definitely have felt as though I’d stumbled on a collection of some particularly well designed and artfully built Dr Who monsters.
There are lots of egg forms in this exhibition and however delightful I found it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were going to hatch into something even stranger.

Slow Dans ran at GOMA from 27th January to 14th May 2023, and An Inspired Scavenger ran at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery from 7th October until 25th November 2023.

The Sound of Sky(e)

Unusually for me, most of my sound recording adventures this year did not take place over the summer, but instead took place over the winter and into the spring. This year in particular you could not call me a fair-weather sound recordist! Over the various lockdowns I got very into making nature recordings – I even wrote about it – and spent a fair amount of time trying and often failing to get better at identifying birds to improve the accuracy of my labelling! However, looking back at the recordings I made last year, I realised that as I started going further afield again to make my recordings, I was falling back on my old urban failsafes. So at the start of this year, I made a conscious effort to try and record more nature sounds, a goal that had limited success – I tried and failed to record some canal geese I stumbled across in Utrecht, but they promptly stopped honking the minute I got my recorder out and glowered at me silently instead, but I did manage to get some magpies having some sort of territorial/courtship standoff in an Amsterdam park – until I headed to Skye for a week for a completely unrelated reason. In April, I headed off to Skye for a week-long Gaelic immersion course, and at the last minute decided that I really needed to take my sound recorder with me. It got far more use than I expected!

One of my course-mates when I was in Skye had a complimentary hobby to mine. He’s really into birdwatching and photography, so spends a lot of time walking outdoors, and has learned to recognise a lot of bird songs to help with identification. (Picture the two of us geeks, striding across Sabhal Mor Ostaig’s campus getting to or from class, only to stop suddenly and stay almost completely still, him with camera in hand, me with my sound recorder outstretched, only to  spring back into motion a few minutes later!) He even introduced me to a little app that has revolutionised the accuracy of my field recording labels – it’s a bird song identification app and it’s pretty good. (If you’re interested, it’s called BirdNET and was created by a team of biologists and engineers out of Cornell University, and is essentially a ‘using machine learning to crunch massive amounts of data’ project. Though the only data they want to collect from their users is the recording you made and where it was made, so that it can feed back into the data to make it more accurate. I’m so used to automatically refusing apps my location data, that for a while there I had to keep manually giving it permission to know my location when submitting a recording, the novelty of it having a legitimate reason to want that data was so unusual.) No more trying to take a photo with my phone one-handed, of a tiny bird, very high in a tree in the hope of narrowing down which little brown bird I’m recording! I got pretty good at recognising willow warblers while I was in Sleite largely because the place of was hoaching with them. 

Normally my location sound recordings fall into one of four categories, public transport, bodies of water/water features, clocks and bells, and woodland soundscapes. So it was quite a novelty to come back from a trip away with a set of recordings almost entirely on the one topic and that topic being birds. I did get a couple of recordings that weren’t of birds, but it turns out they were both essentially updated versions of recordings I’d made during my last visit to Sabhal Mor Ostaig just over ten years previously! Apparently however many other things change over time, some things remain the same. 

IFF – Odds and Ends

For what is possibly the first time, and probably the last time too, I saw more films in English than not at the Inverness Film Festival. At the start of the festival, I created a small pile of documents to compile my film reviews by category as I went along, and automatically included one for New World Cinema, which is usually my favourite and/or most watched category at the festival. Except, due to a combination of what was showing, my own limited availability to actually see films, and my ever present desire to catch as many documentaries as I possibly can, I only actually managed to see one film in that category. I was a little stumped as to how to re-file that film, before deciding that it was a bit of an oddity for other reasons so here it is, with another film that defied categorisation, as it’s companion.

Evil Does Not Exist

This was my first time seeing a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film, I missed Drive My Car when it was screen at the Inverness Film Festival a couple of years ago and then it went on to win an Oscar, so I figured it was worth giving this one a spin. Also it was screening against the Opening Film of the festival and that film is usually the more interesting choice. (The programmer Paul always jokes it’s the film he’d make Opening Film if he were braver.)

In it’s favour this film is beautifully shot. The score is really lovely, and the choices made around when to use score and when to stop using the score are interesting. The characters are compelling and mostly pretty likeable.

