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Kitchen Sink Poetics Celebrated British photographer Richard Billingham moves to moving image with first feature Ray & Liz, and its portrait of his own unruly family is as meticulously framed and bursting with detail as his stills. We discuss memory, influences and class
R
ichard Billingham shot to fame in 1996 with the photobook Ray’s a Laugh. An unflinching portrait of his alcoholic father, Billingham’s photographs were hailed as a highly personal document of working-class identity. Now, almost 25 years later, he’s returned to the Black Country with Ray & Liz, a film about growing up as the heavy industry that once dominated the region was being decimated by Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies.
“I didn’t sit down one day and decide to make a film about my family,” explains Billingham while discussing the origins of his debut feature. “The film came from an idea I had for a gallery piece that charted a few days in my father’s life. The moments in the film where you see Ray drinking his homebrew, those are from that original concept. However, as I was shooting these scenes I decided I wanted to write a short film about my uncle, and then I wrote another one about my brother. The structure just emerged organically from there.” These scenes of Ray slipping in and out of an alcoholic daze provide Billingham with the framework to revisit two formative moments in his life. The first, dated around 1980, shortly after Ray had been laid off from his job as a machinist, centres on the time his baby brother Jason was left in the care of his uncle
N0 2 | 21 – 24 FEB
Sat 23 Feb, CCA, 6pm | Thu 28 Feb, CCA, 4.15pm
Interview: Patrick Gamble Lawrence. Billingham’s family later sold this house and moved into a nearby council flat. This is where the second chapter unfolds, in which a teenage Jason is seen fending for himself in the days leading up to him being taken into care Billingham’s ability to communicate his lived experience through his mise-en-scène illustrates a rarely seen aspect of working-class life. Blending various textures, patterns and objects, he has created a deeply personal memoir that eschews melodrama in favour of the type of photographic detail he’s famous for. The result is an arresting vision of urban hardship that’s unique in its understanding of the link between household objects and memory. “When you’re a kid you look at things so intensely,” he explains. “For example: you might sit and stare at the electric fire for half an hour, or at a >>
>> painting on the wall. Back then these objects felt closer and more significant, and maybe that’s why they play such a large role in remembering.”
“ My brother has seen the film. He told me afterwards that it was exactly how he remembers it, so I must have done something right” Richard Billingham At odds with the gritty kitchen-sink realism commonly associated with depictions of life on the breadline, Billingham understands just how important the ornamentation and decoration of the home is in defining identity. “A few of these objects were items I still possessed, but most had to be sourced from charity shops,” he tells us. “It took a long time choosing the right objects because it was important to me that they looked authentic. I wanted them to resonate symbolically with the rest of the props so they’d resist any simple allegorical readings.” Despite his fastidious attention to detail, he remains surprisingly blase about how it felt being surrounded by these mementos of the past. “I didn’t feel anything to be honest,” he breezily replies. “You’re always fighting against time when you’re filming. You’ve all these people telling you to hurry up, and to move on to the next shot. You never get a moment to
reflect on what you’re working on. It’s probably not the answer you want, but my brother has seen the film. He told me afterwards that it was exactly how he remembers it. So, I must have done something right.” There’s a degree of intervention in each of these snapshots of Billingham’s life that only a photographer could bring to the table. The result is a film that occupies a middle ground between fiction and documentary, setting it apart from similar autobiographical works, something Billingham was keen to achieve. “I didn’t look at other films for inspiration,” he claims when asked about his influences. “I just tried to make the film look as realistic as I could. Visually, I was inspired by Jeff Wall’s photography, especially the way he constructs his scenes. He makes them look incredibly real – almost hyperreal. There’s this one image he did called Insomnia, where a guy is photographed lying on the floor of a kitchen. If you look closely you can see all these grubby marks on the walls. If you tried to recreate these marks quickly it wouldn’t look real. It takes a lot of time and attention.” Billingham has always denied there’s a political agenda behind his work, but the parallels between his depiction of life in the 1980s and the austerity measures of today are hard to ignore. At a time when there are very few working-class voices exerting any
influence within the creative space of British film, Ray & Liz gives pause for optimism, illustrating the potential of art to offer an escape from the harsh realities of life. “I always loved drawing as a kid. I got a lot of pleasure from it. But back then in the 80s you had a lot of time on your hands. We didn’t have after-school classes and there were only three or four channels on the TV, so we had to find something to do. Today kids play computer games but back then you only had board games.” Ray & Liz was funded in part through Kickstarter, a platform that has helped provide more opportunities for artists from underprivileged backgrounds, but Billingham believes the key to greater diversity is education. “When I came back to that tower block after school, subjects like mathematics felt abstract to me in a way that art didn’t. Applying to university was a way of escaping that estate. If I hadn’t gone to university I probably would have stayed there forever. But I never felt like I didn’t belong at university. For me it was more awkward when I went back to working in the supermarket with all the other lads from school. I’d just had my first photo exhibitions and they didn’t really get what I was doing. So, I kept it a secret.”
