BIGLENS Issue 3.6 by Big Lens

? T R A T I S BUT I S CINEMA A N R O P F ION O A DISCUSS

BIGLENS THE KENT FILM MAGAZINE | VOLUME 3, ISSUE 6 | AUTUMN 2007

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ISTORY H G IN T R O DIST A PUS CINEM M A C W E OUR N AND MORE

COVER: INSIDE DEEP THROAT | UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

SMALLPRINT Edited by Dan Cooper Copy Edited by Paul Ockelford Designed by Euan Monaghan Incoming Editors Nia Childs and Paul Ockelford If you have a passion for film and would like to contribute to BIGLENS, please email pto5 or come along to one of our weekly meetings which are (usually) held in Rutherford seminar room 15 on Mondays at seven. BIGLENS is produced with the support of Kent Film, a society of the University of Kent Students Union. | All information is provided in good faith. | Articles are not necessarily the opinions of the editors of BIGLENS, of the Kent Film Society or of Kent Union. | Everything that is already copyrighted, is theirs. | Everything not, is the intellectual property of the individual writer, so no thieving.

EDITORIA “… enjoy and don’t worry – the best film magazine on campus will return next term under the leadership of a young Mr. Dan Cooper. It will be Dan’s job to turn this pubescent teenager into a mature adult, so all the best to him.”

Since the Kent Film AGM of March 2005, I have had the honour of being BIGLENS’ editor. In the last twoand-a-chunk years we’ve broken several records including most issues produced and longest editorial team tenure. When Joe Morris handed stewardship over to myself and Euan, he did so with the legend down on the left. I have had the enormous pleasure of being able to affect some real, positive change, work with doubtless the best writers at this university and be involved with curing BIGLENS of its acne and boob trouble. BIGLENS is now a big scary adult – and so am I. So this is my valediction. Of course for me, it’s a wrench knowing that BIGLENS’ future is in the hands of someone else (this job comes along with a heavy dose of control freakery), but it’s crucial to move on before you and your ideas get entrenched. End on a high. All I will say is that I am going to miss the ping of my inbox and the feeling of total pride when you read something truly brilliant and realise that you are the one who has enabled it to be seen by the public. I would like to say thank you, in no particular order, to, Joe Morris, Andy Carr, Peter Wilson, Ellio Santinez, Paul Ockelford, Michael Boyd, Naida Ally, Mark Alan Warburton, Samantha Speer, Thomas Ogier, Andrew Hauser, John Nugent, Eriko Kurasawa, Damon Murphy, Stephen Marsh, Tim Kelleher, Drew O’Neill, Damian Wrigley, Nia Childs, James Thorneycroft, Thomas Giffin, Phillipa Briscoe and Dave Gilmore. Almost all of whom I met through BIGLENS, many of whom I consider good friends. Importantly, none of this would have been capable without the breathless creativity, talent, charm, wit, good nature, patience and fringe of Mr. Euan Monaghan, who gave his time, effort, and energies into breathing life into every single page of BIGLENS, coping along the way with my liberal attitude to deadlines and jibes about his haircut. Euan is remaining with the team for a further year, and BIGLENS is now under the very capable administration of Mr. Paul Ockelford and Ms. Nia Childs, who have a mission to guide BIGLENS through its first few years of adulthood, give it renewed life and vigour and do nothing less than continue the grand tradition of working with the best writers and artists in this fair city to create something that is truly breathtaking. The future’s in your hands now, kiddo.

DAN COOPER

HOLLYWOOD HISTORY - TOM GIFFIN

BLACK HAWK DOWN | COLUMBIA PICTURES

How many people have seen the words ‘based on true events’ appear whilst watching a film? I have, many times, too many times. However you have to ask yourself, how much is actually real? More importantly, how dangerous is it presenting a pseudotruthful account of events which people believe are actually true? The technical term is called the ‘false document technique’, often used to frighten the audience. Consider the powerful and tension building narrative at the start of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ‘The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths...’. Immediately you are drawn into the world because of the possibility that this happened. Obviously you can only apply this technique to horror films that could happen like in the case of Blair Witch Project. Seeing a film like Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street trying to persuade you that they are based on true events would be laughable at best. One of the best examples of what happens when people believe a fictional piece of film to be true occurred in 1991. Six years earlier, a tiny Japanese piece of cinema called The Guinea Pig Experiments was created. Although fictional, it tried to be the most realistic snuff film there ever was. A snuff film is one that shows the real murder of a person or people. The films became an underground cult musthave, and at only 45 minutes long, with grainy quality and no intro or outro cards it fell into infamy. Then in 1991, the actor Charlie Sheen got hold of a copy. Cue public outcry, a damning condemnation of this kind of ‘filth’, phone calls to the FBI and arrests of people who had imported it into the US and the UK. The film became notorious after this. Other examples occur throughout horror films. In Cannibal Holocaust, the effects were so real that there was a rumour that the cast had really

