Image: Digitalis, Sebastian Buerkner

Animate Projects, with support from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, is pleased to announce a call for proposals for animated works that – in a broad sense – explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the ‘digital’.

We are looking to commission four works, at a budget of £2000 each, including artist’s fee. The commissions are available to UK-based artists, animators and filmmakers who can craft an inventive and engagingly provocative work.

The Digitalis Commissions are a part of Digitalis, a strand of activities for 2011 that focus on the potential of the digital space as a site for artistic production.

More information on the Digitalis Commissions can be found here.

Guidelines and submission form can be downloaded here.

Deadline for submissions: 4pm, 24 August.

Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

Clio Barnard’s acclaimed first feature The Arbor has its UK premiere at the 54th BFI London Film Festival this October, before being released nationwide in the UK from 22 October. A Jerwood/Artangel Open commission, and funded by the UK Film Council, The Arbor won Clio the the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. We talked to Clio about The Arbor, her previous work, and her influences…

You’ve been making work for more than 20 years and I’m trying to think about what subjects and themes are consistent in the work, and I came up with madness… madness, obsession…

I never ever thought of that!

…literally in Bedlam, and then in Hermaphrodite Bikini there’s a compulsive obsessiveness…

If there’s a thematic connection between the work then it’s not deliberate. I think it’s easier for somebody standing outside of it to recognise what the thematic connections might be, that the artist doesn’t recognise.

There are formal things that connect everything, that are to do with exploring the relationship between representation and reality. I know that sounds very broad, but the relationship between fantasy and reality, I think that’s probably common to all my work.

And if somebody doesn’t have a clear grasp on the difference between fantasy and reality, then that’s some sort of madness.

Is that the thing that comes first – the questions of representation of reality – that’s your interest and then you find subjects that fit that?

No – it is usually the other way round, but the subject matter seems disconnected from one piece of work to the next. Interrogating the form is really important to me.

You’ve consistently used a range of different formats – The Arbor is shot on Red, but you’ve used Super 8, digital effects and animation. One of those things that does is draw attention to the form itself and the artifice and construction of film – does that relate to what you were saying… revealing the truth that fiction or even documentary film isn’t the same as fact?

There’s a quote from Errol Morris which I always find really useful, about how truth can’t be guaranteed by style or expression, it can’t be guaranteed by anything. And I think he said that as a critique of direct cinema. And I agree with that statement – and it applies to The Arbor. In using this formal technique – of the actors lip syncing to the voices of interviewees – it’s partly about saying that it’s very difficult to pin down the truth. Non-fiction, documentary films, broadly strive towards pinning down the truth in some way. But that’s an impossibility.

Well… back to what I was telling you that your themes are! Is it perhaps that your characters and subjects are people who have difficulty pinning down what truth, what their truth is, or even what ‘truth’ is?

That’s definitely true. So in Random Acts of Intimacy, which is about sexual fantasy, you don’t know what really happened or what’s fantasy. And Lambeth Marsh is about what people see in their minds’ eye. And I suppose the reason maybe I’d never thought of that as being anything to do with madness is because seeing things through your minds eye is something everybody does.

And obsessions and compulsion are another kind of duality, the public and private behaviour…

That definitely crops up in Random Acts of Intimacy, and in Dark Glass, which is very private, but is all about making the private public. And because of the way that was distributed – across different platforms – it was so public. It becomes about what it means to disclose things that are very private publicly.

Dark Glass by Clio Barnard

And Headcase… where you have people drilling holes into their heads… now let me get this right… you’re saying it’s never occurred to you that you’re interested in themes of madness?!

Alright! With Headcase and Bedlam that’s pretty clear. I don’t think there’s any madness in Hermaphrodite Bikini, though there is an obsession… And you could say that with Lambeth Marsh… because the starting point for that is William Blake who you could say was mad.

Headcase and Dark Glass are both sort of exploring horror genre – Dark Glass is shot like horror movies are shot now, there’s gothic horror in Headcase, but when Frieze asked you about films that have influenced you, you didn’t you list any horror movies, except The Innocents. What’s your interest in horror?

