Belated Glasgow Short Film Festival Review

Tags

glasgow, gsff, uninspiring shorts

After I made yesterday’s post, I was looking at the blog and thinking, “I’m sure I wrote about some films I saw at GSFF, but there’s nothing on here.” So I went looking through my drafts and there was a piece, I’d just paused at one point to go and look something up about one of the films I was writing about and never came back to it. The review feels pretty complete without it, and honestly the apathy of never having felt inspired enough to come back to it, does rather fit in with how I felt about the films.

The Glasgow film festival is upon us once again, and last week saw the short film festival make its brief but intense descent on the cinemas of Glasgow. After last year’s epic day of film viewing anything else was always going to feel thoroughly half-hearted, but nonetheless despite being ridiculously busy last weekend, I managed to squeeze in a screening on the Sunday. Annoyingly there were two screenings that I fancied seeing on the Sunday, and naturally they overlapped by 45 minutes (one at the GFT and the other at the CCA – GSFF’s usual home) so I could only go to one. One screening was all Scottish films and the other was from the International Competition. Given the choice I usually go for the International Competition screenings, for the simple reason that I’m less likely to see International shorts other places, whereas Scottish shorts are more likely to turn up other places.

Also you get your own little ballot sheet for the International Competition screenings (audience award ahoy!) and I always get excited about getting to vote on the films, makes me feel more a participant in the festival than a passive viewer. Interactivity – it doesn’t have to be complex!

International Competition 6: Writing on the Body

So unfortunately for me, this sounded like it would be a really interesting screening and didn’t really live up to its promise. Clearly this is a wider issue I have with GSFF of having very different taste in short films to that of the people who programme it. As the curator was there to introduce the films and then a Q&A afterwards and announced it as ‘the strongest selection’ which having seen the films I was a bit dubious about.

The first film did live up to the promise both from the curator and description. It was a short but substantial documentary about a deaf Brazilian man, raising his daughter as a single-parent and living with Aids. It was more about his life and passions than the other elements, defining who he was. Being a single parent, being deaf and being HIV positive were portrayed as complications in his pursuit of the things he loves rather than defining features of that life.

The second film was weird. The description of the film was essentially ‘a couple having sex in a car are interrupted by an army of snails’ and yes, they were but there was a heck of a lot more going on and I’ve no idea what it was. I think it was a riff off the idea of the possessed car brought to life by people having sex in it and exacting a bloody revenge. Except that I’m not sure if the car was trying to attack them or join in to be honest. I’m sure the snails were symbolic, but of what eludes me. The sound design however, was excellent, really effectively weird – so kudos to the sound team.

It probably says bad things about the 3rd and 4th films that reflecting on them a week later as I write this, I couldn’t remember a thing about them until I dug out the rather sparse notes I took at the time. Whatever else can be said about the 2nd and final films, at least I remembered their respective plots even I didn’t particularly enjoy them.

The final film was made no less weird for being based on real events, being a riff off events that did in fact happen – as one of the film-makers attested with wry amusement that suggested she’d explained that it had all seemed terribly normal at the time. It was every bit as surreal and weird as I’ve always suspected private schools really were behind the Enid Blyton gloss…

So overall, while yes they were all tied together by a hyper-awareness of the body with the exception of the first film, the bodies in question didn’t really have very much to say whether as protagonist or canvas.

Film Festivals I Have Missed

Tags

africa in motion, birds eye view, eiff, films, gff

Film festivals are excellent things, brilliant opportunities to see films that you might not otherwise – or at least not for a long time – to see short films or obscure documentaries. I love film festivals, but crucially I don’t go to that many. Not, as some might presume, because there aren’t very many in Scotland, while the majority of the film festivals that take place in the UK are held in London there are a fair few up here. Recently the Edinburgh Film Festival has stepped out from under the shadow of its parent Festival, and the Glasgow and Shetland film festivals are gaining increasing international coverage; there are numerous smaller more specialised – Edinburgh’s annual Africa in Motion comes to mind – film festivals held in Glasgow and Edinburgh, festivals from the rest of the UK increasingly do tours and Tilda Swinton and co continue to produce charmingly eccentric efforts across the Highlands.  I just have this unfortunate tendency to miss them. Somehow, I’m always in the wrong place at the wrong time or don’t hear about them until it’s too late; one year I will hear that tickets for the Edinburgh film festival have gone on sale before the films I want to see sell out.

