On the Roof of the World

Tags

documentary, mongolia, nepal, roof of the world, tibet

This a review of a film thread in two parts. It originally ran during the Inverness Film Festival back in November so the first two films that are covered are films that I saw during the festival. The second two films were shown in January this year, films that I wanted to see but that I couldn’t schedule in because they clashed with other commitments. As I’ve previously noted here, I tend to pick my films during the festival based on what I think it’ll be my only opportunity to see. However, Eden Court does seem to use the festival as a test screening for lots of films, so if a film sells out at the festival they usually get it back. While I knew they were getting Eagle Huntress back – the one single film that most people have asked if I saw, or expressed disappointment that they missed seeing, at the festival – but I was surprised and pleased to see Black Hen make a second appearance.

Paths of the Soul/Kang Ripoche

Is a lovely meditative film about going on a pilgrimage. It’s not clear watching the film, whether this is a documentary or a drama and it appears that the lines have been intentionally blurred. (Perhaps as a side effect of the compromises required getting a film so explicitly about spirituality in Tibet past the Chinese censors.) If they’re acting then it’s the most method performance I’ve ever seen.

Not being of any particular religious persuasion, I’d never really given a lot of thought to the physicality of going on a spiritual pilgrimage. Essentially just going on a very long walk to a significant place, which, like any epic journey, gives you plenty of time to reassess your life and place in the universe. Physically tasking but easily comprehensible. Apparently not in Tibet! When the blurb talked about physical pain, I imagined blisters and sores from walking for hundreds of miles in all weathers. Walking is the very least of it. Early on there are fascinating scenes where the pilgrims prepare their equipment, the long aprons of animal skin, the wooden paddles that they wear on their hands. And then they walk, prostrating themselves every few metres in prayer.

There’s something gloriously pragmatic about this act of devotion, tilling fields as payment for food and shelter, washing cars and taking labour jobs when they run out of money. Even the decision to go on the pilgrimage is made without fanfare, several quiet discussions about who will go and why, with each discussion setting off others until the group is formed.

Zud

Is far and away the bleakest film in the series. Whereas all the other films, while showing considerable hardship and poverty, also find a great deal of joy and hope in the lives of the people they portray, Zud is fairly consistently bleak.

Set on the Mongolian Steppe, after the loss of much of his parents livestock, young Sukhbat is pulled out of school and given the responsibility of breaking a wild horse in order to race him, in a last ditch attempt to turn the family’s fortunes around. Ultimately I think the film is trying to say something about the clash of tradition and modernity, or the way that despite the march of progress, subsistence farming is still a brutal way of life. However, it was gloomy to the point of grim and something of an exhausting viewing experience.

The Black Hen/Kalo Pothi

Is a sweet, episodic film about innocence, friendship across cast lines, loss and growing up. Oh, and chickens as a vital source of food, currency and status.

The film has a constant undercurrent of vague threat. Being set during the recent Nepalese Civil War/Maoist Insurgency. There are Maoists lurking about on the edges of the film, but they’re very much an ambiguous presence for most of the film. (The only time we see actual violence, the boys are explicitly somewhere that they shouldn’t be – to the extent that they’ve been warned off by soldiers at a check point – even the one kidnapping is a fairly bloodless affair.) The passing bands of government soldiers appear equally if not more threatening to day-to-day life. The film ends on some stark facts and figures about death tolls, refugees and child soldiers, but the only young people we see actually recruited seem to go willingly – Prakash’s sister seems more motivated by the desire to have a regular wages to support her younger brother. In fact as the film progresses and we see more and more the hardships and indignities that Prakash has to endure because he’s an ‘untouchable’ her decision to join the Maoists seems increasingly understandable.

The Eagle Huntress

The Eagle Huntress is an oddly charming little documentary film. At first it seems like it might be one of those clichéd ethnographical efforts that fetishize a ‘lost’ or ‘dying’ way of life. But instead we’re taken right into the action; the protagonists talk to each other and the camera with a frank and disarming honesty. The film is both a delightful coming of age story and a sweet father-daughter bonding adventure.

One of the best parts of this documentary, as a document of these people and their lives is the way it portrays normal life for them. The practicalities of their existence. The stolid acceptance that this is the way their life is now. (The children all stay in dormitories at the school during the week as they live too scattered and nomadic lives to be able to travel to school each day. The deep sibling-like bonds between the girls formed by having grown up together like this.) The combination of the traditional and the modern – trucks with hand crank engines, solar panels to run electricity off, the transistor radio that is the centre of their connection to the outside world – and the way those intertwine with each other. Modern thermal base layers under more traditional garments, the way they seem to have taken what they need from the modern world and used it to preserve their nomadic way of life.

(I like the way the film carefully phrases her status among the other Eagle Hunters. She is the first woman to compete in that particular competition, but they carefully do not call her the first woman to be an Eagle Huntress. The phrasing suggests a fine line being walked, that enough people have suggested there have been others, whether or not they have been acknowledged as such. An acknowledgement of sorts that they can’t prove they existed but they had enough reason to suspect they did and don’t want to erase them if they did.)

