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.

Documentaries @Invfilmfest

There were so many documentaries on at the Film Festival this year and I was pleased to note that they were scheduled in such a way that if everything had gone to plan, I could have seen almost all of them. Unfortunately, world events beyond my control meant that I was unable to do my usual full on festival experience and instead had a rather more limited schedule – with the days when the majority of the documentaries were on being almost entirely out of bounds to me. Yet the documentaries that I did see, were lovely and well worth tracking down.

The Last Autumn

My first documentary of the festival, and an unexpected extra film that I squeezed in at the last moment before work on Saturday. It was an extremely autumnal day that matched the mood of this film really well.

The film follows the day to day life of a farming couple on an island at the very north of Iceland, throughout the final Autumn of the keeping sheep. As in many similar communities across Northern Europe the sheep traditionally spend the summer grazing on the hills above the community and are brought down in the Autumn to overwinter in the valley. (One of the last places where they still do this in Ireland has turned this event into something of a festival that acts as a tourist attraction, in order to keep it viable.) As less and less young people from the community go into farming themselves, or are able to come home specifically to help with it, more and more farmers are giving up their sheep as they get too old to tackle the hill. The trick, according to the film, is to give up before you can no longer get up the hill to help. I described this film to a colleague and she said, with a wry smile, that we’d made that film ourselves, in a dozen different ways, in three minute chunks, over the years. It’s true, it’s a familiar refrain here in the Highlands, of young people who go away and don’t return, or if they do return only for the holidays. 

The film has no narration, and very little dialogue, so most of the commentary on events comes from radio programmes playing on the radio from what I presume to be the Icelandic equivalent of Radio 4. There’s much talk on the radio about language, about the steady creep of English into everyday life, especially among young people. That too is an all too familiar refrain here, and for me a far greater worry than the potential end of hill sheep farming – agricultural has changed many times before and will doubtless change many more times in the future. If the way of life is inevitably changing is it possible to unshackle the language from the lifestyle? Can the language survive without it? If the language is to survive it must somehow remain the language of both those who leave and those who stay. And if that is a struggle in Iceland, where the language in question is the majority language rather than a minority language, how much harder is for those of us fighting for minority languages? The film and it’s protagonist remains stubbornly hopeful, despite everything else. 

I was reminded strangely of Sleep Furiously – while it’s a very different film from that one, the was something of the tone and the atmosphere that put me inescapably in mind of it. This film felt like an elegy, marking the passing of a way of life, not just for the sheep farmer whose last autumn in the job we’re following, but for the wider community. The film feels at peace with that change, there’s no resentment or anger in this film, just a sense of inevitability, that the world is changing and that that’s okay. Which could be a really depressing outcome, but feels strangely reassuring. 

It was also showing with a Scottish short film, Confluence, about a luthier – that’s someone who makes and repairs violins and fiddles to you and me – Charlie Webster, in Abriachan, above Loch Ness. It’s a film about someone who’s found a new way to make a life and a living for himself in a remote area and that despite the impact of the pandemic, is full of hope. It’s a gentle meditative piece with lovely music that made the perfect accompaniment to the documentary. 

Becoming Cousteau

Unlike many of the audience for this film, I didn’t grow up with the films of Jacques Cousteau, my view of the underwater world was shaped the BBC’s Natural History department, and largely – though not exclusively – narrated by David Attenborough. It’s not that I didn’t know about Jacques Cousteau and his films, but I always knew them second hand, at a distance. Through references in children’s nature programmes, but mostly I think through the filter of Luc Besson’s Atlantis (1991) – which I definitely need to rewatch now, in light of seeing this film. A friend who also saw this film at the festival, enthused to me about having loved Costeau’s films as a child, about how they had shaped her view of the natural world and particularly the underwater parts of it. It very much felt that this film had been made from that perspective, or at least from a place of real affection. That’s not to say that it’s a film which shies away from it’s protagonist’s very real flaws and mis-steps. It just presents them in a very non-judgemental way – probably inevitably given the heavy involvement of the Cousteau Foundation in the film – dealing with them as matter of fact parts of who he was and what he did, without implying that they should undermine his legacy. Which is honestly quite refreshing in these days of extremes in interpretation, many documentaries of this ilk would either completely ignore those flaws, or make them the whole focus of the film. 

