Glasgow Film Festival - Cine Skinny - 16February09

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DAily Guide MONDAY 16 February 09

What’s insIde? 2 » Tomorrow’s picks Our highlights of tomorrow’s films and events 2 » Tramway Art Ray Philp takes a look at The Black Audio Collective and the Sebastian Buerkner Exhibition

Scots Wha-Hey! Jack McFarlane celebrates the Great Scots strand.

For a wee country, Scotland has produced a fair share of successful and cutting-edge films across many styles and genres, but there’s always been that nagging feeling that cinema is the neglected child of our otherwise flourishing, home-grown arts community. There’s a feeling that the talent we’ve got in spades (on both sides of the camera) hasn’t yet been put to its full use or received the attention it deserves. The GFF’s Great Scots strand of films and events celebrates our achievements and abilities with our most talented filmmakers from the past, present and future. The prestige of the opening gala goes to the Glasgow-born cult comic writer Armando Iannucci’s directorial debut, In The Loop. A close cousin to his most recent series, The Thick Of It, the film explores the manoeuvring, spin, and incompetence of modern politics with his trademark terse, foul-mouthed humour. Washing away the bile is Bill Forsyth with his unapologetically twee and heart-warming brand of 80’s comedy Comfort and Joy. A tale of rival gangs, lost loves, and ice cream, it receives a much welcomed 25th anniversary screening. The film’s star, Bill Paterson, appears in conversation with GFF co-director Allan Hunter to discuss this and the other roles that have made him one of the most respected actors of his generation. Also in conversation is Glasgow journalist Alison Kerr who will present Remembering Mary Gordon, a look back over the career of the Scots woman who starred in over 200 pictures during Hollywood’s

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Golden Age. Another ex-pat from the same era, Frank Lloyd, is also remembered. The Divine Lady, his vintage Oscar-winning romance set during the Napoleonic wars, receives an extremely rare screening. Not willing to let the weegies hog the limelight, Richard “16 Years of Alcohol” Jobson continues his love affair with the city of Edinburgh, as a man is stalked through its darkest corners in New Town Killers. Our highland landscapes aren’t forgotten about either. They continue to serve their traditional role as horror’s isolated wilderness with The Dungeon Moor Killings’ mixture of gore and giggles.

Perhaps our finest filmic tradition, the documentary proves alive and well in Scotland today. Murray Grigor indulges our national obsession with architecture in Infinite Space: The Architecture of John Lautner, and Scottish history is approached from the perspective of our diminishing Gaelic oral traditions in Second Sight and the forgotten disaster of HMY Iolaire sinking in the Western Isles. The internationally acclaimed RSAMD presents a collection of awardwinning shorts from across the first half-decade of its Digital Film and Television course, in Now We Are Five. Needless to say, these could well be our future stars. However, without support for native industry, there’s the sense that they are being little more than trained for export to London and Hollywood. So consider your attendance to this strand of the festival as one of those rare obligations you should feel lucky to have.

3 » reviews Drama/Mex  Tokyo!  Mr 73  4 » what’s new online Updating you on new online content 4 » Surprise Surprise!

Gail Tolley discusses the risky business of attending a surprise film 4 » win tickets!

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tomorrow’s

Picks

Art at the Tramway Ray Philp finds out more about the events featured at the Tramway as part of Glasgow Film Festival.

Gran Torino

21.00 @ Cineworld

Clint Eastwood has become one of the great American directors, watch his latest film and see why.

Second Sight

20.30 @ CCA

The Isle of Syke is the backdrop for this documentary filled with local stories of the paranormal.

Still Walking

13.45 @ GFT

A favourite of critics over the past year, it’s a subtle and honest family tale by Japanese director Kore-eda.

Let the Right One In

20.15 @ GFT

Eerie Swedish drama that made it into Sight and Sound’s top 10 films of 2008.

GYFF @ The Arches

20.00 @ The Arches

Music, DJs and the winners of the GYFF one-minute film competition.

As the old saying goes; if a picture tells a thousand words, then it’s reasonable to suggest that the moving image won’t leave you short for discussion. Early technologies like zoetropes and flipbooks all contain elements of what is now considered rudimentary content for film; a dynamic, real-time sequence of images and sound that maintain a didactic relationship. The evolution of the moving image necessitated a narrative crutch to convey meaning and context to its audience via narration, actors, and a definitive plot, which a director would oversee and control.

However, this process assumes that the transmission of images and information is a one-way process.