I did get really interested in horror and that was really the starting point for Headcase was getting interested in horror. I read a book called Men Women and Chainsaws by Carol J Clover, an analysis of slasher films in relation to gender. I got an email from somebody who had found Dark Glass online and they’d composed a score for it and it really is like a horror film score. They’ve done this kind of title that says Dark Glass and is in a kind of horror-like typeface, so I’ve never ever thought of it as being like that, but now with you and him…

I love Polanski’s Repulsion, and I really think The Innocents is a very brilliant film, so yes, I do have an interest in it.

You mentioned syncing, and it’s a quite complex thing you’re doing in The Arbor. You have actors mouthing words – miming – speaking other people’s words, ‘speaking’ with voices that aren’t their own. You’re putting words from documentary interviews into actors’ mouths – where did that device come from?

It came from Hermaphrodite Bikini – it came from there being something missing in Hermaphrodite Bikini and needing to include this story about this melting bra!

Having written the story, I got an actor, Barry Wasserman, who had this very deep American voice, to read it. Then shooting something on Super 8… it may have been to do with the budget – I wanted to link together the bits of the animation sequence of these kind of hermaphrodite angel creatures in the garden with – it needed something else.

And I didn’t have any sync sound on the Super 8, so I got this guy to read this voiceover and then got this other guy, who played one of the angels, to lip sync to his voice. And I really liked the disconnection and how it transformed things.

Was that a key work for you then in that – in exploring that disjuncture between truth, reality and representation?

Definitely. For me it was much more of an influence and more successful in that way than Bedlam or Headcase turned out to be.

You mentioned Pasolini and Fassbinder in your list of influences… and there’s a connection isn’t there… in that they’re badly dubbed!

I know you’ve been developing feature projects for many years. What’s it like – on the one hand making short experimental artist film works that get made and get seen, and then with features, you’re writing scripts that get rewritten and rewritten and never get made – how do you sustain that?

Well I did do that with one project that never got made, over five years. It is really tough and I think people do that – who aren’t artist filmmakers – they do that all the time. I don’t know how because I find it really, really difficult and had to make other stuff at the same time because it was too frustrating.

The Arbor was commissioned three years ago, through the Jerwood Artangel OPEN, but how did the project start?

As with anything there were several different starting points that then came together. I grew up not far from Bradford. I’m 45, about the same age as Andrea Dunbar would be if she was still alive, and I really like the work of Alan Clarke, so I’ve always had an affection for Rita, Sue and Bob Too!, partly because I recognise the way those two girls dress!

And I really like the friendship between the two girls and their attitude to sex and the fact that the film doesn’t moralise – they’re 15-year-old school girls having a great time. I really like the writing but I’m not a theatre person so I’d never read her plays. So then I read her plays – they’d been reprinted with this play called A State Affair which I didn’t know anything about, which was a piece of verbatim theatre, where Max Stafford-Clark who’d originally put on Andrea’s plays at the Royal Court, went back to the Buttershaw estate in 2000. It looked at what had changed from the 80s to the 90s. Buttershaw is where Andrea Dunbar grew up and where Rita Sue and Bob Too! is set, where all her plays are set.

What I was really interested in was the idea that you could keep revisiting somewhere and making a new piece of work about that place. And also in the failures of representation – because you know you could go to Buttershaw and make any kind of film you wanted.

And also, the techniques of verbatim theatre – where actors speak the words of real people – related to the techniques that I’d used in Random Acts of Intimacy and in Hermaphrodite Bikini. I was interested in the difference between what happens if you use that technique with film or with theatre.

Because verbatim theatre is meant to be a kind of documentary theatre, but if you apply those techniques to film then it does the opposite. Because in film, it makes it really clear that what you’re watching is an illusion.

In a theatre you already know you’re watching something that’s constructed. But if you do the same with film, if you get actors to lip sync in this case to people’s voices, you’re acknowledging that it’s construct and you’re drawing attention to the fact that it’s an illusion. Though it did work out to be more seamless than I’d expected it to be.

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

But the film is not just about mediation and representation – it’s very much about its subject – and working class people. People we’re perhaps much more aware of now than when Andrea Dunbar’s plays were first at the Royal Court, because these people, as it were, are now visible on talk shows like Trisha or on Channel 4 documentaries, in a more exploitative way. Were you thinking about those kind of representation issues?