been slain, the director had to take the cast onto a chat show to prove that they had not been killed and eaten. Although never claiming to be based on true events, the documentary style of the film persuaded many that this was a real documentary. These are only a few examples of what happens when people believe pseudo-truthful films to be actual truth. Turning away from horror, another main type of accurate historical films are those of the war genre. Whether the glossy beach landing of Private Ryan or the tactical errors of Black Hawk Down, many war films are based on true events that are then dramatised. Mel Gibson’s Braveheart is a good example of a dramatisation of a poem of a person. The film is so dramatised that it contorts history in many places. There are dozens of websites dedicated to pointing out the historical mistakes in that film yet the film was publicised as an historical biography of William Wallace. If we take the example of 300, it is based on a dramatised graphic novel which was based on a dramatised poem which was based on the battle of Thermopylae. Blimey! The fact that the events the story is based on actually happened does not mean that the poem or the film are to be taken as gospel truth. The film has even received criticism from Iranian authorities because it ‘insults the Persians’... The historian Kevin Brownlow has pointed out several massive historical inaccuracies in films. Several examples of these are in U571, the audience was led to believe that it was the US navy rather than the British Royal Navy that captured the German Enigma code machine. One thing that will always change in films is heroes. There are many people hailed historically as being heroes when the truth is often contradictory. Davy Crockett in The Alamo is a hero yet historically there is evidence that he had serious flaws, he was human but the media present him as a faultless hero. Yet another historical example is the 1936 film Charge of the Light Brigade, historically a military cock up of epic proportions but in the film the charge is shown as an intentional act of revenge in India. However, if people believe a piece of cinema to be true then it can become a huge advantage, most notably in the case of propaganda. The Second World War produced some of the finest propaganda in terms of posters, cartoons and films. All nations produced some of it, whether Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia or Stuart Legg’s Churchill’s Island in 1941, showing the defense of the British Isles. Obviously propaganda films have an agenda to persuade people that the fictional scenes they are being shown are how things really are. Since the emergence of film over a hundred years ago, history has been tweaked, twisted and sometimes completely rewritten to become more entertaining. There is nothing malicious in it at all, make no mistake about that, but it is pandering to an audience who couldn’t or wouldn’t watch a film that is completely accurate for many reasons. Possibly it is a lack of escapism that is disliked or the existing mythos around an event that people would rather enjoy. Regardless, I still like watching films based on history but I will be more wary about believing the facts presented at face value, just to be on the safe side.

THE CINEMATOGRAPHER - EUAN MONAGHAN

There is a fair chance of my getting lynched by my fellow BIGLENS writers for voicing this opinion, but it has to be said: I couldn’t stand Sin City. One thing stopped me from walking out of the cinema: the absolutely stunning visuals. House of Flying Daggers, Schindler’s List, Pan’s Labyrinth, Gattaca. While making this list of what I would consider to be some of the most beautifully realised films of recent times, something occurred to me. Many people with an interest in film would know who directed most of them, a fan of one of those films might know who wrote it, and even the average person who goes to the multiplex now and again could name a few of the staring actors. But if you ask anyone who photographed them, who physically created that moving interaction of light and surface, it’s fairly safe to assume that all you would get is a shrug. You may be thinking, fair enough, but you could write this article about any number of under-represented members of crew, featuring anyone from the production designer to the location scout to the caterers. And you know what? You’d be right. But that’s kind of the point. I think this article stands alongside Nia’s piece about the characterisation of actors as icons. It asks the question: what makes what you do so special? That said, it is true that in the world of film production, the director is king (although even here, the producers amoung you may disagree), but