Handsworth Songs (1986), produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and showing at the Glasgow Film Festival as part of the Tramway exhibit, challenges this monodirectional method of filmmaking.

Foregoing a linear narrative with chronologically ordered events, it is instead a collage of still and moving images, inviting the viewer to interpret the information presented.

The film is a socio-political account of race in the media context that focuses on disparate pieces of archive

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footage, poetry, and photographs that give an impression of the overall picture. Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1990), which will also feature at the GFF, uses a similar methodology, where Malcolm X’s story is detailed in a fractured, non-linear collection of spoken word poetry, static and dynamic images.

To an extent, much of the work of the Black Audio Film Collective aims to expose the folly of perceived objectivity in film. Subjectivity is a common thread in these features, and this allows for audiences to interpret the content in an organic way. This is perhaps especially relevant to Malcolm X, who is far too polemical a figure to portray in a supposedly objective fashion.

Furthermore, the fragmentation of narrative serves as a reflection of human memory processes, which do not follow sequential arcs, and neither are they always accurate.

With this in mind, it is perhaps no coincidence that the GFF and Tramway also welcomes Sebastian Buerkner. Buerkner’s use of Macromedia Flash technology in his animation has become a trademark of his expansive, surrealist work in visual art. As well as hosting the Artists’ Animation Programme, a

programme of avant garde films from leading animators, his Tramway exhibit will be his first solo UK show, despite his most recent exhibits in London’s Whitechapel Project Space in 2007 and The Showroom at Sheffield in 2008. Past works like Turf Waltz and Purple Grey are typical of his dream-like aesthetic that fragments narrative into possibilities and inferences, leaving the viewer to interpret their own understanding. Buerkner’s head rush of fantasy, suggestion, and Freudian commentary propose a close proximity, even an entanglement, of the conscious and subconscious processes of human thought.

Film can occasionally appear out of-the-loop of socially mobilising phenomena like YouTube that encourages discussion, debate, and an exchange of information. Sebastian Buerkner and The Black Audio Film Collective manage to avoid this, because their works encourage their audience to dissect and critique what they see, rather than passively consume the moving image.

The Glasgow Film Festival may well be showing films that will leave you speechless, but at Tramway that looks unlikely.

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Reviews Drama/Mex

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

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Drama/Mex’s two interrelated tales are set to the backdrop of one depressing Mexican night. Whilst Fernanda (Diana Garcia) struggles to choose between her current life with Gonzalo (Juan Pablo Castaneda) and running away with vile ex-boyfriend Chino (Emilio Valdes), adolescent thief Tigrillo (Miriana Moro) strikes up an unlikely friendship with the middle-aged Jamie (Fernando Becerril), who has retired to a beachfront hotel to kill himself. These figures have little in common aside from a desire to escape, be it through a night-time tryst, a new acquaintance, or a bul-

tokyo!

Director: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho

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let from a gun. Naranjo’s characters unevenly reflect his unrelentingly bleak vision of Acapulco; simultaneously abusive and frustratingly indecisive, their motivations are difficult to discern as the film sloppily skips from vignette to vignette as the protagonists fluctuate from joyous to suicidal, compassionate to downright nasty with no clear indication from the film’s unconvincing dialogue. Whilst visually striking, Drama/Mex ultimately appears as empty and meaningless as the lives it portrays.

Stephen Mitchell

MR 73

Director: Olivier Marchal

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Tokyo! follows in Paris, Je t’aime’s footsteps by combining several short films by different directors centred around the theme of a city, in this case Tokyo. Wearing its indie sensibility on its sleeve both Gondry’s and Joon-Ho’s pieces combine gentle surrealism with elegant imagery to explore alienation in an over-bearing metropolis.

The former centres on a couple who move to Tokyo with surprising consequences whilst Joon-Ho’s film pursues an OCD recluse whose life of isolation is abruptly interrupted by a pizza-delivery girl. Carax’s film is sandwiched between them and is quite different in tone, which will come as no surprise to those who have seen Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, with which there are noticeable similarities. Poking fun at the Hollywood-style monster movie it follows a strange Golum-like creature that emerges from the sewers to terrorize the streets. Together the three come together to show Toyko at its cinematic best.

Gail Tolley

“God’s a son of a bitch. Someday I’ll kill him.” When a hero utters these words within the first minute of a film you know things will end badly. Schneider (Daniel Autieul) is a Marseille detective on the trail of a serial killer. He has a tragic past, a taste for Jameson’s, and a fondness for cats. So far, so noir.