I think part of the problem with all of that is that there’s an idea about authenticity which is very dangerous. That’s why I agree with what Errol Morris – because there are certain codes and conventions in the way you film. If the camera is handheld and wobbly and the sound is a bit dodgy, it’s a shorthand for authenticity and I think that’s incredibly dangerous because it’s still mediated and constructed and shaped and therefore exploitative, and so I wanted to do the opposite of that.

I really love Alan Clarke’s work but you can’t carry on doing the same thing – what he was doing at that time was very radical – essentially, adopting the techniques of direct cinema and filming in a very particular kind of way. But it’s no more authentic than shooting something in a very careful structured way.

But he didn’t carry on doing that anyway, did he?

No! He made Elephant. And Road, which I think is amazing.

So having found a subject, and the idea of revisiting The Arbor, and critiquing representation, how did it develop?

I didn’t know what I was going to find and I think it was important to go into it not knowing, and with an open mind. I did know that Andrea’s daughter Lorraine was very important to the project because it’s her words that are spoken at the end of A State Affair, and because she links back to Rita, Sue and Bob Too! She says, “If my mum wrote the play now Rita and Sue would be smack heads, Bob would be injecting, probably taking loads of tablets as well.”

She says Rita and Sue would be sleeping with everybody and anybody for money. It’s very succinct, very economical, very direct and very powerful, and so I knew she was important and I knew that I wanted to, if possible, interview her. But what I didn’t know, even when it was commissioned by Artangel, was that she was in prison for manslaughter because her child had died having taken methadone. He died when he was two, and she was in prison when I first went back to Buttershaw to talk to her family and friends.

I found that out fairly soon after I’d been commissioned by Artangel, but it took a very long time before Lorraine became the focus. And part of the reason that it did become the focus was that Lorraine felt very compelled to talk to me. So the focus is the relationship between Andrea and Lorraine, and Andrea’s play The Arbor, which was her first play which she wrote when she was 15.

When I spoke to Andrea’s sister it became clear that the character in the play, Yousaf, was Lorraine’s father and that the second half of the play is all about the difficulties of that relationship and the difficulties of having that relationship on an estate that was very racist. He was very abusive towards her, and what you see in the play is her – the mother, who is Andrea essentially – attempts to protect that baby.

You stage and film scenes from the play on outdoor space on the estate…

Yes. Brafferton Arbor is the name of the street where Andrea Dunbar grew up and it’s also the name of her first play – The Arbor – because nobody ever called it Brafferton Arbor, they always called it The Arbor.

Using the play allows you a kind of window back to 30 years ago and provides a perspective on where Lorraine is now and what’s happened to her in her 30 years – I think it’s just incredibly enlightening, or helpful or revealing, about the complexity of the situation.

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

Revealing of what?

The difficulties of growing up in a culture where… well, many, many things! But one of them is dealing with racism and addiction and poverty.

Andrea’s play enables a kind of cross section across 30 years of one family and her plays are very vivid and very direct.

And I think there’s a difference – in those 30 years as well – with theatre – maybe it’s harder for theatre to make that kind of subject convincing, because we have television. I think The Arbor – in your The Arbor – you’re not just revisiting, you’re repositioning and reclaiming that as a subject for artistic investigation, I think.

The staging of the play on the estate – that must have been a funny thing to actually do. And scary… I don’t imagine it’s a great place to live even now?

Well it wasn’t scary, or only scary in so much as I thought it might not work. I’d got to know people very well on The Arbor specifically, because Buttershaw is actually very big,  but on The Arbor I’d got to know people. And people were very interested and involved and supportive. Part of the reason it was strange was that Andrea’s sister Pamela still lives a couple of doors up from where the whole family used to live, and so it was on her doorstep.

And because Andrea’s plays were so autobiographical, you know Pamela was seeing things being re-enacted that had happened in her front room, but being re-enacted on the green, on The Arbor. That was very strange, for her. And also her brother David, who is in one scene and is incredibly racist towards Yousaf, and lives just around the corner. And his son played one of the parts in the play – so it really was putting the play right back into the place that it came out of, and 30 years on.

Natalie Gavin, who’s the main actress who played Andrea, is from Buttershaw and was aware that there were all these people in the audience watching her who knew Andrea very well. So there was a lot of pressure on her to kind of get it right from that point of view, so that was strange.