In truth, I had no idea how truly groundbreaking those early films were, that time and again they’d had to invent solutions to problems because they were pushing up against the limits of what was previously possible, breaking barriers and records at every turn. How much both marine biology and underwater filming truly owes to Cousteau and his colleagues. That in it’s own way is one of the film’s great strengths, for all it’s a biography of one man, it puts him in context, giving credit to his colleagues and companions without which he couldn’t have achieved so much of what he did. 

This documentary felt both timely and deeply frustrating, with COP 26 taking place down the road in Glasgow, knowing that he spent the last twenty odd years of his life campaigning for environmental protection. 

IFF21 @EdenCourt – Film Festival Preview

It’s that time of year again, the Inverness Film Festival is returning. Not quite the way it was in the before times but certainly closer to that then it was last year. As part of the returning normality the Film Festival Preview screening happened again, though it was not the packed affair that it normally is – busy certainly, but not the kind of affair that I can only get into because I only want one ticket. As always it was a selection of trailers for films showing at the festival themed by the threads of the film festival with introductions by the film festival programmer Paul MacDonald. As much as I am a sucker for a good trailer, I’m really there to hear the programmer’s thoughts and reasonings for the choices. I sincerely doubt that I’m the only audience member who takes an enthusiastic Paul reaction as a more reliable review that any gushing blurb in the programme – or in Sight and Sound for that matter – or number of film festival prizes.

This year’s recommendations come more with the carrot of ‘this has a great performance by that actor’, or this is the new film by the director of this previous IFF favourite film. Which I appreciate, I’d likely never have booked to see Petite Maman if I hadn’t been informed that it was the new film by the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019) which in turn I likely wouldn’t have picked without Paul’s recommendation that it was one of best film’s he’d seen that year – it was definitely the best film I saw that year.

Normally many of the films would come with recommendations from other – larger, more prestigious – film festivals but while all of the European ‘big three’ ran in more or less truncated forms this year, and awarded prizes, there is no real sense of films coming with an accumulating buzz. (This year’s IFF features this year’s Palme D’Or winner along with two films that won the Golden Bear at Berlin over the pandemic but There is No Evil (Rasoulof, 2020) is showing as part of a wider season of Iranian cinema that I’m personally pretty excited about rather than as a garlanded star.) With that in mind, this year’s festival is much more about previews and first chances to see than it is a chance to see the cream of that year’s festivals. It’s worth noting that a surprising number of films didn’t actually have trailers yet – that’s how new they were – and some of those that did came with the caveat that they were ‘works in progress’, the final trailers that accompany those film’s general releases may well be very different. A reminder, if we needed it, that it’s been a funny old year and a half for the film industry.

(Oddly enough, the biggest absence from the usual schedule for me, is that the Bo’ness silent film festival hasn’t run these last couple of years – well a much reduced online version did run – so there’s no newly restored/re-scored silent film for us to enjoy at IFF this year.)

As always, I’m more excited by the films showing in the documentary and new world cinema strands then any award winners. The whole point of seeing films at a film festival for me – and handily also for many of the friends I tend to see films with at the festival – is to see films I otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to see. As fun as it was to have seen Oscar winner Nomadland (Zhao, 2020) before it won the Oscar I generally don’t expect to have an opinion about any awards category except Documentary. (Crossing my fingers that Courage is one that comes back.) This year looks to be a vintage year for documentaries at the film festival, though frustratingly some of the best coincide with the times I absolutely can’t be at the cinema. Nonetheless there’s some great stuff that I can go to see – and I’m definitely much more excited to be seeing Becoming Cousteau (Garbus, 2021) after having seen the trailer.