Never has this unfortunate tendency of mine been more obvious than this autumn. I knew in advance I would be missing the Africa in Motion festival as I was off adventuring around mainland Europe, and doubly so because its tour doesn’t come my way this year. However, it seemed everywhere I went around Europe I would find a film-festival that I couldn’t go to. Festivals seemed to be happening the week before I arrived places, or the week after I left them, in the case of the controversy dogged Zürich film festival it started the evening of the day I left. In one particularly annoying case I discovered that the last screening of one festival was the evening I arrived in that city; the day afterwards. It did occur to me that it would make quite a fun project to travel around Europe for a year trying to attend every single film festival, but mostly I came to feel that the film festivals of Europe were taunting me a little. It even continued once I’d returned to the UK, arriving in Bristol to discover that the Unchosen festival – which campaigns against Human Trafficking – was the following month. (Looking for a link to that festival I’ve discovered that I am currently missing the Encounters short film festival in Bristol…)

Therefore I felt thoroughly triumphant to actually make it to a screening as part of the Birds Eye View Festival when its tour arrived in Glasgow this week. Flooding and train cancellations meant I didn’t get to the Documentary Masterclass at the CCA but I did see an excellent silent film with live musical accompaniment at the GFT on Wednesday. My Best Girl starring the iconic Mary Pickford could almost be held up as the perfect archetypal romantic comedy, and despite not being the greatest fan of the genre I mean that as a compliment. Additionally it has a certain charm, a sort of innocence and naivety almost, borne of being made in a less cynical age than our own. I must admit that I think all silent movies should be watched on a big screen with live musical accompaniment, there’s a certain vibrancy that the live accompaniment gives them that doesn’t come across on the pre-recorded scores that accompany DVD or television screenings. Some films lend themselves to cinematic viewing, loosing a certain something on the small screen (I saw Requiem for a Dream in a tiny screening room, with an excellent sound system, at uni and I’ve never felt more claustrophobic or enjoyed that film more). There’s just something about that piano accompaniment, accentuating the moments of comedy or tenderness, or picking up the pace, galloping along as the inevitable chase gets increasingly manic, that somehow manages to hold its own against any amount of deafeningly crystal clear 5.1 surround sound. There’s something more intimate and warm about it, almost akin to attending a gig, knowing that you’re sharing a unique experience and that even if you were to go and see the film again, with the same people, in the same place with the same accompanist it wouldn’t be exactly the same. It was, as the girl in the row behind me announced at the end, “exactly what I needed.”

Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon

Tags

films

I wrote this some time ago (February 29 apparently), and its been sitting unpublished on here since then, as its never been published anywhere else and I mainly use this blog for published articles these days. However, I’ve not put anything up in almost two months and I still like this so its going up. I wish you all butterflies too.

I don’t often write reviews of films I watch in the cinema, preferring instead to wait till they’re on DVD and I can analyse them thoroughly. However for this particular film I’ll make an exception.

I was expecting to enjoy The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, but nevertheless I was prepared not to. It’s in French, which I hadn’t realised until I was checking the cinema listings and, being the GFT, it gave its French name as well. French cinema tends to polarise my opinion. I either love it: passionately, evangelically and try to convince everyone I know to watch it, or I hate it: fiercely with something akin to pure loathing. Thankfully Diving Bell falls into the former category. Based on the autobiography of Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor of Elle magazine, left completely paralysed (‘locked in’ syndrome) by a stroke. It’s a fascinating film, for most of which we follow the protagonist’s viewpoint exactly seeing the world through his one working eye. It’s a strange conceit, but one which locates us firmly within his world ‘locking us in’ with him, his narrated thoughts our constant companion. During the first half of the film, the only time we aren’t looking out through his eyes is when we’re inside one or other of the only two other (according to him) parts of him that can still move – his imagination and his memories. There is a great deal of frustration in the film, and anger, but more than that there is such passion, imagination, touches of unexpected humour and above all honesty. As a protagonist Jean Dominique does not shy away from his own failings and indiscretions. There’s a wonderful scene where a friend of his, Roussin, who’d been on a hijacked plane and held hostage in Beirut for four years compares their situations and gives him the advice that seems to become his driving force. All through the scene, in his head he’s cursing himself for never having called his friend after his release, for letting his guilt (he’d given up his seat on a flight so Roussin would make his connection, and then the plane got hijacked) stand in the way of being a good friend. The characters in the film feel terribly real, not idealised, not vilified, just straight-forward, with all their flaws and charms, moments of grace and weakness laid out before us.

From a cinematic perspective the film is truly a thing of beauty. The flights of fantasy by which he maintains his sanity are realised with such passion, such life. Imagination has been a saving grace to many a bed-ridden writer (Robert Louis Stevenson turning his fever dreams into Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde springs to mind). The imagery, whether in portraying the adventures of his imagination, or using scenes from nature to embody his emotional states, is always perfectly realised. Apparently the director is also an artist and it shows, this is the best kind of film as art. It’s a film that rips out your heart, but so gently that you don’t realise it that it has until you’re lying broken on the floor with wet eyes and an ache in your chest.