For the very first scene that we shot there we put these car seats onto the green, and I really didn’t know whether it was going to work or whether it would look completely mad in the film. And I wasn’t really sure until we saw a first assembly, and actually I think those scenes are like someone opens a door and lets all the fresh air in at that point – because it’s quite claustrophobic elsewhere in the film.

And for those other parts, you did lots of interviews with people, then you wrote the script and then you filmed actors synced to actual interviews, yes?

Yes – I went and recorded just audio, there was no camera, just audio interviews with people. That was over a two-year period, going and sitting with people for hours at a time and recording just audio, and then we did an audio edit – and that was the writing of the script. There were no words on the page at that point, it was just audio, which we edited – and I ended up calling it an audio screenplay, for want of a better term. It was a screenplay, but you listened to it.

And then there’s archive footage as well. Did you always know that those different elements would be in it?

At one point I thought I would also use the archive as audio only, and get actors to lip sync. So, we’d have an actor cast as older Andrea, who’d lip sync to Andrea’s voice from the television programme, but it seemed very important that the archive was presented as it is. And also I knew, before I’d met Lorraine, I’d been to the British Library, where they had the Arena documentary that had been made with Andrea Dunbar when she was 18 – but they had just the audio, they didn’t have the pictures. I sat in this little booth with my headphones on and listened to her talking about Lorraine, and knowing what had happened to Lorraine. I found it incredibly moving and knew that in a way that needed to be the end of the film.

You never know whether that’s going to quite work, but it is the end of the film – Andrea’s talking about Lorraine being a good baby and she says sometimes you get to wishing that you hadn’t had a baby, but they’re not as much trouble as people make them out to be, or maybe that’s just Lorraine because she’s a good baby. I found it incredibly moving and not least because, I’m a mother too, and one of my children is almost exactly the same age as Harris, Lorraine’s child who died.

I do think the archive is crucial – it’s important that you see Andrea Dunbar herself, because I think it says, actually the rest of the film isn’t pretending, this is about something real. And also there’s the stuff about her going to the Royal Court and everything really plays up class to me – the Royal Court putting on the plays…

Somebody told me how they saw this story of a 15-year-old girl being kind of plucked out of obscurity and her plays being put on at the Royal Court as something that could only have happened in the 80s, it wouldn’t happen in the same way now. It’s like an Educating Rita story or something; it feels very dated it does make you feel very uneasy I think.

Particularly because Andrea really suffered because of being exposed in that way and she really suffered because she put herself on the line and exposed herself and her family for one thing, but also, she really came under attack from people on the Buttershaw estate. She wasn’t interested in moving away from there, that was her home and it was where she wanted to be. And it wasn’t an easy thing for her to do, and maybe there’s some assumption that she was somehow being helped, by becoming this playwright.

But actually I don’t know that it did necessarily help her; it’s just so much more complicated than that. What I hope – I was going to say above all, but anyway, one of my hopes – for the film is that it remains complex, that it doesn’t make things simplistic.

Isn’t there a possibility that actually it destroyed her?

That’s definitely one version of the narrative that I heard from her family. And in a way this formal technique is partly about that – how you can tell many, many different narratives about the same thing. I don’t think there is one single version that’s right but I do think it damaged her in some ways. I’m sure it brought her good things in other ways but I think it did damage her.

And similarly there are, you know, you can have different responses to Lorraine’s story and life. The film doesn’t judge Lorraine but at the same time it doesn’t excuse her either. You know she’s had a harrowing terrible life but she’s also made terrible decisions and she’s done terrible things. And there’s that thing about how lots of people have traumatic childhoods but don’t end up in that way. You must have talked to her for hours, and I mean, it’s harrowing enough in the film… The film doesn’t excuse the behaviour but was something of an ambition of yours to somehow give some kind of explanation of her life?

Not really an explanation but I suppose an understanding, or somehow trying to understand. But you’re right; people do have traumatic childhoods and don’t end up making the decisions that she made. And so I don’t think it explains it, or that cause and effect works quite in that way.

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, image courtesy of Verve Pictures

And although Lorraine’s very self critical and reflective, at times you know you don’t believe that even she believes what she’s saying.