I have to wonder, given the focus on her femininity, the little details of her messily painted nails, her long hair and the hair ornaments, at whether previous Eagle Huntresses have always just pretended to be boys. There’s something defiantly girly about the way she presents herself. There’s a telling little exchange between Aisholpan and her mother, her mother commenting that they should have cut her hair shorter, and Aisholpan assuring her that its fine, because she has girl hair. There seems a wealth of unspoken subtext there, not least a determination that she’s not going to pretend that she isn’t a girl. There’s something determinedly ordinary about how she’s portrayed in the film, yes she’s physically strong and tough but that’s a product of the life she lives. She walks a fine line of being both deferential and defiant in her attitude to her fellow hunters. There’s something about the way she stands at the competition registration table, surrounded by all these men, head and shoulders taller than her, that little raise of her eyebrow at the ‘young girl’ comment combined with a placid smile. There’s something, delightfully unsophisticated about the way she expresses her emotions, her open affection for her bird, her honesty about her nerves before the competition, her infectious joy at her successes and her raw frustration at her struggles hunting in the wild.

The old men, the elders of the sport, are so ridiculously stereotypical in their responses to her existence. It’s not remotely difficult to see why she might struggle to take their approbation seriously. It’s all too easy to imagine them in another documentary complaining about how young people don’t want to take up their traditions. Their sour grapes response to her success makes her victories taste all the sweeter to the viewer at home.

IFF16 @EdenCourt – Documentaries

Tags

cats, documentaries, scotland, turkey

I saw two feature-length documentaries at the film festival this weekend, and I’m not sure they could have been more different if they’d tried. One bittersweet and desolate and the other gentle and hopeful.

16 Years Till Summer

One of the difficult things about living in the Highlands, is that the sparseness of the population means that the six degrees of separation idea is really more like three. It gives documentaries made here about people from here, a certain immediacy that I doubt they’d have otherwise. I’ve not lived here particularly long, but not withstanding that, I regularly know someone who knows someone involved – whether on the production or as a contributor. It’s altogether more unnerving when, as with this film, you recognise someone’s face and cannot figure out why.

That aside, 16 Years Till Summer is a compelling, poetic film about the possibility of redemption and forgiveness – both as something you earn and as an act of compassion. In many ways the film is like an impressionist painting or poem, between the way it has been shot, the long takes and silences, and its hyper-real use of sync-sound and the charming score. Even if, as I found myself discussing with a friend I bumped into at the screening, they managed to make one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland look bleak and depressing.

There’s something almost inevitable about the film’s conclusion, that we spend the duration of the film hoping against hope, along with the filmmakers that our protagonist will make good. Will find it in himself to be the man he believes himself to be, rather than the man he is. Perhaps that’s truly what makes him so familiar, because most of us will know someone like that, a charming dreamer who is great at find opportunities to try and turn their dreams into reality, but even better at self-sabotaging themselves and screwing up those opportunities. It’s just that most of those screw-ups don’t end up with other people dead.

Kedi

Is a film about the cats of Istanbul. Thousands of feral cats – I’ll call them feral rather than wild because they are definitely domesticated they just don’t live with individual humans – rather made the city their home for centuries. The film looks at the lives of these cats and their relationships with the humans around them. The film is mostly shot from either cat level – even for the interviews we are mostly looking up at the interviewees – or in aerial views of the city, it really is a largely cats eye view of the city.

At least on the surface the film is about cats, looking at the city from the perspective of cats and through the lens of cats, reveals a very different Istanbul to anything I’ve ever seen before in films about the city. On a deeper level, this is a film about community and how the city is changing and what that means for all its inhabitants whether they have two legs or four. It touches gently on all sorts of issues, of gentrification and class, culture and language, food and family, all of the gently allided by the presence of the cats. People talk about the things that are important to them, that shape their lives and their fears, sometimes poetically and others bluntly, but always under the umbrella that they’re talking about cats. The cats give them a cover for talking honestly about community and the city, about mental health and poverty, and most of all about human and animal kindness.

It’s a lovely, insightful film and, naturally, despite not speaking a word, the cats are the personalities that stay with you.

IFF 2016 @EdenCourt – Short Docs

Tags

documentaries, scottish, short films

I did intend to see both sets of short documentaries that were showing at the Inverness Film Festival this year, but circumstances conspired against me. (I did, however, get a lovely walk in the Autumnal sunshine yesterday morning as compensation.) Handily, the screening that I did see was the one that contained almost all of the short documentaries I was most interested in seeing. If I could only see one of the screenings, I’m glad it was this one.

The Bell Ringers

The first documentary in the collection is a little slice of life film, about people learning to be bell ringers at St Andrews Cathedral in Inverness. It’s an interesting enough little piece as it is, but mostly it made me want a documentary more about the history of the bell ringers, I wanted more than anything to know more. It also reminded me that a couple of years ago I started some research work, towards making a radio documentary about the Bell Ringers at Dunblane Cathedral – now I really want to make that documentary!