composes the shots and makes a hundred other technical decisions on a daily basis. In Hollywood, a person’s worth can be determined by the salary that they command. A cinematographer, or director of photography at the top of his game can earn $25 to $30 thousand a week. No one is disputing that this is a lot of money, but when you bear in mind that there is a group of actors who count themselves members of the $20 Million A Movie Club, you begin to see the massive disconnect. All this and the fact that lensmen don’t see anything in the way of a profit share, a percentage which many other crew members are eligible for. It’s not all bad news. Many directors often work with the same cinematographer time and time again. Alfonso Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki have worked together many times including on the Oscar nominated Children of Men. Michael Ballhaus has shot some of Martin Scorsese’s most successful films: Goodfellas and The Departed among them. On the other hand it is often the case that directors with a background in either cinematography itself (Barry Sonnenfeld – Men In Black) or others like Stanley Kubrick, who trained as a photojournalist, change cinematographers almost as often as they change scripts. Back to Sin City. It may be stretching the definition slightly to categorise it, or films like Saving Private Ryan or The Machinist as beautiful, but they all possess their own aesthetic that works incredibly well to help tell the story. While the blood-splattered exploits of Marv and co. may have left me cold, the hyper-noir stylings of cinematographer/director Robert Rodriguez kept me consistently entertained until the bitter end. So good camera work can save a film, and Pulp Fiction certainly proves that awful cinematography – seriously, watch it again – doesn’t ruin an otherwise good film. Still don’t believe me? Oliver Stapleton (cinematographer on The Shipping News) once said that the “cinematography of that film is in a technical sense pretty appalling, but in every other way is perfect. [...] I never could work out whether this was a happy accident or a work of genius.” Either way, it’s perhaps slightly telling that that Quentin Tarantino never worked with director of photography Andrzej Sekula again. They can make or break a film, but no one has ever heard of them. I suppose the Academy Award for Best Cinematography has only been around since 1928, so cinematographers are bound get some kind of recognition before too long. Right?

“WHO CREATED THAT MOVING INTERACTION OF LIGHT AND SURFACE?”

without a decent cinematographer/ production designer/whoever there is no film. It’s a team effort, and the cinematographer is the one who makes the director’s aesthetic dream a reality. He designs the lighting,

MIC S A G

ER R P O O O R A N C LEST A D BY ATT B N : R ON PO O S ING BOOT M C AS D D N

Porn’s easy isn’t it? Take a video camera, point it at some boobs. Bam. Job done. Then old men in dirty brown overcoats, like Colombo, will shuffle down to Soho and buy a big stack of porn to… well.. shuffle down to. It’s abnormal! It’s disgusting! It’s not the sort of thing a BIGLENS editor should be writing about! Well you’d be wrong. Porn movies might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it takes a brave man to stand up and try and have an intellectual discussion about them. What’s amusing is that a lot of people pretend to be far more prudish in public and say that they don’t want to think about porn. I blame the culture. Ironically, today, when we consider ourselves a fairly open and liberal society, is more prudish than centuries ago, when everyone would shag anything without remorse or concern, when (so called) lewd images were plastered across cave walls. Up until the 15th Century or so, it was fair to say that if you were over 8 years old, you were fair game. So let’s not kid ourselves that porn is anything new. It’s as old as folk legends. Admittedly, I think I’d have difficulty getting off to a line drawing of a woman drawn by a caveman in his own blood & faeces, but dem’s da breaks. The narratives in porn might be a little shorter than your average blockbuster, but the principle’s the same. A ‘hero’ goes on a ‘journey’, encounters a person, usually a villain, fights them, comes home. (Damn, I promised I wouldn’t use that one.) The only difference is that in porn, our hero’s journey isn’t one over distance, usually more over the various bases one can achieve before you can… Ya know. Anyway, porn has done more to further the uptake of digital technology than George Lucas. We all know that porn’s the backbone of the internet, but did you know that it was porn that

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latched onto the versatility and ease of use of Videotape, later Digital Video and the internet? All ol’ George did was demand that Panavision whack some nice lenses on his DV. There’s more, a lot of people think that the mere sight of an erect penis … etc is enough to weaken the knees of your average viewer. But we know that’s rubbish. In order to sexualise what we’ve all got between our legs, sufficient context needs to be provided. We all know that the actors might not be top-calibre, but someone’s got to write decent pillow-talk for them, light the sets, do the costumes and make-up. There’s art and artistry; you just forget it’s there. Also, obviously, there are conventions of pornography in the same way we have conventions of other genres, and because there’s a decent dose of self-parody (it’s not as if porn actors, producers and directors take themselves very seriously, just look at Ron Jeremy!) – any film company that can put out ‘Battlestar Orgasmica’, ’28 Gays Later’, or ‘Das Booty’, noting that each film is (probably) a noteworthy and postmodern parody of the subject matter in the title, is probably a fun place to work. These people love their material, and their customers do too. A lot of people forget that in terms of business, a little back-room smut is a billion dollar industry with nary a word of true academic discussion as to what constitutes good content. If we’re really wanting to show how permissive a society we are, then why isn’t there someone analysing this stuff so that we can all connect to the things that we love. I say it’s a genre, and should be treated as such. Anyone who disagrees: Well, they’re just a prude.