Yes, and I think for an audience, if they find their feelings about her shift throughout the film, then that’s a good thing. And if their feelings about her are quite complicated I think that’s a good thing.

She doesn’t break down ever, but her foster parents, who feel to me like the moral centre of the film, though they’re not in it that much, but they do break down. Are they there specifically as a hope and respite…

They’re the people that I got to know first and in a way they’re the people that I’ve got to know best I suppose, and spent most time with. They’re there because they were very important in Harris’ life and in Lorraine’s life.

Including that bit where they break down was quite a difficult decision when we were cutting the audio screenplay bit of it. There’s that thing that happens quite often in documentaries when someone starts crying and the camera zooms in.

Because there was no camera there wasn’t that issue, but I did have the microphone and there was a real “Shall I switch it off now?” moment. And I didn’t switch it off, but what you hear on the mic is lots of banging and crashing because I was being so indecisive about it, and going to hug Steve and knocking the microphone!

The intention with that scene, when we shot it, was to reconstruct that sort of interruption. To leave the sound as it was, with all the knocks and the cracks and the crashes on it and the camera would drop, so doing the opposite of focussing on the people when they’re crying.

But because I think you get very absorbed in what you’re watching, that it was too disruptive at that point. And also the performances are so good. The camera doesn’t zoom though; it stays as one locked off shot. And we had to then clean up the sound.

That silence is crucial isn’t it?  It’s a cathartic moment for them and for the whole film in a way. There’s a sense of Lorraine seeking redemption or atonement, because she confesses. But it’s not a film about redemption and it’s not a film that lacks hope. And all the people who talk to you, even Lorraine, have a sense of decency.

There’s certainly hope with Ann and Steve.  They’re now professional foster parents. In a way, out of all of that tragedy, I think that that’s a hopeful thing.

I really wanted to avoid an ending that had false hope. In the edit we tried to create space at the end – we took stuff out so there was more silence and more gaps, so that there’s time to process and to think. And to grieve, in a way.

Because otherwise that doesn’t happen the whole time. Nobody grieves – in a way Lorraine doesn’t grieve when Andrea dies. And an audience is able to empathise through Ann and Steve’s grief.

In terms of the narrative of the film, Lorraine not grieving for Andrea’s death is really crucial.

How hard is it to reconcile wanting to make a film which is fair and just, but also acknowledging the impossibility of that, through film, through artifice?

Impossible really. Someone said that they thought that in a way it was about responsibility. Everybody’s responsibility. The responsibility of the people within the film.  My responsibility as a filmmaker and our responsibility as an audience. And I think that’s right actually.

About the Author: Gary Thomas is Editor of APEngine and Co-director of Animate Projects.

UK Film Council Policy and Funding Priorities Consultation

The UK Film Council has published a consultation document, inviting responses to its proposed priorities for 2010 – 2013. Encouragingly, there’s a proposal that they should “provide a new space and funding stream to support experimental filmmaking.” They don’t however define ‘experimental’, but that’s something they are likely to want to establish partly by way of the consultation process. APEngine hopes they’re thinking about a broad range of stuff – including artists’ work, animation, and even work for different platforms.

Let’s not count our chickens though. The proposal echoes what they said last time, proposing an Experimental Production Fund that would “provide a space for singular and experimental directorial and artistic talent.” They reported that some responses to the consultation “readily backed the proposals”, but “others believed that experimental production did not come under the UK Film Council remit” – and that’s the opinion that won out.

So all credit to UK Film Council for not letting it drop. In the last three years, despite not pulling off an actual fund, they’ve at least made some effort. The Moving Image Initiative, a New Cinema Fund collaboration with Arts Council England, produced the successful multi-platform Single-Shot project, and developed several feature projects, including a project by Gillian Wearing, said to be about to get a green light. The Development Fund put some money into Clio Barnard’s forthcoming feature The Arbor, commissioned through the Artangel/Jerwood OPEN. And in September’s issue of Sight & Sound, the head of the New Cinema Fund, Lenny Crooks affirmed that he was looking to make “challenging work” with gallery artists in the future.

So if you want to let them know that you too are supportive of experimental filmmaking then respond to their consultation, via their online survey, which closes on 9 February 2010.