Take One CFF2013 #2

CAMBRIDGE-FILM-FESTIVAL-REVIEW

In this issue of TAKE ONE we’re offering you an introduction to Roland Klick, an overview of the Thatcher’s Britain strand and an interview with the director of #t1recommends NATAN, screening on the 24th and 25th at the Cambridge Film Festival.

Now barely remembered (beyond the rambling accusations of pornography historians) and slandered throughout his last ignoble days, Bernard Natan was a contemporary, and ultimately a competitor to, Charles Pathé in early 20 century French cinema. Setting up a variety of home-made studios throughout the 1920s, Natan built a mini film-empire which sought to replicate Hollywood’s output, and to keep French cinema French. Yet his Algerian roots would bring strength to his enemies, and Natan went on to suffer a terrible downfall and final humiliation. Cairns and Duane’s terrific film pieces together the few scraps of knowledge that remain about Bernard Natan, through interviews with his granddaughters and a plethora of film scholars, in an attempt to sift through the rumours of corruption and sleaze which have plagued him in life and death. A mustsee for anyone interested in social and cinematic history, NATAN peers into a shadowy period in a French film industry which was beginning to feel the chill fingers of fascism creeping towards it.

- Euan Andrews

Take One is an independent film magazine and website run by volunteers. Visit www.takeonecff.com to comment on our reviews, interviews and features; stay in touch all year round via fb.com/TakeOneCFF and @TakeOneCFF; send fanmail to contact@takeonecff.com.

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REVIEW

just before losing everything

The ShortFusion programme this year offers, as always, a slew of new talent and innovation. Each programme has been arranged around themes such as “nostalgia” and “existentialism”, and each set of shorts complement one another in their own way. From Estonian animation to bittersweet comedy and Beckettian absurdism, it’s well worth taking a closer look at these opportunities to enjoy several experiences for the price of one.

It’s no exaggeration to describe this film as one of the most powerful in this year’s programme.

However, Xavier Legrand’s multiple award-winning JUST BEFORE LOSING EVERYTHING (AVANT QUE DE TOUT PERDRE) has been allocated its own screening at the Cambridge Film Festival. It is technically a short film – it’s 30 minutes long – but even in this amount of time, Legrand has us emotionally invested in his characters, and therefore all the more anxious for their wellbeing when the source of their distress becomes clear. It’s a carefully orchestrated thriller driven by excellent performances, not least from the younger actors.

To properly appreciate this film you should go in blind – this review contains no spoilers – and then following the screening, give yourself time to mull it over, as you would any feature-length experience.

It’s no exaggeration to describe this film as one of the most powerful in this year’s programme.

JUST BEFORE LOSING EVERYTHING is just one slice of an important story, told with great sensitivity and authenticity. Legrand’s finely crafted crescendo somehow stretches the thirty minutes just enough to allow us to piece together the bigger picture behind what at first seems to be just another day for an ordinary family ... [cont’d on page 6]

Free entry to JUST BEFORE LOSING EVERYTHING with a ticket to any Shortfusion programme.

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FEATURE

ROLAND KLICK

Roland Klick, the West German cult auteur film director, writer and producer, is currently reliving his career. The English-speaking cinema public finally have access to his work 30 years after it was made, in a retrospective hosted by the Cambridge Film Festival, the London Goethe Institute and Filmgalerie 451, Berlin.

It’s amazing that we have not had more exposure to his films. His life’s passion has been film since he was fourteen, and at seventy-four Klick still has the air of man who makes things happen. He seems touched by the creative spirits of joy and melancholy, and is driven by the same manic fire of creative film-making that is recognisable in the dancing eyes of Herzog and Jodorowsky.

Klick wrote and directed 6 feature films and a selection of short films between 1963 and 1989, but they didn’t get mass international distribution. It’s not that the audiences didn’t like the films in Germany: he won German film awards and was considered a cult film maker at the time, but his style was uncompromising, and he was alienated from the ‘new German cinema’ movement. Labelled as a ‘maverick’ and a ‘lone wolf’, Klick became the outsider.

His work mantra was ‘film + audience= cinema’: each is an integral part of the whole.

