How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire began with a story, a manuscript found in an attic that told the tale of Russian revolution and exile through Europe to Northern Ireland from the point of view of a young and romantic girl – director Dan Edelstyn’s Grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich. Her words and vision prompted a documentary journey into Ukraine’s present and history culminating in the discovery of a Spirits Factory expropriated from these ancestors in 1917. Thus began a whirlwind adventure into vodka and the desire to create a positive intervention in history, creating and marketing a new brand of Vodka called Zorokovich 1917 and linking the dwindling village of its origins to a new European market.

This reawakening of the family spirit of entrepreneurship is charted in the film and inter-cut with dramatic reconstructions of scenes from the original manuscript. The film has been acquired by More 4 and will have a theatrical release and be broadcast in 2010. The film is the latest project by Optimistic Productions, a dynamic partnership between Dan Edelstyn and artist Hilary Powell. Alongside the film Optimistic Productions also host ‘Optimistic Immigrants’ events bringing together other stories of migration in film, music and performance. Be sure to take a look at APEngine’s interview with Hilary, where she talks about the film and discusses her ongoing fascination with urban space, cultural memory and the 2012 Olympics.

Credits
A film by Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell

Hilary Powell

Hilary Powell is an artist whose imaginative and interdisciplinary practice is consistently engaged with the changing urban environment and its secret histories. She has made theatrical installations in derelict sites across Europe from a car ballet/concert on Amsterdam Docklands to projects in Berlin factories and empty London lidos.  Hilary has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmith’s College where she extended this investigation around eventful practices within urban spaces. A recent commission for Archway by AIR at Byam Shaw School of Art and Islington Council involved a participatory roller-skating extravaganza in an overlooked urban site creating the film animation ‘Light Years Away’.

Hilary’s film ‘The Games’ marked the beginning of her ongoing engagement with the Olympic site and its changing fringe lands. She is involved with local company ‘Pudding Mill River: Purveyors of Sporting Spirits and Foodstuffs’ as they gather and market the last wild harvests of this Olympic zone and sponsor many of the events she holds focused on the power of creative practice operating around large scale regeneration projects. Recent events include ‘Blue Movies on the Greenway’ screening films onto the last remaining sections of the former Olympic blue fence and a prototype float in cinema projecting films onto boats made out of this blue fence.

Hilary is a partner in Optimistic Productions with Dan Edelstyn, and when not prowling the fringes of the Olympic site she is working on their feature film for More 4 called ‘How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire,’ subject of an APEngine showcase.

Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want, Stephen Sutcliffe

Inspired by filmmaker Derek Jarman, The Jarman Award was launched in 2008 “to recognise artists working with the moving image whose work, like Jarman’s, resists conventional definition, encompassing innovation and excellence”. The 2009 shortlisted artists are Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Simon Martin, Lindsay Seers, and Stephen Sutcliffe. We asked them all some questions.

The Jarman Award is funded by Film London and Channel 4.

Stephen Sutcliffe
When, how and why did you start working with film?

I started working with video when I thought ideas in that area were getting a bit stagnant. No-one seemed to be making the sort of stuff I wanted to see. That was probably 10 years ago.

The Jarman Award “recognises individual artist filmmakers whose risk-taking work resists boundaries and conventional definition” – how do you see that in relation to your own practice?
Do you see your work as ‘cinema’, or having a relationship to an idea of ‘cinema’?

I see my work as being more in the wider tradition of collage than art-film or cinema. I like elements that disrupt rather than compliment each other. That sort of juxtaposition is the essence of collage. It suits my love of paradox. As far as resisting boundaries and risk-taking goes, I never think about it.

What other reference points might you have?

Literature and television have always been influential for me. My video work began with the idea of making poster poems along the lines of the poet Christopher Logue’s. In fact, I ended up including him in some of them.

How about…’narrative’?

There has been no narrative in my work up to now.

The winner gets £10,000, and a commission to make four three-minute films for television – what do you like to watch on television?

I like to watch any television really. I like seeing interviews. I am not so keen on music, I watch pop videos with the sound off.

What would you do with the money?

Get my tits done.

Anja Kirschner and David Panos
When, how and why did you start working with film?

