To the South

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Well I’ve just had one whirlwind of a trip. First, five nights in Atlantida, a very sleepy seaside town just along the coast from Montevideo (which I didn’t get to visit) on the La Plata estuary, for a small but extremely friendly documentary film festival called Atlantidoc, where I taught a workshop in directing documentary. Fifteen participants from half a dozen Latin American countries, not students but young film-makers out there hustling to get their films made, highly intelligent and articulate. Lots of animated conversation in the festival cafe on the beach, and late night screenings in the open air. More about this later.
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Reality Effects in London

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Over on ‘Open Spaces‘, Patty Zimmerman recently wrote about the vitality of cinema studies south the Rio Grande. She talks about attending a conference in Mexico and how she ‘heard brilliant analyses of films I didn’t know about. I listened to debates that never migrate al norte. I met passionate scholars mining the theoretical complexities of Mexican and Latin American cinemas beyond the confines of national identity formation. It was exhilarating. I loved being thrown into a place where I didn’t have any of the usual coordinates.’

Here in London we have been fortunate over the last few days to enjoy the same thing on a smaller scale at a conference attended by scholars from Brazil and Argentina, brilliantly devised and organised by Jens Anderman at Birkbeck, in the second of a series of three events in the three countries under the general title of Reality Effects, which included screenings of three recent films which all challenge the conventions of documentary. Read more

Curtocircuito: Materia

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Here’s the third film from the Curtocircuito workshop, Materia by Pablo Fontenla and Marce Magán. This one hardly needs subtitles. The text at the end says ‘Everything exists or doesn’t exist. Something can be at the same time itself and something else.’ A quote from Engels’ Anti-Dühring (although I believe Wittgenstein said something very similar).

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Curtocircuito

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The task was not so easy. The participants in the workshop had to make a three-minute documentary in four days. The subject was Santiago de Compostela, where the workshop was held as part of Curtocircuito—ShortCircuit in Gallego—one of a number of new film festivals which have grown up in Spain, as in many other countries, in the last few years. Read more

Soundtrack thoughts

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I’ve recently caught up with Charles O’Brien’s splendid, paradigm-shifting book, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound, subtitled Technology and Film Style in France and the US. Briefly, O’Brien combines thorough research into primary sources and empirical methods of analysing film style to critique the conventional idea that the coming of sound produced a homogenisation of cinema which spread abroad from Hollywood in the 1930s. In particular, this is not what happened in France, which developed a strong predilection for what was called the film parlant—the talkie which used direct recorded sound—as opposed to the film sonore—the sound film where the sound was post-synchronised, which fast became the Hollywood way.

Of course it’s not quite so simple. Read more

End of the BFI as we know it?

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Let’s have no illusions. It was probably inevitable. The government has announced plans for a merger of the BFI and the Film Council [UKFC]. As The Guardian has it, ‘The British film landscape could be facing its biggest upheaval in almost a decade…’ That is to say, since the Film Council was set up in 2000, to oversee and administer UK film policy, including responsibility for providing the BFI’s grant-in-aid. In all likelihood, what will happen now is the final subordination of the BFI’s cultural remit (which dates back to 1933) to the commercial interests that the Film Council effectively represents. Time Out has described the Film Council as ‘‘heavily geared towards optimising conditions for the commercial success of the British film industry’ (8-14 August 2007). As Ian Christie told the Independent Film Parliament, held in Cambridge in 2003, ‘The people running British cinema are not perceived as having a cultural stake in cinema at all, let alone a vision of British cinema per se. Rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as being in the pockets of the American majors, or at least their boutique divisions.’ Read more

Lockerbie on film

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The Times reports today that the withdrawal of his appeal by the supposed Lockerbie bomber, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, and his expected repatriation on compassionate grounds (he is terminally ill), looks like part of a deal, indeed a cover-up, designed to avoid the courts having to reconsider the evidence.

Christine Grahame, a member of the Scottish Parliament, said: “There are a number of vested interests who have been deeply opposed to this appeal because they know it would go a considerable way towards exposing the truth behind Lockerbie.”

Arraigned against these interests are numerous relatives of the victims and assorted experts who

have long doubted the evidence used to convict al-Megrahi and asked how a single man could have carried out such a deadly attack. They have questioned whether Syria or Iran was really responsible. Some even suspect that the CIA tampered with the evidence.

And perhaps they did more than tamper. I refer you to my review of Alan Francovich’s film on the subject back in 1994.

Another film on Che Guevara

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Here comes another film on Che Guevara. This time it’s a documentary with the somewhat naff title of Chevolution, directed by Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez,  opening at the ICA in London on 18th September. In fact there’s been a constant stream of films, both dramas and documentaries, about el Che for several years now, and the only other twentieth century historical figure who has possibly had more films devoted to him over the same period is Hitler. Which makes you think. Read more

Acting up

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Back in February, actors starring in Michael Winterbottom’s politically-charged The Road To Guantanamo were held by British police under anti-terrorism legislation on their return from Berlin where the film premiered. One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said he was verbally abused, had his mobile phone was taken away, told he could be kept in police custody for up to 48 hours without access to a lawyer. He also claims a police officer asked him if he planned to star in any more “political films”.   Read more