R E VIE WS Thunder Road Director: Jim Cummings Starring: Jim Cummings, Kendal Farr, Nican Robinson, Macon Blair, Jocelyn DeBoer, Chelsea Edmundson, Jordan Fox
Expanded from a 2016 Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning short film, writer-director Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road follows the downward spiral of Police Officer Jim Arnaud (Cummings himself ) as he navigates a messy divorce while grieving for his recently departed mother. Like its forerunner, the feature arrives in the UK with accolades, notably the SxSW Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Feature – and rightly so. From its opening scene, essentially a remake of the original short in which Arnaud delivers
Sun 24 Feb, Cineworld, 9pm Mon 25 Feb, Cineworld, 1pm
his mother’s eulogy, Thunder Road is thoroughly engrossing, deftly mixing pathos and humour in equal measure. Such a careful balance of comedy and tragedy requires a sure hand, and Cummings acquits himself with extreme skill as writer, director and performer. Filmed in striking long takes, Cummings elevates his material through superb technical craftsmanship, while never losing sight of the emotions that underpin his story. In exploring Arnaud’s struggles, both as a policeman and as a father, the film builds a penetrating study of grief, loss and mental breakdown that isn’t easily forgotten. [Alex Barrett]
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Border Director: Ali Abbasi Starring: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Jörgen Thorsson, Ann Petrén, Sten Ljunggren
Magic Realism can go one of two ways: it can be transporting and eye-opening, showing the world in a new light, or it can be aggravating and irksome, because the story breaks its own rules and ties itself in knots. In Ali Abassi’s second film, Border, the Iranian-Swedish director channels his inner Terrence Malick. With the help of cinematographer Nadim
Only You Director: Harry Wootliff Starring: Josh O’Connor, Laia Costa, Natalie Arle-Toyne, Isabelle Barth, Tam Dean Burn
Conception and IVF aren’t the most romantic of topics, but Harry Wootliff’s tender debut feature makes it seem so. It begins with the cutest of meet cutes, like something straight out of a Nancy Meyers rom-com – Elena (Laia Costa), an office worker at the CCA shares a cab with PhD student-cum-DJ Jake (Josh O’Connor) on a chilly Glasgow New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t take long for their drunken one-night stand to blossom into an intense relationship.
Fri 22 Feb, Cineworld, 5.45pm Sat 23 Feb, Cineworld, 3.15pm
Carlsen, Abassi conjures up hypnotic and dreamlike imagery, which comes with a hint of the bleakness of Scandinavian detective dramas – but he does so in service to a story that pulls in one too many directions. In this fable-like tale, Tina (Eva Melander), a border guard with unusual facial features – prominent forehead, wide nose, pockmarked skin – uses her sixth sense to identify smugglers coming off the local ferry. She’s learned to identify emotions through smell, picking
out fear, anger, and even guilt. Because of her features, Tina’s aware she’s an outcast, even when those around her make out like she belongs. Attach what allegories you like to this, whether they be race, disability or gender – the film is happy to take them all. Then a passenger gets off the ferry who looks just like her, and her sense of self is shaken. Does this new figure have the same defective chromosome that Tina insists she has? Or are they both something more? Or other? And why
is no one else taken aback by the apparent twinning? There’s a lot to get your teeth into, but Border struggles with its opposing instincts. One moment Abassi treats his world with a cold practicality, particularly in respect to a dark subplot about child abuse, the next we’re in a world that walks the forgotten path of myth and legend. It’s perhaps commendable that he comes as close as he does to melding the two. [Tom Charles]
Fri 22 Feb, GFT, 5.30pm
It’s these blissfully idyllic standards that Only You continuously subverts with ease and care. Elena slowly reveals she’s older than she first let on, which is no problem until they try to have children. Romantic clichés are never considered; instead it’s the biological clock that becomes the biggest threat. It’s for this reason that Only You resonates with its honest vulnerability. Charming performances from O’Connor and Costa elevate the slow-moving drama, and though it stretches itself thin over its lengthy twohour runtime, Only You is never less than compelling. [Iana Murray]