We’ve both worked on video since the late 90s, because it means we can control the whole process and film seems quite old fashioned as a medium, both in terms of the workflow and the way the image reads. We got into it for different reasons. One of us had used video in a documentary way to create visual essays but was increasingly frustrated with the formal and ethical questions that go with that. The other was looking for a way to go beyond painting and other media where you end up with one ‘unique’ art object.

The Jarman Award “recognises individual artist filmmakers whose risk-taking work resists boundaries and conventional definition” – how do you see that in relation to your own practice?

These days all so-called ‘boundaries’ seem to be regularly broken as a matter of course. We feel that re-opening the challenges posed by narrative, performance and class politics in the present is resisting current conventions. In some way our practice is about figuring out how the boundaries are constructed and how they function historically and politically.

Do you see your work as ‘cinema’, or having a relationship to an idea of ‘cinema’? How about…’narrative’? What other reference points might you have?

Cinema history seems to shape so much of how we see our work, but so-called serious ‘Cinema’ today generally feels pretty exhausted – trapped in a humanist, psychologised or self-referential dead-end. Occasionally we enjoy the unintentional artfulness of CGI or the accidental ‘alienation effects’ of mainstream Hollywood blockbusters. We raid cinema genre components and borrow elements from a cinematic approach but in a different context and to different ends.

The winner gets £10,000, and a commission to make four three-minute films for television – what do you like to watch on television?

Generation Kill was certainly better than any of the ‘cinema’ works made about Iraq war. That kind of thing really shows the potential of the series format. But overall we liked it better when TV had more creative freedom. The internet has meant that you’re able to marvel at what actually got onto UK television between the 60s and the 90s.

What would you do with the money?

Money would buy us time to work on our new script and help us realise the next film.

Fragments for Eye Drift, image courtesy of Anna Thew

My main link with Derek after Chelsea and Butlers Wharf, was through Steve Farrer at the London Filmmakers Co-op, Thomas Mutke, and the gay scene. Steve used to go to the Subway club, which Derek frequented, and then they had this wandering life on the Heath at night, which I’d hear a lot about, and was in awe of, but obviously had no part in. Thomas and Bruno (de Florence) were on the game at that time, and I was really an outsider to this.

We mostly bumped into Derek with Carla and Maria at the Presto (where I was greeted as ‘la principessa’), the Pollo, Maison Bertaux, the Swiss Tavern/Compton’s, and through the club scene.

I have these strong feelings that Derek was a kind of fairy godfather to very many younger filmmakers, particularly men, in that now forgotten area of acceptance of sexuality, of HIV status etc, being able to be out, and be public.

I was very deeply and ingenuously influenced by B2 Movie (3fps, 1982) with Jean Marc Prouveur’s eyelashes almost brushing the lens. An image I filmed in 1994 of Darryn Birch, at Jean Marc’s in Italy, and slowed even slower than that on the optical printer, is almost trying to hold onto that ethos, unashamedly, of those particular faces…  then I’m also a big fan of Anger, Fellini, Pasolini, and forays from landscape into theatricality, so I would say I was personally deeply influenced by part of Derek… (the Super 8s, the diarist, the polemics).

But with the RADA bit, and the Tilda type acting bit, and the designer mud in War Requiem, I’d part company, which is why I’d recommend the German language version of BLUE with voice by Fassbinder’s Eva Matthes (Manfred Salzgeber Edition), which I saw at Manfred’s memorial, at the Filmpalast, Berlin, 1994.

Later, my link with Derek was through the films, as a filmmaker, through the triangle with Manfred Salzgeber and Berlin. See Time to Act, Netherlands, Filme on AIDS, Norway etc., In the eighties Behind Closed Doors and Sailor Trailer were with Imagining October. And from 1993 my film Cling Film screened internationally both with Angelic Conversation and Blue.

One thing I always will be sad about is that, apart from Berlin meine Augen, and possibly the censored television version of Cling Film, I don’t recall Derek seeing any of my films, or ever really coming to see other people’s films, for that matter.  Man Ray, Fellini, Jean Genet, sure, otherwise really only through boy interest or queer solidarity would he have seen work by Adam Elliot or or Richard Heslop.

