7 Inch Cinema & Flatpack Festival 2003-2013 Almanac
Contents p.2 Foreword by Catherine O’Flynn p.4 Beginnings p.6 How to put on your own filmnight p.7 7 Inch Cinema programme covers p.8 2003-2006 p.11 Flatpack 1-3 p.14 2007-8 p.16 Birmingham’s what I think with p.17 2009-10 p.18 Flatpack 4-6 p.21 2011-13 p.22 Flatpack 7 p.23 The next chapter p.24 Credits
1
Foreword By Catherine O’Flynn
I left Birmingham for Barcelona in 2002. When I returned three years later I found my home city had changed. The creaking, oozing Bull Ring had lost its definite article and become the human lobster pot known simply as Bullring. Those seemingly modern, twin communication landmarks of the city, the Post and Mail building and Pebble Mill studios, had been reduced to rubble. But a vague sense of disorientation and loss was always the background hum to life in Birmingham, so the demolition and redevelopment failed to really shock. What was more unsettling was the sense I had that something less tangible but more important had also shifted while I’d been away. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
After that I attended 7 Inch Cinema and Flatpack Festival events in pubs, in converted factories, in art galleries, in tents, in listed historic houses and once in a bus. In retrospect it seems shameful that previously I had known nothing of the work of Len Lye; or had never, in its 30 odd year existence, seen John Smith’s brilliant The Girl Chewing Gum; or heard Mark E. Smith read the football results. But the 7 Inch agenda was never to make the audience feel reprehensibly dumb. It seemed driven by an inclusive kind of enthusiasm, albeit enthusiasm of a nicely understated, softly spoken variety.
Someone who lived in my house during my absence had left a mysterious sticker on the bedroom window. A black and white image of a man with a camera and the words ‘7 Inch Cinema’. It seemed a clue worth following up.
Flatpack is not a parochial affair. The programming embraces the global and showcases work from around the world, that most of us would never otherwise stumble across. Somehow they manage to combine that internationalism with a solid sense of community and place and
2
t fi S m p c B S
B w o n b n I m h a p r a m
for anonymous A-road carveries and mosaic lined underpasses. It was a little disorientating then to find so much stuff going on, and yet stuff that somehow picked up exactly on that certain plangent Betaville tone and turned it into something beautiful or exciting. Flatpack seemed to me to embody that and still does.
that goes a lot further than just showing films by local filmmakers or playing Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham. It’s a more generalised celebration of artists, performers and writers working in the city: collaborations with musicians like Pram or Broadcast, or screenings to accompany Stan’s Cafe’s 24 Hour Scalextric. Back in 2005, after finding the sticker on my window I signed up for 7 Inch Cinema mail outs. I discovered a listings service that was nicely curated but generous; expansive but intimate; and a valuable source of new sandwich venue recommendations. It was there that I learned of other mysterious organisations and events that had sprung up while I’d been living away, amongst them Ikon Eastside, The Rainbow pub and the Supersonic Festival. I’d returned to Birmingham because I’d had a perverse hankering for a certain kind of mediocrity, for empty Sunday afternoons,
3
Beginnings By Ian Francis
S
Autumn 1998. Bill Clinton has not long fled town after drinking a watery pint at the Malthouse pub. I am working at the Birmingham Film and TV Festival when I experience two life-altering events: 1) a shedload of lottery-funded AV equipment arrives at the festival, and I have to teach myself how to use it; 2) an encounter with a starry-eyed volunteer in a projection box at the Odeon New Street, future mother of my children and more importantly (at least in this context), future co-founder of 7 Inch Cinema.