Dear Peter

Dear Peter is, I think, the third of Scott Willis’ documentaries that I’ve seen now – he worked at Eden Court for a while which sort of makes him a local film-maker – so I’m starting to recognise his style of film-making. They tend to focus on an interesting character that Scott’s met – and they tend to stand or fall based on the nature of the friendship that forms between film-maker and subject. This one works really well, I found it compelling and lovely, perhaps most of all because I’m also the sort of person who, if they found a collection of art postcards in a bookshop – all addressed to the one person – would want to track that person down and interview them.

Sheepo

The shortest film in the collection – Sheepo is probably the film that I would most whole-heartedly recommend. There’s not a lot to it and it’s certainly not going to change the world, but it was by a long way, the most fun. It was brilliantly shot, did nice things with sound and had an engaging and amusing protagonist and subject. Who knew competitive sheep shearing could be so much fun?

With The Rising Tide

I’m not sure why I like documentaries about boat building, but I really love documentaries about boat building. There’s just something about the type of person who is willing to spend the time to hand build a wooden boat that seems to make them a compelling subject for a documentary and this one was full of those people. Young and old, male and female – and quite frankly the lassie from Plockton neatly articulated everything I love about woodworking – the sense of community, of building something together, something greater than themselves oozed out of every moment of this film.

With the Rising Tide is a gorgeous lyrical film, with an interesting approach to sound. (Even if said sound did make the sound designer in me twitch to get at the sound mix to mellow out some of the more jarring audio cuts.)

IFF 2016 @EdenCourt – Chi-Raq

Tags

film festival, spike lee, usa

Chi-Raq was a bit of a left-field choice for me, as my normal film festival fare is documentaries and obscure foreign language films. (As will probably become obvious from the rest of these reviews.) But it had an interesting premise, it’s set in Chicago – a city I for which I have a soft spot – and its directed by Spike Lee, so it seemed worth a try. The blurb in the festival programme did not do it justice.

It was billed as a modern day adaptation of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata – which, for the uninitiated, is the story of one woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian War by getting all the women of Greece together to organise a sex strike – but it is so much more than that. I was expecting a take the storyline and themes adaptation, but they went the full nine yards – on screen narrator, Greek chorus, everyone talking in rhyme – and made it live and breathe of the streets of Chicago. It’s vibrant and passionate, funny and tragic (in the proper sense of the word) and it does not shy away from what it is or what it has to say. From the moment that Samuel L Jackson turns around to face the camera, freezes time and breaks the fourth wall to talk about a fourth century BC Greek play, its obvious that this is going to be something different. By the time John Cusack shows up as an evangelical preacher – in what I would say is his best performance in at least a decade – soliloquising on systemic racism, it is clear that neither he or the film are in the slightest bit interested in messing around.

Teyonah Parris is excellent as the titular Lysistrata – but its Angela Basset that steals the show for me. Such a controlled performance, this smart political woman, with so much rage and grief banked down under her skin. She’s the one who plants the seeds and holds the fort; the one who speaks softly while Lysistrata figuratively carries the big stick.

The soliloquies are just brilliant. They’re powerful and moving, and really bring out the poetry of the vernacular that they’re written in. The poetry that exists in all really good hip-hop. (I’m sure someone has done a proper hip-hop Shakespeare adaptation, if not, why on earth not, that would be amazing.) What I mean is that a play from 2000 years ago, ought not to feel so vividly relevant and timely. It feels, almost, necessary? As though it was just lurking somewhere in our collective consciousness waiting to be told. If it was, then I’m glad it chose Spike Lee’s brain to filter through because he absolutely nailed it.

There’s something decidedly bittersweet – a little heart-breaking even – about watching this film just a couple of days after the US Election. This film is very much a product of its time, of the administration that is coming to an end. It’s a film that acknowledges that the system is very broken, that the odds are stacked against anyone trying to build a better world, but it is also convinced that its worth fixing and its worth trying even if you don’t entirely succeed. A film both heart-breaking and hopeful. And honestly, in the current political climate on both sides of the Atlantic, I think we could all do with a little more hope right now.

The film had its Scottish Premiere tonight at the Inverness Film Festival, I don’t know if its getting a wider distribution in the UK but if you can see it, I highly recommend that you do.

Silent Movie (with Live Musical Accompaniment) Double Feature

Tags

german expressionism, germany, silent film, usa

Of all the arts activities that I might have expected to be in plentiful supply when I moved to Inverness, silent films with live musical accompaniment weren’t one of them. I’ve seen half a dozen different films over the last year, and rarely has their live accompaniment been anything as prosaic as a piano. Whether a klezmer band, electronica, a woodwind collective or a jazz trio the performances I’ve seen haven’t been afraid to innovate or push boundaries in interpreting silent movies and the screenings have been universally packed.

I’m personally of the opinion that the best way to watch silent film is with live musical accompaniment. There’s something about live interpretation of a film in music – whether in fitting a pre-prepared score to the film as it spools along, or improvising as they go – that gives silent film a vibrancy that seems to get lost in the cold crispness of a DVD transfer and its pre-recorded soundtrack. Something of the mutability and fragile wonder of the early years of the medium restored to the viewer for a short while.