AM R O RIP T S F

THE GULBENKIAN CINEMA - INTERVIEW

As you may have noticed, the university is lucky enough to have a cinema right in the heart of the campus. (For some of us, this was the main reason we came to Kent, but that’s another story.) This summer it closed for a complete transformation, and should be up and running in time for the new term. We caught up with David Joyce, the director of the newly-christened Gulbenkian Cinema to find out more.

THE CINEMA EARLIER THIS SUMMER. A WORK IN PROGRESS...

So. Why now? We had a bid for funding accepted by the UK Film Council last year for refurbishment works for cinemas committed to screening specialised film. The University of Kent has provided the rest of the funding for the major refurbishment which includes a new screen and projection equipment, new cinema seating, new lighting, new decor and a new infrared hearing system. What can we expect from the new cinema? The new cinema will offer a much better sound and vision experience and a more enhanced cinema experience overall. At the same time the commitment to independent and foreign film and film education will continue with the best new releases being screened just weeks after release and exclusive to the Gulbenkian in Canterbury. Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart is the first example of this. We show the film from 5 October in the third week of nationwide release and you won’t find it on at the Odeon.

The name is being changed. Why is that? Or more to the point, why was the old one called Cinema 3 to begin with? The Gulbenkian brand has become more and more successful in recent years and the change of name amalgamates the cinema with the theatre and cafe bar and promotes Canterbury’s premier centre for the arts. Cinema 3 originated because at the time of its inception in the 1960s it was the third cinema screen in Canterbury. Will the refurbishment mean any change to the type of films being shown? The Gulbenkian Cinema will build on the reputation of Cinema 3 in having the most exciting and eclectic programme in Kent and the south-east of England. In the opening season we have big releases with Atonement, A Mighty Heart and Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It as well as arthouse hits such as Ten Canoes and Taxidermia and a major French film season as part of the Canterbury Festival with Lady Chatterley, The Singer, La Vie en Rose and director Stephane Brize here to introduce his film Not Here to be Loved. What is the GulbCineClub? GulbCineClub is the Gulbenkian’s brand new cinema club which offers customers great ticket discounts, free club screenings, social functions, talks and guest speakers, for an annual membership fee of £10. The idea of the club is to promote greater involvement of the public in Canterbury’s independent cinema and to encourage customers to play a starring role in the Gulbenkian Cinema. At the same time they get £2.00 off every time they come to see a film.

ACTORS AS ICONS - NIA CHILDS

We, as humans, as part of our human condition, have always had figures to idolize: whether it’s our parents, Jesus or John Lennon. Films have always been widely recognised as a collaborative effort; there are directors, cinematographers, editors and even make-up artists. But, there is one group of people that take the limelight, that are worshipped more so than any other people in the film industry - the actors. The actors are the stars of the show, they are used to sell films, they make more money than doctors and many are considered to be icons that can symbolise an entire generation - you can’t think of the ‘50s without thinking of Marilyn Monroe. But why is this? Why do the stars take the credit and why are we so obsessed? There seems to be one common tragic combination that links all of the major icons of the 20th century - these people are not only beautiful, but they are deeply troubled souls. Let’s take the biggest icon of all - and I mean the biggest - the one female will forever be remembered as the most beautiful star of all time - Marilyn Monroe. I cannot deny that I myself feel completely in awe of her. She is a beautiful woman who has 12