On the other hand, the shots and scenes are so long that to call them lingering is a chronic understatement. It’s only an hour and forty five minutes long, but it feels much longer. And the ending…Just baffling. I presume it was being metaphorical – perhaps there’s a Japanese folk tale it’s referencing that if you knew it, would make it all make allegorical sense – but it could be that something supernatural was going on. (Apparently it was originally intended to be shorter and without dialogue but while I could get behind cutting all the lingering scenes at the point they run out of score, some of the dialogue heavy scenes are the best parts of the film, they just go on for too long.) The film is described as an eco-fable, but for my money, a fable implies that it’s a tale with either a moral or at least a lesson to teach. If this had one, then I’ve absolutely no idea what it was trying to say. Just when it I thought it was getting interesting it veered off into it’s baffling conclusion.

Cinema Sgire

I went back and forth over which category this film belonged in, whether it ought to be filed under documentary – it sort of is and it isn’t. It’s more of a compilation piece, and while most of the films that it’s made up from are documentary-ish there’s a whole section of historical comedy at the end which definitely isn’t. It is less a documentary than it is a document of a particular time and place. Cinema Sgire was essentially a community development project based in the Western Isles – mainly Uist and Barra – in the late 70s, running both a mobile cinema service – a forerunner of the now endangered Screen Machine – but more pertinently for this screening a community video production project. For a long time the tapes were under the care of Museum nan Eilean but as so often with pioneering formats, the format had become obsolete and the costs and complications of digitisation meant they were largely inaccessible until they were delivered int the care of the Moving Image Archive (part of the National Library of Scotland) who were able to digitse them and make them available online.

A new community project has enabled people from those same communities to access the newly digitised films, and help identify the people, places and events documented within. The films included in this screening were essentially a highlights reel, alongside some contemporaneous interviews with members of the original Cinema Sgire team.

In a way they are little extracts from anthropological films, except they were made by people within the community rather than outsiders, so they cover topics as wide ranging as wool spinning and weaving, local mod competitions and community hall openings, and an emergency training exercise at Benbecula airport.

Oh and a delightfully silly film about the post-Culloden escapades of Bonnie Prince Charlie – at one point there’s a chase sequence between the prince in an extremely 70s car and a redcoat on a bicycle – as he hunts about the Western Isles trying to get a boat home to France, or at least over to Ireland!

Constructed Narratives @AbdnArtMuseums

This weekend I took the notion to get a change of scene and headed to Aberdeen for the day. Ever since I first discovered the joys of Aberdeen’s art gallery, stopping off there to check out whatever temporary or visiting exhibition they happen to have on has become an essential part of any visit to the city. I might not enjoy every exhibition I see there – though I don’t find their exhibitions as polarising as those at the GOMA or the CCA – but they’re always interesting.

The Constructed Narratives exhibition feels as much like an argument in favour of institutions such as the Aberdeen Art Gallery. Being largely compiled of the work of three local artists, and works from the museum’s collection – that inspired their own practice as artists. All three of them attended attended first Aberdeen Grammar School – where their art teacher Charles Hemingway took his students on regular trips to the Art Gallery – and then Grays School of Art, before going on to have careers as artists. I was initially surprised that such a major retrospective was free of charge – it’s in the special exhibitions space where those usually are – but as I wandered around the exhibition it became clear why it wasn’t and that to do so would undermine the whole subtextual point of the exhibition. It’s both a celebration of their individual success, and a testament to the ways in which having free access to that art shaped them and inspired them as artists.

Of the three artists at the heart of the exhibition, I found Arthur Watson’s work the most engaging, I loved the prints, particularly the mice in all their iterations, and their evolution into the masks. (Their earliest iteration is called Maus, and I couldn’t help but see the mice from the graphic novel of the same name, and all the anti-fascist political implications therein, only made me like them more.) There’s something playful about all his pieces in the exhibition, and the way they engage with the ideas around the boundary between art and craft and also with ideas around not only tacking inspiration from but directly engaging with the art of others. As though by taking the sources of inspiration seriously and unselfconsciously engaging with them, the work was able to bypass any kind of pretentiousness and instead find a bit of joy in the whole proceeding.

However, I feel as though I enjoyed the connections between Ian Howard’s works and the artworks that inspired his younger self, more than the others. Comparing and contrasting those works he selected from the collection with his own early career work, the through-line was clear and pleasurable to spot. (If you’re more into art history than I am, it may well be obvious the connections between the others and their chosen references but as an interested layperson they went over my head.) It probably helps that I had actually heard of Paul Nash before the exhibition, so once the exhibit had established the way Nash’s early work inspired Howard’s own, it was easy to look at his later work and spot the impact of surrealism more generally on him. Those large eccentric looking still-lives are pretty arresting in their own right, but I think their more interesting when you know what they’re riffing off of or in conversation with – they need the art-historical context I think.