Klick would only make films he believed in, and he self-financed them all. He threw himself into creating credible on-screen realities for subcultures including dystopian punk, Western, and homeless kids. As a hopeful rising star he achieved some success, then after a series of setbacks, retreated from filmmaking to become a novelist and teach at several film schools in Germany. His films told stories, and he told them on screen unflinchingly and without judgement. He filmed with passion and beauty, but the style was intense, and outlook introverted, with an acute awareness of the audience’s own social conscience.

His work mantra was ‘film + audience= cinema’: each is an integral part of the whole.

This year Cambridge Film Festival is screening the new documentary premiered in Berlin this year, ROLAND KLICK: THE HEART IS A HUNGRY HUNTER by Sandra Prechtel, together with three of Klick’s experimental features, SUPERMARKT (1973) DEADLOCK (1970) and WHITE STAR (1983) plus a selection of his short films.

Klick worked with Mario Adorf (DEADLOCK) ©TAKE ONE 2013 and Dennis Hopper (WHITE STAR) but he was his own director, writer, producer and editor, Editor/Design: Rosy Hunt even writing the music for some of his films. Deputy Editor: Gavin Midgley [cont’d on page 7] Web Editor: Jim Ross

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INTERVIEW WITH DAVID CAIRNS, DIRECTOR OF

NATAN Toby Miller: What was the catalyst for the documentary?

David Cairns: It began with an ex-student of mine mentioning he’d stumbled upon this interesting story of a man who had simultaneously run a major French film company in the ‘20s whilst also embarking on a career in pornography. I looked at the same sources and wrote a little blog, [but] it turned out that almost everything said about Bernard Natan for years has largely been nonsense, or misinformation, or, at the very least, distortion.

But my initial post did make Paul Duane get in touch. He thought the story, whilst interesting, seemed incorrect. It didn’t seem possible that anybody could be running a major studio and having a sideline in porn – as he put it, “Who would have the energy?”

Paul dug a little bit deeper and found other sources which gave a slightly clearer picture, which in turn led him to think there could be a film in uncovering the true story. Luckily for us the Irish Arts Council then offered to back the film, which after all was going to be a 60 year old story about a Frenchman forgotten in his own country.

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TM: At the beginning of the production you didn’t trust the story; but did you have any idea of the Pandora’s Box Natan’s story would open?

DC: Natan’s accomplishments have been completely erased, and anything you found about him on the first couple of pages of a Google search would be that he was a fraudster, a pornographer, that he had sex with a duck on camera; things that proved to be untrue. The tales about him being a pornographer seemed to be based on a tiny little misdeed early in his life, and when it comes to possible financial wrongdoing, there is certainly room for doubt.

Natan played a major role in pulling French cinema into the talking picture era.

But he hasn’t been given the benefit of the doubt at any point since 1938; rather he’s been regarded as guilty of whatever you accuse him of. But at the beginning Paul and I didn’t know a lot of this. We knew his ultimate fate at Auschwitz, so we knew there was a tragedy in here and we just didn’t know what led to it. [cont’d on page 6]

See NATAN + THE PIONEER on the 24th at 17.00 or the 25th at 13.30. THE PIONEER celebrates the work of the remarkable Alice Guy, the first filmmaker to make a fictional film.

FEATURE

TRUTH AT 24 FRAMES

If cinema really is, as Jean-Luc Godard said, truth at 24 frames per second, it becomes intriguing to discover films which seek to open up a discourse on the nature of fact versus fiction, and how reality is represented within forms of image; whether created, self-invented or imposed upon and then forgotten. Two fascinating films in this year’s CFF programme attempt to seek out how fiction can be sculpted from reality, whether desired or not.

Mark Cousins’ A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM seems on paper to be a fairly straightforward document of how children have been portrayed within cinema, as well as being an addendum piece to his epic masterpiece THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY. The inspiration for Cousins came from observing through the camera his young niece and nephew, Laura and Ben, playing in his own front room. Only Laura and Ben are contained within this locked-off frame, through which they seem to exist in their own microcosm where the only adult intervention comes from Cousins’ voice and the headless body of their grandmother wandering through. This sets Cousins thinking about how cinema represents the tiny incidents of childhood which celebrate universal truths.