However far from normal this year’s festival will still be, I can feel myself getting excited already, and that was worth the price of admission to the preview screening all by itself.

Glasgow Short Film Fest @InvFilmFest

The Inverness Film Festival has returned! In a much reduced and socially distanced fashion, but it is happening in this year when so much else has been cancelled or moved online and that in itself is a cause for celebration. I think the weirdest bit is not the no voting slips, or printed blurbs on the short films, or even the virtual Q&A sessions or socially distant layouts. It’s the absence of each film having an intro from Paul the film programmer, I didn’t realise how much I’ve come to consider having his brief intros to the films – why they stood out to him, what makes them important, even just whether he thinks they’ll get a full release – an essential part of the film festival experience for this festival, but more than anything else the fact that it isn’t safe to have him do that really made the difference feel real to me.

However, it wouldn’t really be the film festival if I didn’t go to see some short films. This year’s shorts came courtesy of the Glasgow Short Film Festival and while I often find those to be a bit hit or miss – I either really love them or really hate them, this was definitely a highlights real. All very different, but pretty much universally enjoyable.

Betty

So this film turns on the concept of being it’s own directors commentary/making of film. It’s very high concept, and a bit too clever for it’s own good. I suspect your enjoyment of the film may be entirely dependent on whether you find the director character sympathetic or just pathetic? Personally, I wanted to know more about Betty herself and how she felt about the whole messy situation.

Once Upon a Time in Easterhouse

I think this was my favourite film of the collection, I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to like it, I thought it was going in a different direction to the one it ultimately did. It’s very much a coming of age story, there’s teenage gossip, friendship, figuring out who you are and who you want to be, football, photography and underneath it all, a lot of unspoken grief. It’s tender and clumsy but ultimately good-hearted, much like the boys and men at the heart of it. The final joke got a bigger laugh than it might otherwise have, purely, I suspect because it broke the tension and allowed the audience to express their relief that the film had gone in the direction that it did, rather than the way we feared it would.

Saturnalia

Was the shortest film of the lot, a sweet semi-documentary about space, scientists and different potential ways of being human in the future.

An Acceptable Face

This was a very raw little documentary, cleverly combining animation with snippets of different interviews with very different people about what it means to be visibly or invisibly LGBTQ in these modern times. Tender and confronting but ultimately very relatable.

The Motorist

Is a pitch black, but incredibly well made gothic horror. It owes a lot to the Wickerman, and those 70s horror films where something ancient and awful lurks in the countryside. It centres around a motorist involved in a hit and run accident, stopped but refusing to get out of his car, so I guess that makes it a very modern – or perhaps post-apocalyptic – take on that kind of film? There’s not a wasted moment in the film, even the quiet moments are carefully calibrated to crank up the tension. The woman’s soft warnings to the motorist, that there’s still a way out, that he can still save himself if he wants to, make a tender counterpoint to the rest of the character’s grim cynicism about human nature. Strange and creepy and quietly horrifying.

The Fabric of You

My second favourite of the films, and only knocked into second place by it’s sad ending. This is a beautifully made animated film, about a tailor mouse and his love affair with a customer. The attention to detail in the film is incredible, the puppets in particular are so amazing, the subtle nuance of emotion in their faces, the way their fur and clothes move and are put together. (The detail in their suits.) The tenderness of the relationship and it’s tragic conclusion.

Neville

This is a lovely, funny, heartbreaking look at childhood grief and imagination. It felt a very real portrayal, as though it came from first hand experience of watching/helping a child work through their grief. Unlike many portrayal of children in short films, young Angus felt like a real child, as charming and discomfiting as actual children often are, and his relationship with Neville is utterly believable, as this odd mixture of standard imaginary friend, idealised version of his dad, and punch bag to process his grief through.