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At the same time a prisoner convicted of brutal killings nears his release. Has he found God, as he claims, or will he pursue the daughter of his final victims?

MR 73, directed by Olivier Marchal, begins as an effective and stylish thriller in the Michael Mann mould, but one that lacks the gritty

sense of locality that anchors and animates the best noir. As the two stories converge and events spin out of Schneider’s control, so Marchal’s grip on the plot slips until the film culminates in a spectacularly overwrought denouement.

Keir Roper-Caldbeck

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Surprise Surprise!

When you were a child you may have been tricked into closing your eyes and holding out your hand for a ‘surprise’; only to find yourself in possession of something you’d rather not (a nice slimy worm, for example). Kids can be cruel, but hey, isn’t that a lesson worth remembering – surprises are not always nice.

On the other hand you could have found yourself holding something joyful, like a lollipop. With that in mind we’re gearing up for this Saturday’s Surprise Film – will it be a worm or a lollipop?

The surprise film has become a staple of film festivals and often one of the most popular choices for the festivalgoer. And whilst any film is likely to have its fans and adversaries there are definitely some choices which are more risky than others; dividing opinion among audiences, leaving some in rapture and others to stage the ultimate act of protestation: the walk-out.

Two years ago at GFF 2007 the surprise film was David Lynch’s Inland Empire. For Lynch fans in the audience they no doubt would have felt that all their Christmases had come at once; three hours of talking rabbit heads, a tormented Laura Dern and a whole heap of narrative confusion would have been expected and indeed relished. But for those in the audience (and there must have been a good few) who were unfamiliar with Lynch’s unique brand of dreamlike surrealism Inland Empire must have been a truly unexpected three hours (they don’t call it the surprise film for nothing, eh?).

2008’s pick, Son of Rambow, appears a more conventional choice, it was hailed as “the best school comedy since Gregory’s Girl” by The Observer’s Philip French, a feel-good flick with an indie slant meant that it was unlikely to offend or divide viewers to any great extent. The same can’t be said for the reaction to the critically-acclaimed Japanese Anime Spirited Away which was the 2003 surprise film at Edinburgh’s International Film Festival. As the opening credits rolled and Disney’s illustrious logo appeared it soon became evident that this was an animation, much to the shock (and disgust) of some members of the audience who grabbed their things and headed for the exit. Anime, it appears, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

However, coming to a film with no expectations is a great way to see through the hype and marketing we’re often subjected to and it can give you an experience of a film you’d never choose to watch on your own accord. A nice surprise or not, at least there’ll be something to talk about, as well as a great insight into audiences’ reactions if the past years are anything to go by.

Gail Tolley

What’s new online?

Comment online at the GFF site, MySpace, Facebook & on The Skinny’s web forums.

CineSkinny board

Rumours are brewing on the CineSkinny GFF page triggered by our picture of John Michie and Marilyn at the opening gala - calm down folks, it’s just a photo!

A Cheggered Past

Ever sat down to enjoy a film and suddenly out of nowhere you spot so-an-so from Corrie?

And did you know Keith Chegwin of Naked Jungle fame was once in a Polanski film? Add your Z-list Brit actor sightings to The Skinny forum now.

Pic of the day PHOTO: alicia farnan

Eilidh with her ukulele.

Eilidh MacAskil entertains the kids before the Take 2 screening of Errol Flynn classic Robin Hood.

Virtual CineSkinny

You can turn the virtual pages of our past issues at www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk/cineskinny

win tickets!

We have 2 tickets to see the award-winning Swedish horror movie Let The Right One In on Tuesday 17 February. A highly original take on the vampire myth, this follows Oskar, a lonely 12-year-old who befriends the girl next door, Eli. She does seem a bit of a night owl, however, and has an unquenchable thirst… To win, answer the following question:

Who played Dracula in the 1992 film? email michael@glasgowfilmfestival.co.uk by 10am Tue 17th Feb to enter

What did you think?

We asked those coming out of Dungeon Moor Killings what they thought

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ali I thought it was an alright film. There were some points I really couldn’t take seriously but I liked the Scottish aspects of it.

scott The story was pretty good and I think the camping made it all seem scarier. The scientist was a bit over the top though.

steven I liked the fact that it was quite a ‘rough’ film as such. A lot of movies nowadays are too polished and the way this was filmed made it more realistic. It’s also always nice to hear Scottish accents on film.

david I enjoyed it. Good mix of gore and fun!

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