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... openly mocked and sent away with the horrific phrase “HipHop Proclaimers” ringing in their ears ...

While we return to Laura and Ben playing in Uncle Mark’s film throughout, Cousins’ cinematic essay is mainly depicted by an outstanding selection of clips from 53 films in which childhood is a predominate theme. From E.T. and THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER to lesser known examples of world cinema such as LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC and KOWBOY, Cousins strings his thesis together with ease, a particularly sublime transition displaying how adults are seen through childish eyes cutting from an old Tom and Jerry cartoon to Lynne Ramsay’s GASMAN. Cousins concludes that cinema itself is a child. If this is the case, then right now it’s having a particularly stroppy adolescence; but this is not to detract from the sheer delight of this film.

Fresh from adolescence, the protagonists in Jeanie Finlay’s THE GREAT HIP-HOP HOAX are the determined Dundee duo of Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain. Having met at college, they decided to be the future of hip-hop and duly headed to London for an open audition in 2002, only to be openly mocked for their heavily Scottish accented rapping; and sent away with the horrific phrase “Hip-Hop Proclaimers” ringing in their ears. Filled with righteous indignation, Boyd and Bain decided to take on the music industry on its own foul terms, and reinvented themselves as Californian skate-punk kids “Silibil ‘n’ Brains”. In doing so they became the frenzied talk of the London scene ... [cont’d on page 7]

THE GREAT HIP HOP HOAX screens on Sunday 22nd at 20.30 and A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM screens on Sunday 29th at 20.45.

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FEATURE

thatcher’s britain

In response to the Iron Lady’s passing, the Cambridge Film Festival is showing a series of British pictures made during her premiership. These invite another look at our culture in the 1980s, as well as a consideration of the modern cinema industry.

The features chosen share themes that we can broadly think of as Thatcherite – such as the social effect of a new economic individualism. Bill Forsyth’s warm cult comedy LOCAL HERO gently explores the consequences of free market economics through the story of a Texan oil agent’s visit to a remote Scottish community. In Julien Temple’s ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, featuring David Bowie, a young photographer is drawn into a garish 1950s Soho that echoes 1980s yuppie culture. Thatcher herself appears at the Conservative Party Conference of 1982 in the climax of PLOUGHMAN’S LUNCH, a personal drama scripted by Ian McEwan in which an ambitious working class journalist becomes embroiled in a love triangle with a privileged mother and daughter pair.

A cultural shift in attitudes to race and gender is also explored. Both the Liverpudlian comedy NO SURRENDER and the moving MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE depict contemporary cultural and racial confrontations – between Irish Protestants and Catholics, and London White and Asian communities respectively.

The latter, starring a young Daniel Day Lewis, also rubs up against a re-emergent Victorian morality in relation to homosexuality. Mike Leigh’s LIFE IS SWEET tackles the differences in feminist attitude between Alison Steadman’s mother and her twin daughters as a central theme. Taken together, the works paint a broad social snapshot of Thatcher’s Britain.

the arrival of VHS players posed a comparable threat to the current availability of rival content on the Internet.

Parallels can be drawn between the film industry now and in the 1980s in terms of production.

This is particularly true in relation to public funding: in 1979, the newly elected Conservative government scrapped the Eady levy, which had subsidised British film production via a percentage of all ticket sales. Similarly, in 2010, the incoming David Cameron-led coalition abolished the UK Film Council, a body that had invested £160m in British motion pictures since the year 2000.

Another cinematic resemblance across the decades comes in competition from other formats; the arrival of VHS players in 1980s homes posed a comparable threat to the big screen as the availability of rival content on the Internet. Similarly, British film continues to score occasional worldwide successes today just as they did some thirty years previously, with the Best Picture Oscars clinched by CHARIOTS OF FIRE (1981) and GANDHI (1982) being matched by the likes of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008) and THE KING’S SPEECH (2010). [cont’d on page 6]

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[cont’d from page 1] the young son plays truant, the teenage daughter waits at a bus stop, and the mother heads to her workplace.

