A Documentary Festival in Cyprus

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A long time, I know, since the last post. That’s because I’ve been hard at work on a new film, to be unveiled soon. Back in August, however, I had a welcome break with a visit to Cyprus for the Lemesos documentary festival, one of the numerous such events that have have flowered in so many places over recent years (Lemesos is seven years old). Demonstrating the existence of real audiences, these festivals give heart to the independent film-maker.

What you get in small festivals like Lemesos is not just the enthusiasm of a local community, who include aspiring film-makers, but also a bunch of invited directors, producers and speakers (here including myself, talking ‘In defence of documentary’) who share the event  — with the help of some splendid hospitality. Here is pretty much everyone speaking their bit:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIkwc54TYJM[/youtube]

 

 

“I Like Students’

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or ‘Me gustan los estudiantes’: Mario Handler at St Andrews

The Uruguayan documentarist Mario Handler came to St Andrews recently for a symposium revisiting New Latin American Cinema of the 60s through the Uruguayan case. The event was able organised by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, included a prety cogent overview of Documentary and Activism by Leshu Torshin, and a Q&A with Mario Handler by Gustavo San Román. This was my own contribution. Read more

Soundscapes in Maastricht

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Maastricht provided a suitably quiet setting for an international workshop on ‘Soundscapes of the urban past’, which covered the behaviour of audition across different forms — radio, film, theatre, plus new audio phenomena like car stereos and audio museum guides — from a range of perspectives, including social history, history of technology, sociology, music, media and cultural studies, etc. The idea, with Karin Bijsterveld at the helm, was to bring together a group of about a dozen people to discuss the drafts for a volume of essays to be published next year. Read more

Marx at the Movies in Preston and Third Cinema in Oxford

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Events since the near-death experience of finance capital in 2008 have succoured renewed attention not to Marxism as a political creed but to Marx as the urtext of the proper analysis of the capitalist system. On the one hand, old established Marxist scholars like Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey have all published new books, while on the other, numerous articles alluding to Marx’s relevance have appeared in both the capitalist press and independent weeklies, sometimes even on the radio (though never television). On the web, you can find a growing number of videos about capitalism, its discontents and dysfunctions, strongly informed by Marxist ideas, jostling for attention with an explosion of more anarchistic street level video activism. Read more

Revisiting the theory/practice debate

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Interesting discussion going on recently over on Film-Philosophy about that old bugbear, the relation of theory to practice in our teaching and study of film. This debate has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages.  In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. Read more

Nostalgia for the Light

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Patricio Guzmán’s latest film finally reaches London at a DocHouse screening on 2nd February.

The Atacama desert in the north of Chile—the location for Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)—is one the driest places on earth, where astronomers have located optical and radio telescopes to take advantage of the extraordinarily clear air, the zero humidity and almost total lack of clouds, and an absence of light pollution and radio interference from nearby cities. In the film’s opening scenes, Guzmán’s gentle voice tells us how he became attracted to the region as a consequence of his boyhood fascination with astronomy and enthusiasm for Jules Verne—the subject of a film he made for French television a few years ago (Mon Jules Verne, 2005)—and he now waxes lyrical over the magnificence of the Atacama skies, where an extraordinary number of stars and constellations can be seen even by the naked eye. The first film that Guzmán has shot in HD, the pellucid light of the film’s title, and the bleak expanses of the extraordinary landscape, are beautifully captured in the limpid cinematography of Katell Djian. The soundtrack too is permeated by the landscape, full of silences and reticent touches of music by the Chilean musicians Miranda and Tobar.  

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The camera that supposedly changed the world

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The recent BBC documentary ‘The Camera That Changed the World’, directed by Mandy Chang, about the birth of direct cinema at the start of the 1960s, was a solidly crafted and conventionally narrated television documentary containing a good deal of fascinating material, especially in the form of the testimony of surviving participants. Unfortunately, however, these were embedded in a narrative that was historically askew—although truth be told, only in the same way as the versions to be found in most film histories that deal with the topic. Read more

Blinded by science?

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There’s an interesting new piece of research about the perceptual process of watching films which I can’t get out of my head without writing a blog about it. This research is not just of theoretical interest, but touches on pedagogic concerns. Part of learning to watch films critically is to understand how editing works, and this means learning to see every cut. This is an acquired ability (especially well developed among film editors). Thanks to this research we now know for certain what the film teacher has always known—that the untutored film viewer, and any of us some of the time, simply doesn’t notice a lot of the cuts. Two experimental psychologists investigating the topic, Tim Smith and John Henderson, call this ‘edit blindness’.  Read more

Forgotten early Soviet sound films

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Three Forgotten Early Soviet Sound Films on the Electrification of the USSR

(This is a revised version of the talk I gave at the BFI Southbank on 1st June 2011 as part of the Soviet season, to introduce Macheret’s Men and Jobs and an extract from Shub’s K.Sh.E. Here I also discuss Dovzhenko’s Ivan.) Read more

Postgrads in Glasgow

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Following the KCL Postgrad Film Studies Conference that I wrote about last week, I’ve been up to Glasgow for a similar event. In fact, two. The first was a workshop on documentary as research, with a focus on human rights and video activism. The panel I joined included folk from the Manchester collective Castles Built in Sand, the Glasgow Human Rights Film Festival, and Camcorder Guerrillas. Read more