The first film of my double bill did actually feature the traditional piano based musical accompaniment. And what a feat of piano playing that turned out to be. The Thief of Bagdad is a two and a half hour epic in the old fashioned sense. Despite his massively influential role in Hollywood during the silent era, I’d never actually seen a Douglas Fairbanks picture before – I’m generally more of a Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy type when it comes to early US cinema – and this film really showcases his legendary swashbuckling charm. Despite its unconvincing dragon – there was a good deal of sniggering in the screening – the other special effects are really quite effective and the action sequences quite thrilling. It moves at a cracking pace – the accompaniment certainly helped keep the pace up – and honestly you’d never have known it was as long as it was, there was never a spare moment to get bored in.

The Graeme Stephen Trio appear to have something of a specialism in the works of German Expressionist Cinema. (This year saw them interpreting Faust in Eden Court for Hallowe’en while last year on the same date they were interpreting The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in Perth. They’ve also won prizes for their scoring of Murnau’s Sunrise and recently completed a new score for Metropolis.) The film itself is every bit as dark and strange as one would expect from a meeting of the source material, the director and the general period. It’s set in that weird late semi-Medieval period that I’ve only ever encountered in German cinema – though perhaps it equates to an actual historic period in central Europe, my mainland European history knowledge goes, Rome, Vikings, defeat of Napoleon, German unification so I may be missing some subtleties – and can’t be entirely certain whether or not it actually existed. I’d always thought of Faust as being a story of a scientist/philosopher lead to temptation by a thirst for knowledge. But actually his temptation here is a much more complex affair which I feel made it a much more interesting film.

It’s interesting to note that while I can easily call to mind numerous German film directors of this period, I struggle to name more than one actor – Conrad Veidt for some reason, those compelling eyes probably – whereas in Hollywood at the same time I could reel off numerous stars but the directors names are unknown to me. Perhaps it says something about the different film cultures in Europe and the States a the time, that there wasn’t really an equivalent of the star system that was so dominant in the US. Or perhaps this is an artificial distinction wrought by the perspective of being more used to looking at European cinema through the lens of auteur theory. That we associate genres with particular genres in early European cinema, whereas in early Hollywood cinema we associated them with stars. Or perhaps my continuing interest in German expressionism in film and in film noir has just skewed my perspective towards a focus on stylistics.

The main thing that these two films have in common – other than having been made within two years of each other – is that they are essentially adaptions of earlier literary sources. While The Thief of Bagdad is quite a loose adaptation, it plays heavily on the idea of the existing mythos of 1001 Arabian Nights to allow it to make use of tropes and motifs from the genre as shortcuts that require no explanation. Faust on the other hand is much more of a straight up adaptation of Goethe’s novel – how close and accurate an adaptation it is, I cannot tell, as I haven’t read the book. The other major commonality between the two films is how they function as morality plays, where a protagonist of dubious morality has to face the very real consequences of his sins to someone he cares for and is given the opportunity to redeem himself.

CRIME: Hong Kong Style @EdenCourt

Tags

crime cinema, hong kong, jackie chan, ringo lam, wong kar

The CRIME: Hong Kong Style season of films arrived at my local arts cinema Eden Court this month. While we didn’t get any of the Q&As or introductory talks that appear to have graced its visit to larger metropolises and we certainly got fewer films – in its original incarnation in Manchester there appear to be at least 20 films showing, while only six of them made it this far north – but the selection that we did get were certainly worth watching. A good mix of classics, more obscure choices and recent releases. (Also they did a nifty wee discount ticket if you bought four films at once. I love it when that happens.)

First up, from 1974 was The Teahouse/Sing Gei Cha Low (turns out there have been a lot of Hong Kong films released with an English language title that is a variation of The Teahouse.) It’s a film about found families, communities, crime, corruption and honour. One of the theme’s I found fascinating about this season is that the good guys are regularly stalwart, honourable and brave, and they often don’t win. There’s always a price for standing up to the bad guys. (Is it worth paying they ask? Well, at least in this film, the answer is yes. Our hero loses one family – to protect them – but he finds another.)

My second ‘classic’ film of the season was Police Story (1985). Starring a young Jackie Chan, proving just why he’s an absolute martial arts legend. It adds a certain frisson to the action sequences when you know that yes, that’s actually Jackie Chan swinging from that double decker bus. Yes he did in fact injure himself on that fall. (Yes, I too would re-run that slide down the lights if I’d injured myself that badly shooting it!) The action sequences are brilliant, thrilling and hilarious by turns. The plot doesn’t entirely make sense, but who cares, we’re not there for that, we’re here to watch Jackie Chan kick ass and lose the plot!

As Tears Go By was the film I was most excited to see so naturally that was the one showing the night I got stuck at work and didn’t get to go. Of all the films I could have missed it’s probably the best one though because as a Wong Kar Wei film it’s at least going to be relatively easy for me to track down myself. On the other hand, well, I’m sure Wong Kar Wei has made a bad film at some point, but if so I’ve never seen it, so I’m still a bit gutted to have missed this one.