Five years later, and I’m having a go at freelancing. Towards the end of my time at the BFTVF I had been programming more and more events outside of the cinema, using said lottery kit to show shorts in bars and community venues. Not just because the technology was available, but also because it was cheaper this way, and it offered the freedom to show things you might not put on in a cinema. This was a boom time for interesting music videos, animation and shortform work, and with persistence a lot of it could be tracked down on the web. (After many years of waiting for distributors to respond to faxes, this was a blessed relief.) Just as excitingly, there was a lot more leeway to book bands and performances alongside these films, and to sell these events as a social occasion. Film-going sometimes felt like a bit of a sad, solitary affair, and under the influence of music promoters like Oscillate and Capsule we dreamt of film events that were not just good for you but also fun. 4
a l i d t a f n t fi o T c e i a o
O f c I a b s c c d n s d h d p m t y
t
So this was to be my focus as a sole trader, although how it was going to make me a living wasn’t yet obvious. In 2003 a group including Fuzz Townshend (once the drummer for Pop Will Eat Itself) refurbished the Rainbow pub in Digbeth and made an immediate impact, just by creating a friendly atmosphere and putting on good nights. Terrified that someone would get in there before us (Birmingham felt like a onefilmnight kind of town back then), we swiftly offered our services and booked a monthly Tuesday night slot. Having spent all year coming up with various rubbish titles for my embryonic business I now needed a name in a hurry. ‘7 Inch Cinema’ arrived at 1am after a night out, and seemed like a stroke of genius at the time. *
However busy it got, the night never made much sense economically, and in retrospect that was one of its great strengths. We didn’t start with a funding application or business plan, but saw a gap and tried to fill it. The aim was to show things that you couldn’t see anywhere else, and also to galvanise people, and because we had no one to answer to we were able to develop a voice and make mistakes as we went along. This isn’t an argument for scrapping arts funding (without which we would never have been able to grow), but a reminder that sometimes it’s important to do something for its own sake. So much of the work we’ve done since has flowed from those early experiments.
Our photocopied flyer included a call for submissions, and all sorts began to come out of the woodwork – not just films. I remember a trip up Stephenson Tower, a recently-demolished city centre towerblock, to collect a case of family holiday slides that an artist had ‘modified’ by carefully scratching in obscenities with a compass needle. These were projected during an interlude on the opening night, sandwiched by a blend of local submissions, internet treasures and archive discoveries listed on a photocopied handout that you could pick up at the door. Entry to that first event cost £1, and pulled in a decent crowd. The following month it was noticeably busier, and from then on it was advisable to arrive early if you wanted a seat.
* The original idea was something to do with short film DVDs being the equivalent of 7” singles, although the name has caused various misunderstandings and sometimes gets rejected by over-vigilant local authority spam filters.
5
Putting on your own filmnight
D o h
fi G t
Ten top tips on turning a social venue into a cinema for the evening
1
2 3
4
5
6
Make sure you can take over the sound system. There’s no point in trying to fight deep house with a low-key domestic drama. Steer clear of Friday and Saturday nights, for the same sort of reasons. If possible find somewhere which is easy to black out, particularly in the summer. We have expended a lot of effort and blu-tak sticking sugar paper to windows in the past. Beware of in-house equipment; those pull-down screens and ancient projectors designed to show footie. Licensing is not the same as copyright. The former is down to the venue, who need to have permission from the council to put on screenings. The latter is up to you – getting permission from the rights-holders to show their films. This applies even if you’re showing them for free.
7
8
9
10
6
If you’re showing shorts, make a programme handout. People love having something to browse while they’re watching. Don’t over-programme. We’ve consistently ignored this advice for ten years, but if you pack three hours of shorts into an event the audience can get a bit punchdrunk. Playing directly off a laptop gives you better quality than DVD. If you are using DVD, try and avoid menus coming up on screen. It looks crap. Show some local stuff to help develop your audience. It worked for showmen in the 1900s, and it still works now. Develop an identity beyond any particular films you might be showing. If all goes well, people will trust you to put on interesting work even if they’ve never heard of it.