And I think people should consider how Derek was influenced by someone rough edged, like Padeluun,  by Cerith Wyn Evans and John Maybury with the early blue screen effects doing the music clips, by Richard Heslop’s energy, Christopher Hughes’s precision and care with some of the Last of England filming, say.

And how Derek was an impresario, a commensurate charmer, who gathered people and drew them to him, and absorbed their talent, and how he was always happiest with an entourage, collectively, ‘the gang’, he never seemed to think about his feature films alone, and he asked me how he should finish Caravaggio, “I can’t think how to end it,” and I said, “Go for a walk somewhere and shut everyone out, and clear your mind of so many conflicting views, and think how YOU want it to end”…   I don’t think he listened to me.

Yet a shot of the ragwort on the shingle with scudding clouds in The Garden, could only be filmed if you were alone, so his Super 8s had that something which spoke.

Anna Thew is an artist and filmmaker.

Derek Jarman. Image courtesy of James Mackay

The Jarman Award “gives recognition and support to artists working with the moving image, and whose work, like Jarman’s, resists conventional definition, encompassing innovation and excellence.” The shortlisted artists for 2009 are Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Simon Martin, Lindsay Seers and Stephen Sutcliffe. And the winner – who receives £10,000 and a Channel 4 Three Minute Wonders commission – is announced on 22 September 2009.

To mark the occasion, Engine asked people about the man himself, and his work.

Duncan Petrie
Derek Jarman was a great artist who understood profoundly the power of the cinematic image – from the composed lushness of 35mm to the hand held immediacy of super-8 – to analyse and reveal, provoke and arouse, challenge and stimulate. He was also an intellectual, concerned with the inter-relations between creativity, power and desire which he explored through an engagement with a rich array of historical figures from Saint Sebastiane to Caravaggio, Shakespeare to Marlowe, Eisenstein to Wittgenstein. Culturally he was both traditionalist and radical, which in his version of progressive, cosmopolitan Englishness created no contradiction.  Above all his work was profoundly autobiographical, something that moved centre stage after he was diagnosed HIV positive and which intensified the inextricable link between art, life and ultimately death that motivated his creativity. But Jarman was also a generous and collaborative practitioner and his oeuvre is unimaginable without the input of, among others, the actors Tilda Swinton and Nigel Terry, the designer Christopher Hobbs and the sound designer Simon Fisher Turner. Jarman was one of a handful of true iconoclasts to grace the British cinema. His enduring legacy should be as an inspiration to ambitious filmmakers seeking to challenge the conservative orthodoxies and cultural amnesia of contemporary British cinema.

Duncan Petrie is a professor at the University of York.  He previously established and was director of the Bill Douglas Centre.

Jo Comino
My contact with Derek was through the mid-eighties, over the long haul to get Caravaggio off the ground and during the making of The Angelic Conversation and The Last of England. Often he was talking and I was listening. Mostly in his tiny, austere flat in Phoenix House, Charing Cross Road, mysteriously free of the detritus of everyday life. His conversation was fluent and distinctive, crammed with references and inconsistencies, sweeping to an impassioned crescendo. The smallest trigger could set him going. Once he was furious with somebody or something and rang me to sound off. Because I was out he left a message on my answer machine only to be cut off in full rant after 3 minutes. He rang straight back to resume his flow on a new section of tape. I interviewed him for a piece in City Limits on his painting show at the ICA. When I delivered the copy the deputy editor snorted (quoting Derek) “’Fidel and Mother Theresa; they’re probably better than most!’ Ridiculous, outrageous!” “Good copy though,” he added.

For a whole generation of filmmakers he was both icon and spokesperson, generous and tremendously encouraging. He was bound up with tradition as well as being (as he described Blake) ‘off-key’. His films seem to me to be bound up with his personality: visionary, gestural, bold but doubting too.

Jo Comino is a freelance writer who continues to multi-task on film-related activities, currently for Borderlines Film Festival, Flicks in the Sticks and The Rural Media Company in Herefordshire/Shropshire.