Last up is the newly released Wild City (2015) the first film in over a decade from Hong Kong crime cinema legend Ringo Lam. Two brothers find their fates entwined with that of a young mainland girl, Yun, whose boyfriend has caught her up in a corruption scandal involving a large suitcase of money and a group of increasingly psychotic Taiwanese gangsters. It’s a proper power corrupts story, as Yun isn’t quite the ingénue she at first appears – she’s been seduced by the same corruption that caused her boyfriend to sacrifice her the way he did – but when the boys mother gets kidnapped, she steps up refuses to stay safe and hidden, playing bait to help them get Mona back. To help put all the players away, not just the ones that have hurt her directly. (Interestingly, almost all of the violence that the brothers perpetrate that isn’t in direct self-defence of themselves and Yun, is done on behalf of their mother. The truly brutal stuff is all for Mona, the gentlest soul in the film.) I liked the whole stand-off between T-Man and his former boss his whole, arrest me tomorrow, let me finish the job shtick was great – and it worked!

All in all a great season of cinema, free of pat Hollywood endings. Hooray for Hong Kong Crime Cinema!

Other Adventures @ The Inverness Film Festival

Tags

documentaries, eden court, iff, sound art

The advantage of a small concentrated film festival like Inverness is that you can get a lot seen in the course of four really intense days. The disadvantage is that if you happen to be away for the weekend of the week that it’s on you’ll will a sizeable percentage of the films. Which is to say that I missed several really interesting looking documentaries due to being in Aberdeen, though my bank balance probably appreciates it. (Hence my lack of nablopomo posting over the weekend, as I was away without the laptop. I did, however, manage to knock out a draft of a short story for a competition I want to enter, which I feel should count for something. The friend I was staying with was fair taken with me actually writing in a paper notebook.) I did manage to see some things, so really there’s no reason to sulk about the things I didn’t see.

Very Semi-Serious

After my earlier fretting about the unlikeness of my chances of getting to my target of 25 feature documentaries this year, I came across my list of new years resolutions and lo and behold my actual target is the much more achievable 15 documentaries. As this film is number 11 for this year, I actually feel hopeful rather than daunted by the task ahead.

Very Semi Serious is a film about the Cartoon department of the New Yorker. It’s a charming little film about the serious business of being funny. More an insight into how being a cartoonist in the 21st century works, and how the publishing industry has changed since the ‘golden era’, than an actual history of the New Yorker. It’s the kind of film I feel ought to make the rounds of art schools for budding cartoonists to watch and get a realistic idea of how hard they’ll have to work to get on in the industry. Interesting and charming and amusing, even if in my case it was more of a wry smile than a guffaw, but then that tends to be my reaction to the cartoons themselves so it seems entirely fitting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film was that it tackled head on the issue of diversity amongst the cartoonists. It looks at the activities of the current Cartoon Editor to shake submissions up, to find and nurture new talent because in his words

“Unless we interceded this may be the last generation of cartoonists to do this.”

That utterly pragmatic statement as a reason for opening up the submissions process, seems to fit perfectly with what they say they want from their cartoonists. Which is essentially to find cartoonist with distinctive styles and voices. It’s interesting to watch the archive footage of a gathering of the cartoonists in the 70s – essentially a gathering of late middle-aged white guys, with one solitary woman slipping awkwardly through the crowd – and compare it to the current crop with its considerably more diverse mix.

We do get the usual suspects interviews – the legends of the job if you will – but instead of just getting our one trailblazing female cartoonist – Roz Chast – talking about how it used to be and one of the current ones talking about how it is now, several female cartoonists, at different stages in their career with the magazine are interviewed about different things. In fact the interviews with the current batch of cartoonists are pretty much gender balanced. I feel odd bringing it up, but it says something about the documentaries that I’ve watched recently that I felt that there were a lot of women in this documentary when really it was just a proportional number in terms of how many were part of the story. (According to the Variety review there were 45 named contributors of those 15 are women. I’m remembering that Geena Davis article from years back about the 3:1 ratio of men to women in family friends and how that affects the point at which we ‘see’ the balance tip on representation by gender and laughing at myself for proving her point.)

It’s a film largely dominated by the presence of Bob Mankoff – rightly so, he’s an interesting guy with lots of intelligent and interesting things to say about the serious art of being funny – about a very white, male middle class institution, I would not have been surprised, and probably wouldn’t have noticed if Chast had been our only female contributor. It was nice to have variety – a range of cartoonists, a production staffer, Mankoff’s wife and daughter – but kind of sad that it’s unusual enough to be noticeable.

Carnival of Souls

This was a really unusual film event to attend, as there wasn’t actually a film being projected.