Covers Dave Gaskarth produced a series of brilliant and occasionally warped covers for the 7 Inch programme handouts, and went on to create the identity for the first five Flatpacks. Sometimes taking weeks over one flyer, Gas made us look good from the start and established thoughtful design as central to the whole process.
n
n
7
2003–2006 As well as numerous pub gigs, this was a period when we started to learn the ropes of freelancing
I n p s c S t
and how to flog our wares. Early customers included Digbeth’s hairy, eclectic new Supersonic Festival, where we hosted the film space for many years, and The Public, who asked us to do some research on film in the Black Country. We also produced a DVD compilation of shortform work taken from our Rainbow events.
We ran the cinema tent at Shambala Festival in its early Somerset/Devon incarnations, often showing films for two or three days solid on very little sleep. Abiding memories include: laying our toddler down underneath the projector at bedtime; a generator cutting out during The Jungle Book, leaving a darkened tent full of bereft young viewers; one of our DJs strictly enforcing a bongo-free zone; and Singin’ in the Rain lighting up a drizzly Sunday afternoon. The inflatable structure pictured on the left was a former US Army decontamination tent, bought cheaply off the internet. Nice and dark, though it tended to get a bit smelly by the end of the weekend.
8
In 2005 an arts centre in Aalst near Brussels invited us to curate a programme of performances and screenings. We overestimated our capacity for Belgian beer, and ZX Spectrum Orchestra (above) spread the geek gospel.
Gangsters was a grubby, surreal crime drama filmed in Birmingham which ran for two series in the 1970s. Over one weekend we showed all thirteen hours of it in a back-street warehouse, and set up an incident room to trace the show’s locations.
g
9
2003–06
T
S m o
C t t e f t
Our first proper funded project, Landmarks revisited two early BBC documentaries by Philip Donnellan and returned them to the places where they were made: Cradley Heath (Joe the Chainsmith, 1958) and Handsworth (The Colony, 1964). It was incredibly satisfying in terms of audience reaction and detective work, although we probably didn’t bargain for how time-consuming this kind of archive project can be. The most engaging interviewee in The Colony is Stan Crooke, a signalman from Balsall Heath. A highlight was tracking down his daughters through an ad in the Redditch Advertiser, then welcoming them to a screening at the mac. After the film we went for a balti on Ladypool Road, along with Donnellan’s daughter Philippa.
1 2 T
“ o u –
“ a a I o fi – 10
The birth of Flatpack Surprisingly enough, Flatpack started life in a meeting at Birmingham City Council. We were offered £5000 to put together an event, the Arts Council matched it, and we were away. Festivals thrive on a kind of collective insanity, a willingness to pitch in and make it happen, and in these early years in particular we were hugely reliant on favours and goodwill. Once you get a taste for it though, it’s a tough habit to kick.
Flatpack 1 19-22 January 2006 28 events across 8 venues Total admissions: 1,886
Highlights: a tribute to sound artist and prankster Henry Jacobs; the European debut of Portland, Oregon’s Vladmaster experience; previews of Mirrormask, Black Sun and Frank and Wendy; the UK premiere of Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey along with docs on Morrissey, Tresor and Iceland’s music scene; the Audible Picture Show; and a wake for Kodak’s fondly remembered K-40 super 8 film stock.
m e “A cornucopia of aural and visual oddities… the festival’s eclectic energy is unquestionably impressive.” – Metro “I tried to attend as many events as I could and had a great time. I met so many lovely and inspiring people over the weekend. I’m filled with ideas and inspiration to carry on making short films. I hope it was the first of many…” – audience feedback 11
Flatpack 2
Y u w g b C
1-4 February 2007 42 events across 10 venues Total admissions: 3,027
1 5 T
“A Dadaist flyer promises innovation and experimentation, and the Flatpack Festival – now in its second year – does not disappoint.” – Plan B “Flatpack tickles parts of my brain I didn’t know I had. Thank you 7inch. Birmingham deserves this.” – audience feedback
Highlights: The Seashell and the Clergyman with live score; guests including Bibio, Broadcast, Bela Emerson and David Rudkin; a 3D installation of carnivorous plants in St Martin’s Church and the Harrachov Exchange in Digbeth; previews of The Science of Sleep, Paprika and Bamako; and a ‘This is Your Life’ event with Tamworth maverick Mark Locke.