David Curtis
Steve Hawley and I were planning Charting Time (1986),  ‘an exhibition of artists’ drawings, notes and diagrams for film’ at the Serpentine Gallery, a filler to complement a show of avant-garde music scores; (they had a gallery left over, ‘twas ever thus). We rapidly dug out animation drawings by Jayne Parker, scratched 8mm images by Tim Cawkwell, Patrick Keiller’s 40-foot scroll photo-score for The End, Lis Rhodes’ artwork for Lightmusic, many others.

Why don’t you ask Derek if you could borrow one of his books-for-films, said someone, probably Mike O’Pray. This led me to an invitation to tea at the flat in Phoenix House, with muse Tilda in attendance. Suddenly, next to the teacups, there were his exquisite ‘Books’. In them, collaged together, drawings, copied texts, photos, bits of fabric, even little objects; ideas towards a film, sometimes already with sections of dialogue in place, sometimes just prompts; all linked by notes in his sepia, Elizabethan-italic script, (occasional flourishes, included).  I left with the promise of a jewel, his The Art of Mirrors book (now held by the BFI in its Special Collections department).
The collage-method of these books is what structures the best of his films; assemblages of savage and tender reflection.

I think he had ambivalent feelings about ‘drama’ and about actors. I heard him rail against English thespians, yet in his ‘big’ films, he often allows them to do their theatrical worst, awkward alongside the non-performance of more eloquent untrained ‘finds’ (Tilda being the exception). His big budget dramas can seem to preach; his low-budget films, more radically, simply present us with things about which Derek felt passionately.

David Curtis wrote A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain and founded the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection at the University of the Arts London.

Daniel Fawcett
It was upon being shown a fuzzy VHS copy of The Garden, one Sunday afternoon in 1998, by my uncle, that I decided I wanted to make films. Never before had I considered that a film could be a personal expression and exploration of ideas. I wasn’t inspired to make films that looked like The Garden, but to make films that are as personal to me as The Garden is to Derek Jarman.

As filmmakers, we are now in a privileged position: it is possible for us to produce ambitious films for very little money and without involving ourselves in a situation of artistic compromise. If there is anything we should learn from Jarman it is that we should be making films we believe in and use whatever means we have available to us.

Filmmakers should be feeling liberated. Now, more than ever before, we should be seeing unique visions. A new language of cinema could emerge. Like Jarman, we need to seek a cinema of questions, exploration and experimentation. I would love to see more theatre and more magic, less business and less money, and just a whole lot more honesty. A film crew should be like a family and film like your child, raised with love, imperfect and beautiful; you must allow it enough freedom to have a life of its own.

Daniel Fawcett is a writer and director, and founder of One  + One, the Brighton Filmmakers Journal

Gary Thomas
I only met him the once. As a teenager, back in Wales, I’d seen Barry Norman reviewing Sebastiane (1976) on Film Night. A film in Latin, with an orgy scene with Lindsay Kemp, and naked soldiers – one of the first things I did on coming to London to study in 1979 was to skip lectures one afternoon for a double bill, with Jubilee (1977), at the Scala, then in Charlotte Street.

Our journalism tutor briefed us to go and interview someone famous. I stalked Kenneth Williams outside the Stage Door of the Fortune Theatre, got invited to his dressing room, and though he spoke for a couple of hours, I’d only managed ask one question. I then tried actress Georgina Hale, who’d been in Ken Russell’s The Devils (set designed by Jarman) and Mahler. In a Play for Today she’d uttered the line “why don’t you go and peddle your arse to the soldiers outside?”, which has left an impression. But she hadn’t as much to say as I’d hoped, and I’d had to ask my questions twice.

Then. Walking down the road one day. Charing Cross Road. I spotted him. Walked up to him and said “You’re Derek Jarman.” And it was back to his Phoenix House flat for tea and an interview. He told his Wizard of Oz/running down the aisle in terror story. Of how he hated Scorsese – “Raging Bull? Raging Bore!” – and his plans to make a sci-fi film that it would be impossible for an audience to bear to watch the whole way through.

I’m not sure some of the features stood up at the time, let alone now. Jubilee confirmed punk as art school, Caravaggio was Querelle-lite. But Imagining October and The Angelic Conversation remain crucial works – vital and assertive, aesthetic and political testimonies that there was a part of culture that belonged to us.

Gary Thomas is editor of APEngine.