Food at the Movies

The Guardian having been doing a series of articles about cooking food from various movies lately and it’s got me thinking about what food from which movies, I’d like to cook and/or eat. 

Last year’s Inverness Film Festival featured a variety of film themed cocktails, some of which were truly spectacular – personally I like neither The Big Lebowski (Cohen & Cohen, 1998) nor White Russians but that’s not the point – and whomst amongst us film fans of my generation has not thought longingly of Uma Thurman’s five dollar milkshake in Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)? But in general food marketed as ‘from x movie’ tends to be more inspired by the movie than actually taken straight from it. In fact most of the articles in the series that inspired this post, featured dishes that I neither remembered nor particularly wanted to eat. 

The thing is, most of my favourite – or at least most memorable – movie food experiences are from films where you, well you wouldn’t want to eat the food involved. For example, my favourite film about food is Delicatessen (Jeunet & Caro, 1991) which is a post-apocalyptic film set in an apartment building above the eponymous delicatessen, featuring vegetarian freedom fighters and a cannibalistic butcher! Possibly it says something about my taste in movies – pun intended – that most films about food that I’ve enjoyed, feature food as a metaphor for unspoken/unspeakable desires, so the answer to ‘mmm what’s in that pie’ is pretty much always one you don’t want to know the answer to. For all the Chungking Express (Wong, 1994) revolves around the eponymous takeaway – and no rewatch will ever be complete for me without an accompanying takeaway dinner – we don’t actually see very much of what they actually eat. That’s not the important bit, it’s hot and filling and sustaining, it’s the need for those things that brings the characters together not the specifics of what they’re actually eating. Even last year’s stunning The Menu (Mylod, 2022) while it had some truly amazing food in it – particularly that burger and fries at the end that is put together as something of a chess game to freedom between Margot and the chef – but it’s about 50% glorious and 50% horrifying in terms of actual food content. (It’s more about skewering the culture around high end restaurants and toxic foodie culture, than the actual food itself.) Most films about food that I remember, the food sticks in the mind, less because of what it actually is, than what it represents. 

In terms of films featuring food I’d actually like to eat well, I think Birds of Prey (Yan, 2020) has to be up there, particularly the truly decadent breakfast sandwich that Harley Quinn doesn’t get to eat has to be up there. (Never has a greasy breakfast sandwich, cooked on a slightly manky hotplate, ever been filmed with such loving care and given such a full cinematic object of desire treatment. I was salivating right there along side her. And of course there’s Parasite’s (Bong, 2019) late night comfort snack ‘ram don’ – or jjapaguri to give it it’s proper name – which became something of a phenomenon after the film came out, to the extent that the company that makes to the two kinds of noodles that are combined to make it, now makes a combined packet as a result. However, as a vegetarian, I did have the disappointing realisation when I got home from the cinema and looked it up, that I couldn’t just swap out the sirloin beef for tofu, as one of the packets that gets combined is spicy seafood flavour so I gave up on that one. Until that is, I started writing this article and was overcome with the desire to make a vegetarian friendly version. 

One that stayed true to spirit of the dish – combining two things you love to make a late night comfort food snack. To which end I wasn’t allowed to buy anything specifically for this recipe, I had to knock it together out of things I already had in the cupboard. 

So, I had: 

A packet of sesame instant ramen soup noodles

A packet of those vacuum packed ‘fresh’ udon noodles

A packet of marinated tofu

A packet black bean stirfry sauce 

A couple of spring onions

A few mushrooms

And a bell pepper 

I had also forgotten to have lunch and was a) ravenous and b) needed to eat something reasonably substantial so I could take some antibiotics, so it needed to be quick. 

As per the recipe I found online I cooked the udon and the ramen together in the sesame liquor, but I think if I do it again, I’d maybe stir-fry the udon in the black bean sauce with the tofu and the vegetables – or maybe fish them out just before the end and stirfry them round for a bit, I feel as though they didn’t get enough of the black bean sauce either way. While the noodles were cooking, I did a quick stir-fry of the tofu, pepper, mushrooms and spring onion, combining them with the black-bean sauce once the tofu was cooked. The process of combining the noodles and the black-bean stir-fry in the bowl did not result in a particularly elegant looking dish, but I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t meant to be elegant, it was meant to be comforting. Apparently in Korea – but not in other markets it’s sold in – one of the packet mixes comes with a lump of kombu in it, so I had a dig in the cupboard but unfortunately the only seaweed adjacent ingredient I had were sheet of nori for making sushi, so I made do with shaking some furikake over the top of my concoction as it’s both a little spicy and has seaweed flakes in the mix. I ended up with something that was definitely in the ‘this shouldn’t work but really does’ category, the mixture of noodles sizes and textures was pleasing and the sesame and black bean flavours compliment each other well. A dish to make you go hmmm in a good way! Quick, easy and comforting – a success! 