12
You may notice a gap in 2008. This was partly down to financial uncertainty, along with a wealth of year-round projects which kept us occupied (see p.14-15). Taking a year out was a gamble, but one that paid off. We returned in 2009 with our first bit of long-term funding (three years support from the UK Film Council) and a renewed sense of vigour and ambition.
Flatpack 3 11-15 March 2009 54 events across 16 venues Total admissions: 4,830
“Britain’s most exciting and innovative film festival.” – Lonely Planet “Best thing to happen to Birmingham ever.” – audience feedback
13
Highlights: Curzonora featuring The Destroyers in Birmingham Town Hall; guests including Paper Cinema, Guy Sherwin, David O’Reilly and Vanessa Toulmin; newly unearthed 50s amateur film from Northfield; screenings of Let The Right One In, Touki Bouki and In a Dream; and the first outing for our festival hub, in this instance a converted warehouse which we renamed Floodgate Kino.
2007-08 This was the point when we moved out of our attic and into an office, rebooted our website, and got ourselves a board. All of this, along with a surge in new work,
S C
combined to make 7 Inch Cinema feel like a proper organisation. Guest spots during this period included Aurora Festival in Norwich and London Short Film Festival at the ICA, while we also worked with a West Bromwich school to plan a glamorous red-carpet premiere for their film project.
Worcestershire on Film was an archive tour which visited all sorts of venues across the county, from nail museums and thatched barns to Malvern Priory and the ‘Chinese Gothic’ Pump Rooms at Tenbury.
Dream Within a Dream was the first of many collaborations with Ikon Gallery. A Halloween event in their Eastside space, it included a haunting turn by Broadcast (the late, and muchmissed, Trish Keenan is pictured right), as well as Scott Johnston’s coffinbased video installation The Divine Edgar. Because we were close to capacity, it had the distinction of being the only 7inch event that nearly got shut down by the police.
14
W a D s o p R a F
Shadow Play workshops and screenings at Compton Verney in Warwickshire.
When a media arts festival in Coventry asked us to put on an event, Delia Derbyshire seemed to be an obvious starting point. An unsung daughter of the city who went on to create pioneering electronic music as part of the Radiophonic Workshop, Derbyshire had already provided inspiration for the first Flatpack’s cover art (p.11).
In the run-up to the event we tracked down Derbyshire’s first house just outside Coventry. After answering the door the man who lived there went off to the loft and returned with two boxes of post-war ephemera including childhood doodles, Girl Guide membership card – and Delia Derbyshire’s actual gas-mask.
15
‘Birmingham’s what
2
I think with’
T C t s o w s F B a L
“Birmingham’s what I think with. It’s not made for that sort of job, but it’s what they gave me.” - Roy Fisher
One of the recurring themes of our work is Birmingham itself. Not out of navel-gazing, but because it’s a fascinating place and so little of its past has been talked about or properly documented. Both the people who live here and those who visit for the weekend seem to share our interest in its hidden corners and all the things that have been buried by the city’s insatiable appetite for redevelopment, and our walking tours and archive screenings are often the most popular elements of Flatpack. (I once talked about this with a man from Rotterdam’s festivals unit, and his response stayed with me: ‘The most important subject of any festival is the place where it happens.’)
16
It’s not just about the past. Compiling this booklet has been a reminder of how much Birmingham has changed over the past decade, and how much more it has to offer culturally than when we started out. When discussing how the place is regarded nationally and internationally, a familiar theme is often “Birmingham needs to shout louder” – a cliché that we’ve probably been guilty of employing ourselves. The priority, though, is to make it a brilliant place to be. The rest will follow.
