Tag Archive for: Film

Upcoming Screenings in London

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‘Interrupted Memory’ at Birkbeck
Friday 9 January at 6pm

memory pointing (small)One of the interviewees in Interrupted Memory (Memoria interrumpida) (Michael Chanan, 2013, 116mns) recalls being detained in the 1976 coup in Argentina. She was beaten and raped. She began, defensively, to play a role. ‘Me, I know nothing about politics. I’m just a girl, I’m 17.’ Her captors let her go with a warning, ‘You don’t leave this place twice. Behave properly, don’t say anything.’ She was so traumatized that she went on playing the role of the naïve girl for years. Real life was suspended.

Michael Chanan’s film charts not just the public history of recent political violence in Chile and Argentina, but also the intimate and inner damage it has wreaked.

Free entry. To attend this event please RSVP: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bisr-guilt-screening-tickets-14629456097 or just turn up!

‘Secret City’ at SOAS
Saturday 24 January at 4pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre

Aldermen and judges (small)

16:00  London is Burning (Haim Bresheeth, 2012, 45′)
17:00  Secret City (Michael Chanan, 2012, 72′)
18:30 Panel presentations and discussion:
Chair: Prof. Annabelle Sreberny (SOAS)
Prof. Costas Lapavitsas (SOAS): “Non-Productive Capitalism and its trail of destruction”
Owen Jones (Guardian) TBC
Prof. Doreen Massey (Open U): “The city of London: The invisible demon”

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Remembering Richard Attenborough

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Attenborough shooting OWALW

This is how I remember Richard Attenborough—setting up a shot for Oh! What a Lovely War, in a photo I took myself. He’s the one in the hat. The news of his death takes me back to where I started, because that first film of his as director was also the occasion for my own first effort at filmmaking, and I’m eternally grateful to him for the chance (rare in those days) to have made a film of the filming.

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Best Docs?

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When Sight & Sound sent out their invitation to contribute to their best documentaries poll, I’m afraid I bottled out, and sent this response.

Dear Nick,

Thanks for inviting me to contribute to Sight & Sound’s best documentaries poll. I’m afraid the task has defeated me. There are certainly some films which come to mind immediately, starting with classic titles like Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City, and Vigo’s A propos de Nice—if you’ve written about documentary history, you start thinking chronologically, but the result would be ten or a dozen films for each decade. I’ve already got a list like that—I give it to my students—but it’s not what you want. Yet it includes a good number of little known gems—for example, Les Raquetteurs by Groulx and Brault, Marisol Trujillo’s Prayer, Jorge Furtado’s Island of Flowers—which for me encapsulate essential aspects of documentary. Should these be dropped in favour of bigger numbers, like, I don’t know, Pennbaker’s Don’t Look Back, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Poto and Cabengo, Paul Leduc’s ABC del Etnocidio, or Moretti’s Dear Diary? OK, that’s ten titles already, and I haven’t even started. Read more

Spirit of Coutinho

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This video presents an overview of the work of the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014), one of the most original documentarists of recent decades, whose films remain shamefully little known in the English-speaking world.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/99022268#[/vimeo]

Read an accompanying discussion of the themes and preoccupations of his work here.

Avi Mograbi: A fly in the soup

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 Here’s a piece I’ve written on the Israeli documentarist for Sight & Sound:

Variety calls him a “gadfly documaker” and Cineaste quotes his own self-evaluation: “If some [filmmakers] see themselves as a fly on the wall, I see myself as a fly in the soup”. In short, he is a performative documentarist, like Nick Broomfield, Michael Moore or Nanni Moretti, who acts himself up on screen: a playful and self-deprecating video diarist with attitude — and split-screen personality disorder. Part of this attitude is a rejection of Zionist orthodoxies and solidarity with the Palestinians; part is a deep distrust of the orthodox idea of objectivity. Reality isn’t punctual. As Mograbi puts it, it is never there in itself and it’s always already being interpreted for us all the time. Besides, there is no such thing as a transparent camera; no way, for example, you can introduce a camera at a checkpoint without the soldiers noticing. The camera has a certain power: ”You can almost blackmail everyone into behaving better.” Whatever the situation, people respond to the camera, whether explicitly or not.But the intervention of the camera also has a tendency to backfire on you.