What will the titular loss entail? A death… an escape… a banishment? We strongly recommend you find out at one of the three screenings at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

But, if possible, don’t watch it alone.

- Rosy Hunt

JUST BEFORE LOSING EVERYTHING screens at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 17:30 on the 24th. Free entry with any ShortFusion ticket.

[cont’d from page 3] As we found out more, we discovered more and more how important he genuinely was: he played a major role in pulling French cinema into the talking picture era. He also was vital in the development of Cinemascope and discovered important figures like Jean Gabin and Jacques Tourneur.

I think going into the story, one old theory we had seized on was that there were two Bernard Natans: one a legitimate film producer and the other a pornographer. But no, that didn’t make any sense, because as we quickly realised, you couldn’t be a famous pornographer in the ‘20s and ‘30s because it was illegal – if you were famous for it, you would be in jail.

Full interview at takeonecff.com.

Fans of animated film: as well as the HERTZFELDT PROGRAMME on the 23rd/27th, #t1recommends the ESTONIAN SHORTS on the 24th at 16.00, which include two beautifully strange cartoons.

[cont’d from page 5] Yet there are also several differences between the eras. UK cinema attendance has been stable at around 170 million tickets a year since the turn of the millennium, up hugely from the 54 million of 1982, and there are far more British film companies making features now than in the 1980s; both causes for celebration.

A less positive change is noticeable however when watching the ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ series.

Whilst period dramas such as the Merchant Ivory A ROOM WITH A VIEW continue to be a staple of the industry, the other titles in the strand are primarily lower budget pictures that depict contemporary communities. This is a type of cinema that we now seem to be missing in the UK mainstream – amongst James Bond, Harry Potter and Cockney geezers, it would be a pleasure to see a successful regional comedy or drama set in the modern world. That Shane Meadows’ THIS IS ENGLAND (2006) returned to the Falklands war for inspiration is one indication of the continuing influence of Thatcher, perhaps to the detriment of comment on present day life.

Similarities between the film industry of both eras might make us wonder whether we are still living in ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ today.

The varied series at the Film Festival show that the 1980s in Britain weren’t only Margaret Thatcher’s – the decade belonged to many other people too. Similarities between the film industry of both eras, as well as the first female Prime Minister’s lingering cultural impact, might make us wonder whether we are still living in ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ today.

Watching this fine selection of films depicting contemporary 1980s Britain, the overriding impression is that their modern equivalent are noticeable by their absence.

- Robbie Griffiths

Visit http://www. cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/ to find out when you can see the films mentioned in this article.

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[cont’d from page 2] THE HEART IS A HUNGRY HUNTER is a documentary about Klick’s career, in his own words; through a series of interviews, and archive footage of his work. It’s a great introduction to his work, or an accompaniment if you are familiar with him. He says that both a professor and a builder can enjoy his films: the same is true of Prechtel’s documentary.

Klick’s passion for filmmaking radiates throughout the documentary and he genuinely believes in film as an artistic format in which to tell stories. Roland Klick comes across as a force of energy dark, bright and powerful. We know he is a man who laughs on screen, and a man who teaches young film makers his craft. We know that this documentary is a fascinating portrait of an artist and a passionate film maker. We have much to learn from him yet. - Sarah Acton [cont’d from page 4] and the quarry of grasping agents and labels desperate to have the new Eminem. The dream, and deception, turns sour very quickly for Boyd and Bain, both of whom were determined to party hard while never once letting their fakery drop (barring a highly amusing evening with Daniel Beddingfield at The Brits). Hugely enjoyable viewing, it proves Hunter S Thompson’s old maxim about the music industry (“...a cruel and shallow money trench...”) was totally accurate.

- Euan Andrews

Artist Paul Jon Milne offers TAKE ONE readers a special deal on his film & TV related merchandise.

Quote reference “Take One CFF” to buy a high quality A4 “Eleventh Doctor” print for just £12 +P&P; or a “Life is a Crabaret” t-shirt for £10 +P&P. http://www.etsy.com/shop/PJMillustration

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