IFF – Powell & Pressburger Double Feature

For entirely practical reasons, there were substantially less films showing during the day at this year’s Inverness Film Festival. Which was a shame, as that’s usually where they show the more esoteric options. (Last year for the twentieth festival there were big films from festivals past on 35mm, the year before it was an overview of recent Iranian cinema called Afternoons in Iran.) However, possibly if there’d been more adventurous or at least international options, then I’d probably not have made the effort to the Powell and Pressburger offerings on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, and that would definitely have been a loss for me. I was surprised just how much I enjoyed them, they were much more engrossing than I expected. The BFI are currently doing a massive retrospective of Powell and Pressburger films, so these two screenings marked the start of a wider season of their films – mostly during December – at Eden Court. They even came with a short film made by the arts centre’s youth filmmaking group; who’ve been watching all the films in the season and made a rather charming piece to introduce new audiences to Powell and Pressburger and why they’re so influential.

Black Narcissus

Is there anything that quite sets a film within it’s exact historical period of film-making than a Rank Company ident – that massive gong – and a title card thanking MGM for the loan of Deborah Kerr?! Having said that, for all that Deborah Kerr has the star billing, and as excellent as she is, this is absolutely Kathleen Byron’s film. Her quiet, intense presence – interrupted by occasional outbursts of intense emotion – means that she steals nearly every scene that she’s in, drawing your eye even when the main focus of the scene is with other characters. She makes a neat parallel with young Kanchi, a local girl equally prone to dramatic gestures and initially equally fixated on the General’s agent Mr Deans who is utterly immune to either of their charms. (Kanchi quickly transfers her attentions to the rather more susceptible Young General and whether that works out for them is left ambiguous.) For all that the characters of Sister Ruth and Sister Clodagh have come to represent a battle between good and evil in popular culture, there’s a sense in the film that while Ruth certainly seems to have cast herself in that role, that isn’t how the rest of the nuns see her. (They all seem more worried that she’s going to hurt herself than anything else.) In fact they all seem to be too stuck inside their own heads, too worried but what the place is doing to them and their relationship to their calling to give much thought to how any of the others is doing. Too scared to ask for help for themselves, and therefore blinded to how much their fellow nuns need support in turn.

Only Sister Briony manages to keep her head throughout, perhaps because her experience in other dispensaries allows her to focus on her work without being consumed by everything else, or perhaps having realised early on the dangers of the place she, like Mr Deans has found a way to ignore whatever it is about the place that plays on the minds of others.

A Matter of Life and Death

If you’d asked me before I’d have insisted that of course I’d seen A Matter of Life and Death, you don’t often get a chance to see films of that vintage on the big screen so I was taking advantage of that, but Thursday’s screening proved that actually I hadn’t seen it, or at least not all of it. It’s instead one of those films that I’ve seen so many chunks from over the years that I just feel like I’ve seen it.

(As with any film of this vintage and fame, there’s a delightful second life to the experience, watching actors you’ve seen in other things playing to or against type. I don’t think I’ve ever seen David Niven get to emote quite this much in anything else I’ve seen him in, and given that the first film I saw Richard Attenborough in was Jurassic Park(Spielberg, 1993), it was downright strange to see him as such a young man. Though nothing quite prepared me for seeing Kathleen Byron as an angel so shortly after seeing her, falling from grace, in Black Narcissus the previous afternoon! Those intense eyes of hers, once seen never forgotten.)

Because so many films of this vintage that I’ve seen were essentially B movies, and therefore in Black and White, I’m always surprised by the sheer vividness of Technicolor whenever it shows up. And this film really plays up to how new and intense an experience cinema in colour was for audiences. Plus there’s the whole reverse Wizard of Oz(Fleming/Vidor, 1939) effect, where it’s not heaven that’s in full colour but the real world – Conductor 72 even comments on it, how much he misses the Technicolor of reality when he’s in heaven – which clues us in early in the film that Earth is where we’re meant to root for Peter to stay.