Read the full article: Chanan on Mograbi

Avi Mograbi

Avi Mograbi is a special guest at Open City Docs Fest in London (17-22 June). See opencitydocsfest.com for details.

Eduardo Coutinho In Memoriam

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Poetic injustice. The terrible irony of it. On the same day, the news that the US actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died from a heroine overdose, and the veteran Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, has been stabbed to death by his son, who is reported to suffer from schizophrenia. (According to a BBC report, the police told a press conference that the son ‘knocked on a neighbour’s door after the attack saying he had “liberated his father”.’) I learn about the first from the mass media, the second from Facebook, in posts from Latin American friends and colleagues, who over the next few hours register a huge outpouring of shock and grief, for Coutinho was well known and much loved. In Latin America, that is, because Coutinho was a documentarist. Still active at the age of 80, his work was little known elsewhere. The more’s the pity, because he was one of the most original of contemporary filmmakers in any field. Read more

An Encounter with Miklós Jancsó

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The Round-Up (1965), The Red and the White (1967), The Confrontation (1969), Red Psalm (1972): the films of Miklós Jancsó were one of the most exciting discoveries of radical cinema in Europe in the late 1960s, but hearing of his death last Friday at the age of 92 brings back a personal memory, for at the very beginning of my career as a film maker, I had a brief but hugely positive encounter with him. I interviewed him when he came to London for the opening of The Confrontation in 1969, and me a young film and music critic just then finishing my first short documentary for the BBC. Read more

New? Latin American? Cinema?

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The proper title of Havana’s annual film festival, founded in 1979, is the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema – Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano.  The words mark the Festival’s identification with a movement that was born in the 1960s, in the diverse endeavours of a new generation of filmmakers across the continent. The Festival remains a model of its kind after thirty-five years, the programme not only full of films in cinemas across town but also workshops and masterclasses of all sorts. This year’s centre-piece seminar (in which I was privileged to be one of the panelists) boldly addressed the Festival’s very raison d’être, under the title ¿Nuevo? ¿Cine? ¿Latinoamericano? – ‘New? Latin American? Cinema?’ It went along with perhaps the strangest festival promo you’ve ever seen, beautifully made by Pavel Giroud, in which an old projectionist switches off his projector, takes the reel off and goes and buries it.

[youtube aJNg73RM-U4]

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Coming soon: ‘Interrupted Memory’ / ‘Memoria interrumpida’

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Interrupted Memory is the title of the film I’ve been shooting over the last three months in Argentina and Chile, a documentary about memory and politics which follows the course of people in the act of remembering in front of the camera. Asked about their earliest political memories, people recollect incidents and recount experiences from childhood and youth often figuring popular militancy and rebellion, military coups and the state violence and repression which followed. In Argentina, an old trade unionist remembers a factory occupation; a woman speaks about being kidnapped by state intelligence at the age of seventeen; another of spending seven years as a political prisoner; a father and son tell the story of the other son who disappeared. In Chile, a woman remembers her Communist father being released from concentration camp in 1949, people remember the military coup of 1973 at different ages, and younger ones remember discovering they were living in a dictatorship. The oldest contributor is over eighty, the youngest are students occupying a high school in Santiago.

A psychologist in Chile and a psychoanalyst in Buenos Aires speak of psychoanalysis under dictatorship. The remembered experiences shape a collective narration of history in the two countries from a range of different angles, whose traces are also found in the archives that play off against the spoken word. In short, the film constructs a possible version of lived political experience, of collective living memory, which emulates the condition Gilles Deleuze found in films by Jean Rouch and Pierre Perrault, where the stories people tell, he said, are never fictional. It concludes with reflections on the politics of memory, and the lacunae of today’s official discourses of human rights in the two countries, either because trauma, both social and individual, always leave traces that remain ineffable, beyond expression—or because some things are put aside as politically inconvenient or incorrect.

Interrupted Memory is currently in post-production. Filmed in Argentina and Chile, May-July 2013, it will run about 120mns. Made with support from IRSES/TRANSIT, British Academy, Santander Fund at the University of Roehampton.