Nuts in May, Mike Leigh

Dates: 2-4 July | Location: Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham

Our good pals at 7 Inch Cinema have teamed up with Birmingham City University to present a weekend of screenings and events at mac (Midlands Art Centre) to celebrate the remarkable range of drama produced at BBC Birmingham during the 1970s and early 80s under producer David Rose.

Recently awarded a fellowship by the British Film Institute, Rose started out with police series Z-Cars and later went on to make his mark on UK cinema during ten years at Film Four. But it was at Pebble Mill where he first established his reputation for nurturing new writers and directors, such as Mike Leigh, Alan Bleasdale and David Hare, and for bringing risky, surprising work to the small screen.

The programme features gems such as Alan Clarke’s supernatural drama Penda’s Fen and Mike Leigh’s cult comedy Nuts in May, plus look out for a guest appearance by David Rose who will be joining in the celebrations.

It Came From Pebble Mill is produced by Birmingham City University and 7 Inch Cinema, and supported by the National Lottery through ScreenWM.

The full line-up and booking information can be found here on the mac website.

Parade, Vicki Bennett

Applications are now open for the 2011 Great North Run Moving Image Commission, which will award an artist and/or filmmaker £30,000 to create a new moving image work in response to the world’s largest half-marathon that takes place in the North East.

The work will be presented as part of the following year’s programme with an extract screened on the BBC as part of their live coverage of the run.

The Great North Run Moving Image Commissions to date have focused on the stories of those that take part, the physical exertion and movement of runners, the architecture of the route and the footage archives of The Great North Run. You can see Parade made by Vicki Bennett for the 2009 Moving Image Commission on the site.

The deadline for applications is Monday 7 June, 5pm. Visit the Great North Run website for more details.

bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork

The BBC has recently relaunched the Film Network site, and it’s had a glamorous new makeover. The video player has at last been upgraded to match the usability of the BBC’s iPlayer, making it a much more enjoyable way to watch all the interviews, festival reports and most importantly the shorts. If you’ve never visited it before and you’re a British filmmaker then take a gander – there’s a wealth of information about filmmaking, festivals and the suchlike, plus the opportunity to get feedback from other members of the Network on your own work.

Elephant, Alan Clarke

There is a remarkable cadence to Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989) that makes it difficult to define as a television drama, extended short, short-form feature or artist’s moving image piece. In differing contexts it could be read alongside films such as Culloden, Partie de Campagne or Meshes of the Afternoon. The film, a circle of violence, near silent with no thematic context provided, other than three lines of dialogue spoken in a Northern Irish accent, provided Clarke an opportunity to focus his camera in a manner akin to his more conventional roots in social-realist docu-drama.

Produced for BBC Northern Ireland and originally broadcast on BBC2 in January 1989, at a time when the corporation had been recently forced by Thatcher’s government to impose a blanket broadcast ban on loyalist and republican organisations with supposed links to the IRA, Elephant makes no attempt to explain, contextualise, glorify or denounce the succession of eighteen murders, played one after another, the only recurring feature a lingering single shot of the murdered man at the end of every sequence.

By shooting almost entirely on a steadicam on the streets of a Belfast free of passers-by and stacked along with empty buildings, gives Clarke the opportunity to determine the pace of the film by its characters and allows it to unfold as if it were a documentary. Clarke’s narrative arc is episodic and its beats are natural. We follow, literally, each assailant or victim as they go about their daily business, playing football or taking a stroll in the park, at work in factories and offices, even chatting with friends in their own homes. Our field of vision is as limited as the man which we trail. Every area we are led towards, indoor or out, feels claustrophobic, inescapable of violence that we are aware is imminent, that we will to stop but are never given the respite.

Alan Clarke’s final film, and after Contact (1985) his second to deal with the political situation in Northern Ireland, Elephant has it’s antecedents across a broad range of the arts. One can draw a direct thematic line between Shadow of the Gunman by Seán O’Casey to the plays of Frank McGuinness or Richard Hamilon’s The Citizen to a legacy that has been recently well established by works such as Gus van Sant’s Palme d’Or-winning homage (with the title, for example, a direct reference to that well-worn phrase of ‘the elephant in the room’, in both cases the history of a violence that goes unremarked upon) to Willie Doherty’s recent multi-media installations Ghost Story and Buried. The latter works draw upon Clarke’s distinctive and purposeful use of the steadicam to trace a character’s bearing. In both instances, we are led by paths well-trod that hold the weight of a violent history.