The opening of the film with it’s omniscient narrator and galaxy wide panorama, couldn’t help but remind me of the start of It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946) – which oddly enough came out at Christmastime the same year – and much like that film, it’s a much less sentimental and conventional film than it’s remembered as in popular culture. The film somehow manages to be both a highly stylised fantasy film, and a fairly realist take on immediately post-war British culture. It walks a fine line of never needing to confirm if it’s scenes in the ‘other world’ are an actual supernatural experience or a product of Peter’s poor injured brain – those brain adhesions of his were up to date science at the time, that’s not a thing you can often say about cinematic brain injuries – trying to alert him and everyone around him that something is wrong. Or for that matter whether both things are true. Both things being true at once is definitely a wider theme of this film, in fact arguably of both of these films, as this is a film that manages at once to hold a deep affection for British culture of the time, while refusing to be blind to darker side of that, and why other cultures that regularly bump against that might have entirely understandable resentments there.

IFF – Highlights

There was a time when I used to avoid the films featuring in the ‘Highlights’ thread. Largely because they usually sold out, and they usually came back, and generally the more obscure films scheduled against them would be complete gems that either wouldn’t come back or if they did, would only return for one screening that I would inevitably be unable to attend. (I missed Blue Kaftan at last year’s festival and Shall We Dance the year before and have managed to narrowly miss being able to attend screenings of either of them not just in Inverness but also in Glasgow and Edinburgh.) Also whereas at the Glasgow Film Festival I tend to see the most obscure things they have on offer, at the Inverness Festival I’ve grown to trust that if the festival programmer says that a film is a highlight, then most year’s there’s a good 80% chance that I’ll agree. And this year, at least with the films from that category that I saw, it was a 100% hit rate for me.

Eileen

This was definitely one of those movies that I saw the trailer for and knew before it was over that I needed to see it. It wasn’t the movie that I thought it was going to be – and I might argue, there’s a moment about two thirds of the way through where Eileen herself realises she’s not in the story she thought she was in either – but that wasn’t a bad thing, just unexpected. I suspect I was expecting something either more noir-ish – Rebecca just oozes femme fatale from the moment she appears in the prison and in Eileen’s life – or perhaps just something more heightened. (I haven’t seen director William Oldroyd’s previous film Lady MacBeth but from what I’d heard about it when it came out, I was half expecting something more schlocky or at least a higher body count.) With the exception of Eileen’s vivid, sometimes violent, fantasy sequences, for the most part the film is incredibly restrained. Much like Eileen herself the film is wearing a placid mask over something stranger and more interesting than it appears at the casual glance.

It’s really quite difficult to talk about several of things I found particularly enjoyable or interesting in this film, and about Rebecca in particular, without spoiling one or other of the film’s twists, turns or revelations.

Rebecca is definitely right about one thing. Learning the truth about herself and facing it, really does set Eileen free.

Poor Things

I was really torn about choosing this one, as it was screening against Aki Kaurismäki’s new film Fallen Leaves. But I’d seen a trailer for this one in the wild a couple of months ago and thought at the time: I must make the effort to see that when it comes out, that looks gloriously weird. So see it I did!

It was in fact a good choice.

The first thing to know about this film is that it’s an adaptation of Alasdair Grey’s book of the same name. (So if you’ve read the book you know what you’re getting into; I have not read the book, and I’m now never going to.) It was also executive produced by one of it’s leads Emma Stone, who seems to be having the time of her life playing the central character Bella Baxter. (The central cast in general appear to be having the time of their lives, Mark Ruffolo in particular chews the scenery with seemingly joyous aplomb.) I haven’t seen any of director Yorgos Lanthimos’ other films, but based on this one, I clearly need to, the use of surreality and satire in such a satisfying whole is rare and to be appreciated.

The second thing to know about this film is that it’s deeply, deeply strange. It’s a steam-punk fever dream of a film, full of sex and gore, weird science and philosophy, like some sort of Frankenstein movie where the titular Dr actually cared about his creature, named her and made her part of the family. It’s over two hour long and not once did I so much as glance at my watch, or even wonder briefly how long was left. I think it’s best described as a compelling movie, I was disgusted, embarrassed, confused, moved and delighted at various points. I laughed aloud on several occasions, and actively thought ‘what on earth did I just watch’ at several others. Mostly though I’m just glad to have seen it in a packed cinema with a crowd that seemed equally torn between delight and disgust, appreciating the moments of both heartbreak and horror.