It’s a binaural sound experience! Basically they took the script of a 1962 horror movie of the same name and adapted it as an audio drama. Binaural audio, for the uninitiated is essentially where sound is recorded using a set up where the microphones are positioned like your ears (usually using an adapted mannequin head, but you can do it yourself with microphones that sit in your ears like headphones) while the drama unfolds around them. Done well it produces a really immersive experience. In the cinema we wore wireless headphones and blindfolds and dived in. The blurb made a great deal about having tested the drama out on blind film fans to let them tweak it to be more effective. And the soundscape is really effective. Creepy and strange and really evocative. Technically its brilliant, I’m in awe. It’s a shame therefore that the plot of the film itself – especially the ending – makes no sense. Early on it works wonderfully but towards the end of the film it just, doesn’t make sense. Presumably something on screen in the film itself would have made a big reveal but perhaps not. It was really clever and really well done, but I do wish they’d chosen better source material.

As an aside, I think the technique has potential as an interesting way to re-score silent movies. I think it could be really fun to take the script of a silent movie – just because we can’t hear the dialogue, doesn’t mean it wasn’t written – and do the same thing with that and screen the two in sync. Now that would be a 3D cinema experience I could get behind.

Short Docs @ The Inverness Film Festival

Tags

documentaries, eden court, iff, scottish, short films

Handily for my Nablopomo aspirations, this month does appear to be filled with interesting events for me to write about. Which does make me wonder, is autumn a particularly good season for the arts in Inverness or have I missed all sorts of gems other months because I wasn’t hunting for blog material? Clearly I need to be paying more attention…

It’s the Inverness Film Festival this week! No, until a month ago, I didn’t know they had one either but they do and this year is in fact the 13th Inverness Film Festival. The theme this year is those “who are brave enough to move away from their comfort zones and embark on an adventure, whether that be by choice or circumstance.” Given that moving to Inverness in the first place was about leaving my comfort zone and seeking adventure, it feels particularly fitting to me that this one should be the first I got to attend.

Early mornings at film festivals are usually the territory of short films, and the IFF is no exception. Short films from the UK, short films from around the world, short films for kids of different ages and, most relevant to my interests, short documentaries.

Half the films in the selection were products of the Scottish Documentary Institutes’ Bridging the Gap initiative and the correlation between those and my favourites in the screening was pretty close. They were all really interesting and different documentaries, which is something I associate with – and value in – the output of the SDI. Embarrassingly I was late and missed the first film in the screening, so I’ll stick to talking about my favourites of the films I did see rather than reviewing them all.

Mining Poems or Odes

This was the film that least caught my fancy in the program but which utterly captured my imagination and heart in the screening. The central concept of the film a poet and ex-Shipyard welder, Robert, talks about how being a welder shaped his writing, his worldview and his relationship with words and philosophy. The film is poetic and mesmerising, and Robert’s words and screen presence are compelling – that face, that voice, those words – I could have listened to him for hours. His descriptions are economic but paint vivid pictures of a world lost and an education at the hands of a type of men that seem to have vanished with it. Big burly men, of few words, who taught him to weld and badgered him into reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Das Kapital, who swung great big hammers for fun but could put more care into asking ‘alright son?’ than other people put into saying ‘I love you’. For all that the film is presented in quite a stylistic fashion, it feels more honest and authentic to its subject than many a more earnest documentary.

(You can view the film’s trailer here to get a feel for it.)

The Banana Republic

Is a charming wee film about the Banana Flats – officially Cables Wynd estate – in Leith. It follows a photographer who grew up in the flats, as he works on a photography project, documenting the people who live in the flats now. It’s a film about community and what home means to different people. (Also the idiosyncrasies of flat numbering, I spent enough of my childhood traipsing up and down blocks of council flats leafleting with my dad to truly appreciate the frustration and triumph of their search for flat 69!) It’s a slight film, without any great pretensions of grand messages, just a slice of life – lives that those who don’t live them seldom see. Which to me, is the core of what documentary, especially in short form, should be about.

United We Will Swim…Again

This was probably the film in the selection that I was most interested to see. It follows the long-running campaign to save the Calder Street baths in Glasgow. The longest film in the selection at 26 minutes, it nonetheless felt about half its length, packing in 100 years of history and 13 years of activism. For the uninitiated, back in 2001 Glasgow City Council decided to close the public baths in Govanhill. They were a popular and well-used public service, the focal point for a lot of community activity both water based and not, and in the wake of the closure of many local amenities it became the line in the sand that the community rallied round and said no more closures. In many ways it’s a heart-warming tale of a diverse community (traditionally it has been a working class and immigrant community, one of the interviewees claims it as one of the most diverse communities outside of London) coming together to protest and campaign. Of a community buy out of a local amenity to return it to its proper role as a central community hub. Of their on-going campaign to be able to afford to use them as an actual swimming pool again. But it’s also a story of institutional greed and power corrupting officials. The aerial footage of the mounted police officers advancing on protesters sitting in the street, tells its own story. Over and over during the film, especially during the section about the removal of the protesters occupying the baths, I wondered why? What made the council so fixated on closing the Govanhill Baths? In the face of the campaigning and protesting, why were they so set on closing an amenity so well-loved by its community that they would organise sit-ins and marches, would practically riot in the streets to keep it? What did they even use the money they got for selling it for? Because it certainly wasn’t improving the substandard housing that makes a Victorian bathhouse remain necessary for its original purpose in the 21st century. There’s scope for a longer and more in depth film about the wider issues, because you can’t help but wonder how many other communities – especially in these less economically sunny times – have lost their vital amenities in quieter and less well-known battles.