2009–2010 The return of Flatpack meant that 7 Inch Cinema took a bit of a back seat, though there was a foretaste of the Colour Box family strand with the Travelling Picture Show, a series of kids’ screenings and animation workshops which toured the Midlands throughout summer 2009. We visited Rotterdam Film Festival and the wonderful Nova cinema in Brussels with special guests The Paper Cinema, and doffed a cap to one of our heroes Len Lye at Ikon Eastside. Another hero is David Rose, the producer who was a presiding genius at Pebble Mill’s drama department in the 70s and then at Film Four in the 80s. We were delighted to welcome him to mac for a retrospective which included such BBC gems as Nuts in May, Red Shift and Land of Green Ginger.
A regular residency at the Green Man Festival’s cinema tent in Glanusk Park continued with oddball midnight screenings, raucous family matinees and live guests including Gruff Rhys, Bibio (pictured) and British Sea Power, whose live score to Man of Aran had people queueing all the way out of the field.
y
. 17
Flatpack 4
F
23-28 March 2010 63 events across 9 venues Total admissions: 5,723
2 6 T
“Suggesting Londoners go to Brum for a weekend doesn’t come naturally. But Flatpack Festival might make us break the habit of a lifetime.” – Time Out “Flatpack put on a magical spectacle and simultaneously raised illuminating questions about what constitutes a ‘film’.” – Electric Sheep
“ e –
“ in b –
Highlights: Murnau’s Sunrise with live score in St Martin’s Church; guests including Julien Maire, Ben Wheatley, Stuart from Mogwai, Ghost Box records, and Dublin collective Synth Eastwood; a rare retrospective for Takashi Ito; previews of Trash Humpers, Dogtooth and The Secret of Kells; plus the introduction of our Colour Box and Patron Saint strands. The first honoree was Oscar Deutsch, culminating in a bus-tour around his flagship Odeons including Kingstanding (referenced in our flyer, above).
18
Flatpack 5
Flatpack Festival 23-27 March 2011 Birmingham, UK
23-27 March 2011 64 events across 11 venues Total admissions: 7,077
Film, and then some.
5 Featuring: a psychotic tyre, a man playing cello with an angle-grinder, vintage mobile movie-house, 16mm rarities, bunker installations, live scores, archive cut ups, headphone cinema, turntable zoetropes, shadow shows HUK ZOLKSVHKZ VM NVVK ÄSTZ
^^^ ÅH[WHJRMLZ[P]HS VYN \R
“Now in its fifth year, Flatpack has built a reputation for showcasing eccentric and unusual cinematic treats, alongside emerging talents.” – Creative Review “Something that Birmingham and the region should be so proud of: interesting, engaging, authentic and most definitely of the city but in an intelligent, outward-looking, forward-looking way - thank you.” – audience feedback
Highlights: the visit of Devon’s Vintage Mobile Cinema; Pram’s Shadow Shows; headphone cinema performance every minute, always; guests including Thomas Arslan, People Like Us, Chris Needham, Tony Garnett and Hiromichi Sakamoto; a tribute to critic and archivist Iris Barry; previews of Self Made, Rubber and A Useful Life; and a festival hub called The Dirty End, shared with Fierce Festival.
s,
19
Flatpack 6
2
14-18 March 2012 78 events across 19 venues Total admissions: 5,722
Y f
W
“This joyously inventive event interprets the notion of a film festival loosely enough to incorporate an evening of psychedelic projections and live space rock, an audience-participation remake of Citizen Kane, a Birmingham Noir walking tour, and a ‘gif shop’ where you can make your own animation and play it on a record deck.” – The Guardian
L c f
“It doesn’t exclude anyone; having a huge variety of events means that people of all ages and interests can find something they want to go to. Plus you can tell the staff/ organisers love it!” – audience feedback
Highlights: a tribute to Laurel and Hardy stooge Charlie Hall, featuring silent slapstick with Neil Brand’s accompaniment; guests including Suzan Pitt, Robert Morgan, Lawrence from Felt, White Hills and Adil Ray; previews of Juan of the Dead, This Is Not a Film and Grandma Lo-Fi; and the arrival of new designers An Endless Supply and our Film Bug mini-festival in partnership with Colmore Business District. This was one of our best festival hubs, a café space at the Custard Factory which hosted 16mm screenings, magic lantern shows and an OHP Draw-Off.