The Bikeriders

This was a cracking little film, with some bravura performances in it. (The central trio of Jodie Comer, Austen Butler and Tom Hardy were worth the price of admission alone, but the rest of the cast were doing a solid job around them.) It couldn’t hold a candle to the two films above, but I think that says more about how intense the experience of those films were that this film paled beside them. Which says something when it’s a film about the slow slide of a motorbike riding club into a motorbike gang over a ten year period. (I’ve seen a lot of films that were substantially more violent than this one, and it’s not even that the violence was particularly extreme, but that that violence felt real, like it had consequences, I haven’t flinched away from the screen this much outside of a horror movie.) It’s based on the photobook of the same name that Danny Lyon published in 1967 along with the interviews/oral histories that he recorded with the people he photographed at the time. (There’s some lovely bits of sound design in this film, in the sequences where Danny is recording interviews, particularly with Cathy, where she’ll move around the room going a bit off-mic as she does, as though we are actually hearing the tapes back. The sense that they used not just the things people said but the things they didn’t to inform the story, right down to how they blocked the scenes. I can’t quite put into words how much I love that little touch.) Some of the photos from the book are used in the end credits and my goodness did they put a lot of effort into casting actors who could capture the look and the presence of their characters’ real-life counterparts. There’s so much attention to detail in this film, apparently the film was a bit of a labour of love for director Jeff Nichols, and that dedication to, and care for the subject matter really shows through.

IFF – Short Docs

It’s the Inverness Film Festival! Much like the month of November itself it rather snuck up on me this year. I certainly didn’t expect this to be my first post from this year’s Inverness Film Fest, but then I didn’t expect to get to attend this particular screening so that was a surprise bonus all round.

This was a delightfully elegiac collection of short documentaries, all very different in tone and subject but all to a greater or lesser extent dealing with the space left behind by someone or several someone’s. The sort of set of short films that can best be described as lovely.

Maud

This was an interesting little film about Maud Sulter (1960 – 2008) a Scottish/Ghanaian artist and poet, though in all honesty it’s more about the impact that her work, and her status as a Black Scottish artist, has had on young Black Scots artists of following generations. To a certain extent it’s as much about the disconnect between generations of minority artists – whether in terms of gender, sexuality, race or even language – and the struggle to ensure that each new generation doesn’t have to fight the same battles over and over.

The only real criticism I had of the film is that for a film largely focusing on her influence and impact on other artists, while it included a fair number of contemporary Black Scottish artists talking about her, it didn’t actually tell me who any of them were which made it a little bit of a dead end for finding out more about the subject. I feel as though it needed to either show us their work and hers so we can see that influence and cross-pollination, or spend less time talking about how she influenced other people and more about her actual life. As looking back on it, I realise that other than her poetry I don’t actually know a lot more about her life and work than I did going in.

Outlets

This is an extremely meta film. (Early on I was reminded of last year’s A Cat Called Dom and I suspect that film would have annoyed me substantially less if it has been under twenty minutes long.) In fact it is very much a kind of short film that often really annoys me. However, despite that decidedly unpromising start, the film manages to make a virtue of all it’s false starts, never lingering on them for too long, to evolve slowly into something tender and lovely, if a little messy. But that’s grief though isn’t it? Messy with a tendency to get it’s grubby fingers all over everything else in your life despite your best efforts.

Camas

This film is objectively about the names for places that never show up on maps, the local names known only to the particular people who need words for them. In this case the various inlets, bays, coves and prominent rocks of the Foyers side of Loch Ness. Subjectively, this is a two men in a boat film, where they talk about fishing and memory, passing on folk memory as it was passed on to them. It’s a film about changing times, enduring friendships and the importance. It didn’t have anything life changing to say but it was an enjoyable way to spend fifteen minutes.

It’s apparently one of three films about different groups of people that characterise Loch Ness’ ‘other side’ but it stood alone just fine.

And So It Was

It was probably inevitable that this one was my favourite of the shorts. (It’s a short Scottish documentary, in black and white and partly in Gaelic, I am predictable.) Shot in absolutely gorgeous black and white, it’s a gentle observational portrait of Norah MacRae, longest serving postal worker in Scotland, in the wake of her sister’s death. Largely set in one of those classic tiny Highland post offices – in this case Achmore, Lewis – that are more part of a house than they are part of a shop. The film has a strong sense of place, of being part of a community, which compensates for the fact the film doesn’t really seem to be trying to tell any particular story. In that sense it is more of a portrait than a traditional documentary, capturing a particular person at a particular time. A portrait of grief, family and community, told with a great deal of attention to detail and above all with love for the subject.