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TOP FIVE
week one
Fri 22 Feb, GFT, 6pm
Transit Director: Christian Petzold Starring: Starring: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman, Maryam Zaree, Barbara Auer
Past and present collide in Christian Petzold’s inspired adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel, Transit. At first, the German filmmaker appears to have adopted the book’s original setting of Nazi-occupied France. We meet Georg (Rogowski), a German refugee in Paris, who’s fleeing south to avoid the fascist
Tue 26 Feb, CCA, 4.45pm
stormtroopers sweeping the city. Anachronisms in fashion, technology and cultural references (George A Romero, Borussia Dortmund’s league success) soon clue us in that this is no straightforward Second World War film. But a glimpse of a German Reich passport suggests this isn’t a modern retelling either. This isn’t the only discombobulating trick up Petzold’s sleeve. When Georg finds himself in possession of the papers belonging to a recently deceased Mexican writer, he adopts his identity as
a means of escaping the continent. An encounter with the writer’s wife (Beer) in Marseille only adds to his guilt and confusion. The dreamlike reality is also being commented on by a mysterious third-person narrator, whose voiceover is often at odds with what we’re seeing onscreen. The result is we feel as unmoored as Transit’s characters, which only enhances the film’s empathy towards Europe’s refugees, both past and present. [Jamie Dunn]
Fri 1 Mar, GFT, 1pm | Sat 2 Mar, GFT, 8.45pm
Happy as Lazzaro
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 21 Feb, Grand Ole Opry, 7pm A trio of Sydney drag queens take to the road on a wild trip across the Outback. What could make Stephan Elliott’s comedy even more fabulous? Being paired with a night of Bingo, that’s what. Papi Chulo 21&22 Feb, GFT John Butler opened GFF two years ago with Handsome Devil and he’s back again with this comedy drama about an LA weatherman in a funk. In tow with Butler will be the film’s ridiculously handsome star, Matt Bomer. Aquarela 22 Feb, Cineworld, 3pm Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky pays tribute to plain old water in this dazzling doc shot in hyper-high-definition. From groaning icebergs to thunderous waterfalls, experience H2O in all its aweinspiring forms.
Director: Alice Rohrwacher Starring: Adriano Tardiolo, Luca Chikovani, Alba Rohrwacher, Agnese Graziani, Tommaso Ragno, Sergi Lopez, Natalino Balasso
On a sun-scorched Italian hillside, peasant sharecroppers toil. One of them is the eponymous Lazzaro; a strapping teenager with an angelic face, he toils more than most as his work-shy colleagues bark orders at him. But there’s nothing ironic about that title: Lazzaro accepts the lion’s share of the work with a smile. Clothes and living conditions suggest we’re looking at a bygone era, but slowly it dawns on you that this isn’t once upon a time – although in many ways Alice Rohrwacher’s beguiling film is a fairytale. Recalling M Night Shyamalan’s The Village, these farmers are ruled over by a tyrannical marchioness, who’s failed
The Matrix 22&23 Feb, Argyle Street Arches, 6pm Immerse yourself in the Wachowskis’ world of cyberpunk cool, radical politics, zen philosophising and kick-ass kung-fu with this mind-twisting pop-up installation screening of their sci-fi masterpiece.
to inform her employees that this feudal system was outlawed years ago. There are more surprises in store as Rohrwacher’s neorealist style takes a turn for the magical and events switch to a nearby industrial city where we find a similar cycle of hardscrabble survival.
In this urban environment, Lazzaro’s allegorical status is even more apparent. This is a thrilling, major work where the political and the poetic intertwine, and the collision makes both elements all the more powerful. [Jamie Dunn]
Lost Map present VISITΔTIONS 24 Feb, The Savings Bank, 7pm Lost Map’s VISITΔTIONS project transports you to the label’s home of the Isle of Eigg for a night of music (Monoganon, Free Love) and moving images (captured by Slow Tree).
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