A c
It was also one of our toughest years financially, although despite the limited budget we still put on nearly 80 events. For various reasons (no big venues or installations, over-stuffed programme, lack of marketing cash) this was the first year that total admissions dropped, but as for many other festivals it was a year for hanging in there. 20
2011–13 Year-round projects over the past couple of years have been fewer but larger in scale, and included a mini-festival in Wolverhampton as part of the Home of Metal celebrations and Light Fantastic, a season of dance films for IDFB 2012. We also converted the Ikon Slow Boat into the Cinémathèque de Tangers for a series of floating screenings.
Enraptured young viewers get a first taste of silent film at the Book Bash film tent.
A post-apocalyptic walk-in screening commissioned by Diesel, complete with burning oil-drums, moonshine and foraged food.
This portrait of Flatpack co-founders Ian Francis and Pip McKnight was painted by Stephen Earl Rogers as part of a series depicting Birmingham arts folk in various states of emergency. In 2011 Pip shepherded her last film festival, and left us to take up delivering babies instead.
21
Flatpack 7
T
21-31 March 2013 108 events across 30 venues Total admissions: 7,929
“Flatpack dances to its own tune.” – Adrian Goldberg, BBC Radio WM “An incredible mix of film and music for all ages” – The Times After many years of grumbles about programming clashes, we stretched across two weekends for the first time and it worked a treat – despite an unseasonally late lorry-load of snow which arrived on opening night and stuck around.
Highlights: live scores to Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last and Lotte Reiniger’s Prince Achmed; a tribute to Birmingham Arts Lab with a reunion of original members; guests including Demdike Stare, Alice Lowe, Penny Woolcock, Shynola and directors from Lithuania, Lebanon and Lowestoft; a night of celluloid chemistry at Thinktank; stereoscopic fun and games; a screening space built out of pallets by BCU architecture students; and a solar-powered caravan cinema.
22
“ c
The next chapter
“Find work that you love. If you have that you can cope with anything.” – Judith Kerr
This almanac has been compiled in summer 2013. Gloominess abounds, with talk of more cuts on the way and the scope for risk-taking severely limited. All of the work we’ve done has come from a self-sufficient ethos, but without people willing to support and take a punt on us it would not have survived. It’s vital that the next generation of Flatpacks gets a chance to grow and blossom.
e e s
s
For us, the maxim “do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you” seems to be holding true. The act of throwing light onto a screen is so simple, but the variations are endless; it feels as though we’ve only just got started. Another ten years of this may not be out of the question.
23
Credits Text (apart from the foreword) by Ian Francis Booklet design by Dave Gaskarth (zipdesign.co.uk) Photography by Lars Björklund, Dan Burwood, Tegid Cartwright, Scott Johnston, Chris Keenan, John Maltby, Brindusa Nastasa, Penny McConnell, Jenny Moore, Mark Rhodes and Richard Short. Flatpack Festival is: Ian Francis (Director) Selina Hewlett (Operations Manager) Sam Groves (Programmer) …And an army of others. There’s not a chance we’ll be able to name them all here, but huge thanks to all the boardmembers, volunteers, freelancers, bakers, venues, festivals, technicians, web folks, programme partners, funders, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and of course audiences we’ve worked with over the past ten years. If you’d like to work with us in the future, do get in touch: Tel: 0121 771 1509 Email: info@flatpackfestival.org.uk Address: Unit 118, The Custard Factory, Gibb St, Birmingham B9 4AA Website: www.flatpackfestival.org.uk Twitter: @flatpack Facebook: flatpackfestival
24
www.flatpackfestival.org