It also led me to discover that it’s really awkward to cry in a mask, especially if you also wear glasses. I’ve mostly got the hang of the glasses plus mask combo – and the film festival is teaching me to master takeaway coffee plus mask – but there’s no easy way to subtly juggle mask plus glasses plus crying, without ending up steamed up or clammy-faced. This film, however, was well worth getting in a fankle over, even if I think that if I know ahead of time that a film is likely to be a tear-jerker, I’ll be wearing a scarf instead!

Lasts and Firsts @EdenCourt

Last week, amidst a news agenda full of grim and saddening stories, a moment of lightness and joy reached me. Eden Court was re-opening. It might sound trite but it’s nonetheless true, having an excellent wee – actually fairly big as these things go – arts centre practically on my doorstop has been high on my list of reasons to counter the puzzled questions as to what possessed me to move to the Highlands and more than that, to have stayed.

So obviously the first thing I did when I read the official re-opening announcement, was book myself in for a pre-work morning documentary screening and lunch afterwards. I was amused to discover that pretty much the entire audience of the screening I was in remained in their seats throughout the credits, until the lights came up fully, as though we were collectively soaking up the previously under-appreciated joy of seeing a film, in the cinema, with an audience.

In a moment as delightful symmetry I discovered that not only was the first film I saw in Eden Court since it re-opened a documentary, but the last film I saw there before it closed was also a documentary. They were also both films made last year that have proved to very much of this year’s moment.

The last film that I saw before Eden Court closed for the duration, was a Sudanese documentary called Talking About Trees. It’s a film about loving film, more about loving cinema, of sharing the collective magic of a film screening. In the documentary four aging cineastes run a small film club, screening classic films for small passionate audiences, so far so average film club story. The difference is that Sudan has no mainstream cinema-going culture to contrast it against. After a coup some thirty years before, almost all the cinemas closed and the film industry collapsed, for nearly two generations, the cinema going that we take for granted – or did take for granted – has been non-existent. The film follows these four as they set out a deceptively simple task, to hold a proper cinema night in an actual cinema. The face all kinds of challenges, from the dilapidated nature of the abandoned cinema they’ve got permission to use, getting the correct permits to put on the screening in the first place – not an easy task between government corruption, religious inspired censorship, and sheer grinding administrative indifference – to the purely logistical difficulty of getting a profession cinema screen and projector delivered to Sudan. Each individual challenge enough to put most people off, but not these four, these are men accustomed to disappointment, and not accustomed to giving into it. All this is interspersed with their day to day lives, running the film club, making their own films – one of the four holds the honour of both having had films screened at international film festivals, and having had most of his films banned by various Sudanese governments over the years – and reminiscing about their memories of the past and dreams of the future for their country. And do they succeed, you may ask? Well that would be telling.

The first film I saw after the cinema re-opened, the morning it re-opened in fact, was White Riot, a film about the Rock Against Racism movement and a film as in your face as Talking About Trees is meditative and contemplative. Though I suppose in it’s own way it’s quite an elegiac film. It’s a film about a particular time and place, about young people coming together because of a shared love of music and hatred of racism. The decision to make the most of the copious archive material by using the visual language of the zines around which the movement came together, is a great one, and really well executed. It really gives a sense of how raw and confronting those original materials were while incorporating lots more archive material than you otherwise could have fit into the film, in a way that keeps it vibrant and interesting instead of dusty and dull. The subject wasn’t exactly new to me, having been a teenage alternative music fan in the early 00s, and part of the induction into being a ‘proper’ punk fan was learning about the politics and Rock Against Racism – or Love Music Hate Racism as they became – was an important part of that. However, it was really good to see a thoughtful, well-made film that both treated it’s subject seriously and as something worth remembering. (The film has also got some cracking tunes, and gave me a bunch of new old punk and ska bands to check out.) The film is partly an arty little documentary about music subcultures in the late 70s, and partly it’s a damning indictment of the evils of the abuse of power, media propaganda and systemic racism. It also draws a whole bunch of unspoken parallels with today’s issues around racial justice and immigration, it doesn’t hit you over the head with them, just lays out the facts and leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This is definitely a film that says: sure things used to be much worse and these folks helped make it better, but there’s still a lot of work to do. But I imagine that message felt a lot subtler and less urgent when the film was made last year than it does in this present moment.