It’s a long way to go for a swim, but if they do get the pools open again, I think I’ll be making the effort nonetheless.

October Documentary Catch-up

Tags

documentary, eden court, georgia, nablopomo, spain, uk

I started this year with such good intentions about my documentary watching. After the success of last year’s documentary a month project, I was excited to up my game and try to watch 25 feature documentaries. I got a good start to the year at the Glasgow Film Festival, but then, well life got interesting and documentary watching fell by the wayside. I managed to catch a few documentaries on the iPlayer from the Storyville strand but at the end of September I had only watched 6 feature length documentaries. I needed to up my game.

Thankfully, my local arts cinema (Eden Court) was having a good month for documentaries so I was able to arrange a triple bill of documentaries across October. (I actually ended up watching four documentaries if we count Häxan from my last post, which I do.) If I were only aiming for twelve documentaries again this year I’d be feeling quite positive about the challenge – I was actually at the same stage in October last year before I had my epic four documentaries in two days session – but as it is I’m searching for ways to keep the momentum going.

Salt for Svanetia

Its essentially a 1930s Soviet propaganda film about the state building a road that will connect Svanetia with the rest of the U.S.S.R.. (The Svan are an ethnic minority in the mountains of the Georgian caucuses.) However, other than the last ten minutes or so, you’d never know. The rest of the film feels like one of those odd silent ethnographic documentaries of that period that leave the modern viewer uncertain how much of what they’re seeing is actually an insight into a now lost way of life and how much was made up for the cameras at the time. It’s fascinating in a rather surreal way. The director apparently set out to make a fictional film set in Svanetia but could only get funded to make a documentary/propaganda film, which explains the rather jarring change of tone and tacked on feeling of the ending.

What really made this film for me was the live musical accompaniment. The Bo’ness Hippodrome’s Silent Film Festival commissioned the band Moishe’s Bagel (jazz influenced Eastern European and klezmer music…) to write a new score for it and for my money it succeeded admirably. The music was gorgeous and complimented the images and events perfectly. It did a good job of making some of the more sensational sections more human and real, making the Svan people more sympathetic than pitiable.

Palio

I think that objectively, this was probably the best of the documentaries I saw this month. Oddly enough it’s a sports documentary about, of all things, a horse race held twice every summer in a small Italian city for hundreds of years. One of the oldest sports events in the world and the only horse race where a horse can win even if it lost its rider. (It’s a bareback race and my goodness those horses don’t half lose their riders in style.) I knew nothing about the race, about the wider sport of horse racing – everything I do know I learned from reading National Velvet as a teenager – and, having bought the tickets at the start of the month, by the time the screening came around I had completely forgotten what the film was even about. Yet, somehow, the film is utterly compelling. The Palio is a horse race that’s largely not actually about the horses. Each rider taking part in the race represents an area of the city (traditionally the jockeys would be from that area but this is no longer the case and the area compete for the best jockeys – the horses are chosen in a lottery) and the wealthier the area the more money they have to spend on getting the best jockey to ride for them. While for most of the population the race is about history, civic pride, a place to play out centuries long local rivalries and a metaphor for life in the city, for the movers and shakers, the powerful and the jockeys, it is game of strategy, skill and corruption. Ever was it thus. In recent years, though, it has recently become much more about the latter element, with average rather than exceptional horses being selected again and again and one jockey coming to almost complete dominance in the race. But all that might change in the face of a young Sardinian jockey ready to challenge his former mentor. Will he take the advise of another legendary jockey and pursue the best horse rather than going for the contrade with the most money for bribes for his fellow ‘assassins’?

There’s a lot of Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, which does wonderful things for maintaining the atmosphere and plays nicely into the thematics with the young underdog preparing to face off against his former mentor turned competitor. A compelling and almost gladiatorial show down.

The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead

Music documentaries are always a bit of a weird trip for me. Largely because I’m not usually a big fan of the band in question. (I do wonder what these films are like for fans of the band, who aren’t only there for the music and the fallouts. I suspect music documentaries are my reality TV, all vicarious voyeuristic pleasure.) The Damned were no exception. I’ve always been a bit confused by them, they always turn up on punk compilation albums but my mental image of them is more New Romantic than Punk (Dave Vanian and this vampire aesthetic have a lot to answer for). They were the first punk band in the UK to get a single and an album out, but they’ve been pretty much entirely eclipsed but the rest of the movement. The Damned are…essentially more of an argument than a band and pretty much always have been. Watching the film you do wonder how they ever managed to get albums written let alone stayed together long enough for one tour let alone to still be touring. Mostly it occurs that their greatest claim to fame ought to be that they all survived!