Clarke as a film director was an anomaly, in that he was a filmmaker who made only four features (all of which were highly acclaimed and even underwent, like many others, a short and unsurprisingly unsuccessful R&D period in Hollywood), but who spent almost twenty-five years making films for television, which at that point, along with the theatre, was traditionally a writer’s medium. Drawing on experience of theatre, feature film and television, Clarke was one of the leading proponents of the social-realist movement of Thatcher’s England and Scum (1977), Made in Britain (1983) and The Firm (1989) are all held as exemplary models of reflection of England in this period. The evolution of his modus operandi culminates, artistically and literally (this being his final film, broadcast six months before his death) with Elephant and its candid, fluid and unobtrusive camerawork and sparing mise-en-scène. Add to this themes and content that hold wide: general examination (violence in this instance, politically-motivated or otherwise, or drugs in Christine [1987]), Elephant is a work of drama; whether each episode has its roots in reality or otherwise. It works separately as a piece of art because of the lack of a moral bias that distances the film between political accuracy and emotional sub-/objectivity. It is not overtly political, we cannot say with any conviction that the murders that we witness are specifically republican-led, yet the wider significance of each action cannot be understated. There may not be a rigorous interrogation of the actions however the focus remains, this is clearly not an ambiguous film.

In the end the motivation for the actions are unnecessary, we as viewers will bring our own interpretations to the occurrences, a difficult feat for an artist to achieve when dealing with potentially highly-politicised subject matter. Played on a loop on a television set, this is the art film in your living room.

About the Author: Ajay Hothi has written and produced broadcast documentaries on dance and visual arts for television and radio and is a regular contributor to NY-based arts publication Artwrit. He is currently Visual Arts Officer at Arts Council England, London.

It Felt Like a Kiss, Adam Curtis

Greg Kurcewicz writes on the music of It Felt Like a Kiss… and says it’s time Adam Curtis had a room at Tate Modern.

Have you ever noticed that when you have a documentary on TV covering any issue to do with the 1960s – anything – could be about banning pesticides, moon landings, car production in the midlands, whatever – at some point you always get that stock shot of some fey English hippies dancing in a circle in a field, cutting to that face-painted woman gazing at a placard with ‘Love’ painted on it, then a shot of some dudes down Carnaby Street trying on some threads in I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet and the music is somebody in the 1980s trying to make a Shadows-esque guitar sound with bad guitar effects?

Our image of the past has been colonised by lazy clip researchers and penny-pinching production companies.

Thankfully, somewhere deep in a dark storeroom in Ealing or someplace, there is one, softly spoken man on a mission, patiently loading up a Steenbeck with old rusty reels of gaudy Fuji 70s film stock of forgotten news reports, and writing down in a small notebook an endless stream of polemical sociological narrative in response. Though the man is muttering quietly to himself, the stack librarian decodes a request for another cup of tea… (no sugar)…

Adam Curtis’s latest work, It Felt like a Kiss is a little bit different from his earlier works (The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, etc) in that it disposes with his well-metered voiceover and instead deploys a stream of music and text as a foil to the well chosen clips.

Emotive music, banal music, trashy music. I can’t help but think of being reminded of elements of  Ken Jacobs’ magnificent 6 hour epic Star Spangled to Death, which you will love if you like Curtis’s work.

I suppose that I knew this before, but it’s nice to have it confirmed: Mr Curtis has really good taste in music. This isn’t just an exercise – it rocks! He’s used a Faust track – and I’m getting images of him in his youth, in a trenchcoat, with long hair, buying Can records from a branch of Virgin…

He loves his Godardian references too – the theme from Le Mepris – and big block colour type titles, and why not?

Anyhow, as you can probably gather, I loved the film… but it makes me think that this could work in a similarly effective manner without any text at all. Granted though, that it’s a concentration on ephemeral details that makes it different from his other works. I loved it in the way that I loved watching The Rock and Roll Years on BBC Two in the 1980’s. That’s a compliment because that was great…

It Started with a Kiss was a collaboration with ‘immersive’ theatre company Punchdrunk, for Manchester International Festival. I don’t mind if Adam Curtis wants to work with DJ Spooky or Michael Ball and Lou Reed at Glyndebourne with fireworks and lasers. Thankfully I didn’t have to go and do that – I watched the film on the internet. I forgive him. I know it must be a welcome break from the groundbreaking rooting around in dusty rooms. I need to see his work. I demand an Adam Curtis channel. Not on the internet, but on the BBC proper TV channels. The digital channel that they use for snooker the rest of the year would be fine for me.

I want to see the true story of the Trident missiles arriving at Greenham Common while Jan Leeming intones the news from the beige newsroom set with The Birdie Song from the pop charts in the background (the real version please) because that’s how I remember the chilling banality of it. And Adam Curtis’ best structural filmmaker voiceover weaving some sociopolitical truth over the top.

In my estimation, Mr Curtis is up there with the best structuralist filmmakers: Owen Land, John Smith, Hollis Frampton and all. Wait a minute, forget the out of season snooker TV channel – he needs a room in Tate Modern…

About the Author: Greg Kurcewicz is a film artist, musician and curator.