IFF17 @EdenCourt – Bridging the Gap: Rebellion

I normally see the Bridging the Gap short films at the Edinburgh Film Festival, so it was a little odd to see them in Inverness. This year’s theme was ‘rebellion’ apparently, which I’m not actually that sold on as a theme for the films. Looking at the piece I wrote last time I saw a full ‘Bridging the Gap’ screening, it appears that they normally assign the theme first – as the scheme provides new Scottish/based-in-Scotland film-makers with not only funding, but training and support as well – and on that basis I’m not sure that they fulfilled the brief very well. There are some quite nice little documentaries in the selection but none that really blew me away. There’s certainly nothing to compare to Pouters and Polaris from that last time. (Oddly enough I’ve since seen Polaris again since then twice at other short film screenings and I’m never disappointed to re-watch it.)

Teeth
Far and away the funniest film of the screening. Oddly enough it’s a kind of documentary that I usually hate, in which the director is making a film about some issue or other that they are a little obsessed about and talking to us via the voiceover. They’re usually either terribly worthy or terribly cringey. However, thankfully this one was an exception. I loved the conceit of filming the interview subjects’ mouths so that we focus on their teeth. Perhaps because I have had a difficult relationship with my own teeth and the dentistry industry. (My teeth were fine until I got my first wisdom tooth at fifteen, and it was all downhill from there.) Maybe because it didn’t take its subject matter too seriously and was genuinely funny in its tone. I’ve felt his pain, and so, wincing in sympathy, I laughed with him.

Inhale
This was the best film of the bunch I think. Apart from some weird arty shots of tadpoles and frogspawn at the start, it was a beautifully shot and perfectly pitched in tone film. It’s about grief and recovery and resilience. It helps that its central character has one of those really compelling voices; he’s lived an interesting life and can express himself well when he’s talking about it. One of those people that if you ended up talking to him on a train, you’d gladly go an extra couple of stops to keep talking to. It’s a subtle and very moving film, highly recommended.

We Are Here
An odd but charming film. It’s a film about friendship and about reconnecting with your best friend as an adult. In this case because the director’s best friend, Stuart, had an accident a couple of years ago and is recovering from a traumatic brain injury. It’s about memory and identity and living in the moment. This fascinating central concept that they agree on that this person is not who he was before the accident, that he’d never be that person again and that that’s fine. That they can still be best friends not just despite that, but also partially because of it.

There’s something missing from this film that I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps its just a feeling that there’s a question the director isn’t asking, that he would be asking if his subject wasn’t his childhood best friend. Regardless of this, I liked the film.

Plastic Man
This is a beautifully shot film and its central character is both odd and compelling – I can completely understand why someone would want to make a film about him. However, I came away from the film unsure about what it is he’s actually doing or for that matter what the film is trying to say about it.

Hold
Hold is an odd film. It’s about absence and loving someone who isn’t there. In this case because they’re in prison. From what little we learn its presumably white-collar crime – theft, a nine-year sentence, they’re very middle-class – and there’s a kind of naiveté about the whole thing. It’s weird that the little girl in the film seems more practical and accepting of reality – this is how our lives are now – than her mother. Her mother is the one who has, by her own admission, built a fantasy/fiction around the whole situation.

Only My Voice
This is a film about refugee women in Greece. Some of them we never see and the ones we do, we only see in fragments, as though to actively prevent us from drawing conclusions about them and their lives from their faces. This film also has some glorious sound design moments, taking the woman’s voices and playing with them and their context. It’s an interesting concept and is probably the film that best adheres to the theme of rebellion. Almost all the women talk about the way that coming to Greece has both extended and limited their freedom.

Other Adventures @ The Inverness Film Festival

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 miss 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 films 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

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

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!

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.