dominated a predominately male industry, and, though I am no feminist there is no denying that a woman who can practically make a man faint just by looking at him has got to be something very special. But, if we take a look at her life there is no doubt that she was a very unhappy person. She was abused by her stepfather and died in extremely suspicious circumstances. An entire generation of people mourned her loss - but why is this? Is it because her performance in The Seven Year Itch was just enthralling? I doubt it. If we look at her life, she hung around with gangsters, and stars (you were right the first time – Ed) like Frank Sinatra, and her husband Joe DiMaggio was a huge baseball star. So it’s not her talent that keeps everybody so in awe of her- it’s the idea that when you know so much about somebody, you feel as if you know them. The thousands of mourners that gathered on the streets for her funeral were not mourning somebody they knew, they were mourning the loss of somebody that they had created in their heads, someone the media had helped them create. Although the sadness in her life was no secret, people seem to have an urge to think they can save somebody from their pain, and for Marilyn Monroe it was too late. It’s the same with modern day icons such as Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix - people have a desire to rescue a tortured soul and feel a great loss when it doesn’t always work out. Another star that commands this iconic status is James Dean. If you actually count, James Dean didn’t feature significantly in any more than a few films, but it’s his life and the tragedy that surrounded it that people feel fascinated by. He was a young, extremely good looking man who died at the height of his fame, and losing an icon like this for some reason seems like such a tragedy for a group of people that don’t even know him. I am extremely conscious of the fact that this article may sound like I’m churning out Hollywood gossip, but I feel it’s really important to understand the motives and psychology of the

FRANK SINATRA | HOWARD FRANK ARCHIVES

average film viewer, because like it or not, stars can essentially shape the film industry. Stars like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor can bring in an audience. For example, I have seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And I know that it stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but if you ask me who directed it I couldn’t even hazard a guess, and I’m a film student. I could tell you that Peter Jackson directed the recent The Lord of the Rings and I could reel off virtually every star that was in it. But I couldn’t tell you who was in Bad Taste, his first feature, and I doubt many people could. This is because Peter Jackson, who is a very talented director and producer, simply cannot sell a film on his own. I suppose it’s just part of the human condition to aspire towards something, and the glamour that surrounds stars who are beautiful and rich is extremely appealing. And how ever much we try to deny it, the film industry is a business, it needs to make money to function and stars are the main attraction. This doesn’t mean that their job is not important. Who wants to see a film with bad acting? If I want to see bad acting I’d just watch an episode of Hollyoaks. I guess the dirty little secret about films is that actors and their roles in society are part of what makes the industry so big, but because their own creativity is limited to what the writers can produce and what the director tells them, they are looked down upon. We all want to believe that films are all made for artistic expression, but the majority of successful films are not. The film industry needs money and if you took away stars it would cease to exist. Stars are important not just economically but to fulfill an overwhelming desire that we all have: to aspire and relate to somebody. Whether it be Marilyn Monroe, the sexy but innocent blonde; Marlon Brando, the rebel; or Grace Kelly, who married a prince, we all want to be like these beautiful stars- they are our icons. 13

SOME WORDS FROM KENT FILM

As I was elected President of the Film Society at the end of last year, Joe Morris, the former President, told me that my position was essentially to ensure that other committee members put the effort in and did their job. I was sceptical of this until a few weeks into the first term of this current year; my phone bill suddenly skyrocketed. ‘Have you done this yet?’ ‘Can you get on this for me?’ A society based on a subject as broad as film meant that the events and initiatives our society encompassed were equally as broad, this meant more people to ‘delegate’ to. And with a committee so large you can be certain that there were some, who shall remain nameless, who decided to abruptly abandon their positions, declaring this simply by not turning up to meetings or answering phone calls. This meant either having to replace them fully or find a temporary replacement on a week by week basis. Whilst I can’t really blame them for this (as our newly elected committee will soon discover), it did add a lot of unnecessary stress. This brings me to the point of my writing, and onto BIGLENS itself. Dan Cooper has been editor of BIGENS now for two years, preceding my own time in the society, and throughout the year, I can safely say he’s been great (and you can insert as many four letter words followed by ‘-ing’ as you like). To my own discredit I can admit that I haven’t myself attended a BIGLENS meeting – but then I haven’t needed to! Not once did I have to ring Dan regarding the lateness of an issue’s release, or because he’d used up all the society’s money (he learnt not to do that off the last guy). Without a doubt I can safely say that Dan Cooper has been the most consistently hard-working member of the whole committee, and when the enthusiasm of others waned during Spring Term, Dan’s didn’t; I would often turn to him for advice myself (‘what’s an AGM?’). It is for this we have awarded him a Lifetime Membership to the Film Society. Dan Cooper, I salute you – now someone give this man a job. Peter Wilson

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