The best review I can really make of the film is that, I came away from the film not really liking any of them as human beings, but thinking that if they did happen to tour near me anytime soon, I’d likely make the effort to go see them. Make of that what you will.

Hallowe’en Screamathon!

Tags

eden court, hallowe'en, nablopomo, screamathon

It’s Hallowe’en which here means my local arts cinema put on a marathon selection of horror movies for young and old. It was organised by the local film society and they really went to town on the decorations and associated activities. There were six films on all together, though I only went to see the latter three. I mistakenly thought it was all kids films in the first half when actually most of them were just PG rated due to being old (Bride of Frankenstein and The Mummy) which I was disappointed to miss. I went along intending to see A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (I tried to see it at the Glasgow Film Festival, but the timings didn’t work) and Häxan but it turned out that the special ticket they were doing meant I could see Rosemary’s Baby for free. (Which nicely circumvented my desire to not give Roman Polanski money.) It was a thoroughly entertaining evening all round and definitely one of the better – and cosier – ways to spend Hallowe’en.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

First up it’s an Iranian Vampire film. Which, lets be honest, is a description that will either make your ears prick up with interest or decide to run away right now. And that’s probably for the best, because if it’s your kind of film then you’ll really enjoy it, but if its not you’re going to be really confused. Because the other thing that it is, is heavily influenced – in terms of style, imagery, set design and music – by Spaghetti Westerns. The film is set in a mysterious ghost town of a city called Bad Town. It feels very much like a Western, but in that way that watching Seven Samurai feels like watching a Western, it’s a Western filtered through Iranian culture.

Our nominal hero Arash, looks like James Dean and drives a beautiful classic American car that is his prize possession. He fights against circumstances and somehow gets out alive. The girl (she is the vampire with no name) on the other hand looks like she stepped out of a Nouvelle Vague film, dancing to records in her room like a 60s Parisian teenager. It’s fascinating the way her Chador gives her freedom, makes her untouchable yet alluring. (Somehow the skateboard only adds to the effect, making her seem childlike and implacably ancient all at once.) There’s an innocence to their chaste courtship that feels like it stepped out of another era, and they both move through the strange world of the film like aliens, never quite blending in, using that to their advantage. They both have a strong sense of justice and fairness that does not necessarily line up with legalities of their time and place. Kindred spirits despite their almost insurmountable differences.

The film has a dreamlike quality, compelling and strange and wonderful. I haven’t seen anything quite like it. See it if you can.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Officially, it’s a fictionalised documentary. Which was fairly standard for documentaries of the time. It was filmed in Denmark and funded by Swedish backers. It looks at the history of magic and witchcraft from pagan times up to the then present (1921). Amusingly, the director, Benjamin Christensen, intended to make the film much more fully researched with historical advisors, but it turned out that most of the experts on the subject he wanted to consult were opposed to the film being made.

Unofficially, it’s just really strange. (Apparently there’s a version available with a narration by William S. Burroughs, having seen the film that honestly doesn’t surprise me and I’m not entirely sure that that would make it any weirder.) It’s an interesting and entertaining experience but it’s certainly not a documentary that you would recommend to anyone wanting to seriously learn about the subject.

The thing I most enjoyed about Haxan, honestly, was the accompaniment. The two guys providing the accompaniment had gone the full hog in terms of ‘authentic’ accompaniment, by using a whole host of instruments to create the score and do all the sound effects. Often to great comic effect. Their efforts really brought the film to life and mitigated what might otherwise have been a just plain bizarre viewing experience.

Rosemary’s Baby

Classic old school psychological horror. It’s one of those classic horror movies from the 60s that makes people say ‘they don’t make them like the used to’ and well, honestly having grown up when J-Horror was breaking upon English speaking audience the response is generally ‘no they don’t, they’re scarier now.’ Personally when I say I like my horror movies old school I mean, monster movies from Universal in the 1930s or Hammer in the 60s and 70s. But I digress. I don’t actually think that Rosemary’s Baby is supposed to be conventionally scary, its more about the creeping sense of unease and dread, as events unfold and we struggle to decide whether to believe the ‘innocent’ explanation for what the neighbours are up to or whether the not so innocent but highly unlikely one is actually the truth.

Spoilers ahoy. I was actually surprised when they turned out to really be devil worshippers. I was fairly certain there was something terrible going on, but I thought devil worship was just Rosemary’s fevered imagination and the real threat would be something more mundanely evil. (I never thought it was all in her mind, not after the party and Guy’s blatant gas-lighting of her. Certainly not after Hutch’s visit. Cutting her off from her friends, controlling whom she sees and what she eats and drinks, actively preventing her from going to a different Doctor? All classic abusive behaviours.) Admittedly, the coven is in fact, terribly mundane in their evilness. With their society manners, refinement and busybodyness, they’re a sort of chintzy evil. There’s something terribly surreal about them all in their posh clothes with their china teacups crying out ‘hail Satan’. Honestly I was a bit disappointed she didn’t get to go after anyone with that knife of hers, but mostly I just spent the last 15 minutes of the film internally shouting ‘run away! Run away!’ at Rosemary.