The wolves who learnt to swim (Part Three)

How do I sum up the experience of seeing 50 plus films (out of 185) at this year’s 51st The Times BFI London Film Festival? Now you know why there hasn’t been a blog from me for almost a month. My eyes have been slaving over a hot screen! Let’s start by quoting Sean Penn quoting novelist E.L Doctorow who “said the greatest responsibility of the artist is to understand the times in which he lives”. And when people ask me what my website is ‘about’ I guess it’s exactly that. For many Londoners, the London Film Festival is one if not the highlight of their year. For others, even in the visual arts, it can go unnoticed. And as my little websit continues gaining readership (who’d have thought it for a site that’s almost too austere for cyber-age survival) and approaches it’s 1st birthday (all gifts accepted), I’m thinking a lot about what is that responsibility I have in writing this.

On Saturday, The Independent’s arts commentator David Lister cited Andrew Marr in his Robert Redford Lions for Lambs TV interview for the title originating from the difference between WW1 soldiers and their generals. “When Marr gently pointed out...that the correct word is not lambs but [lions led by donkeys] Redford gasped: “Isn’t it? Oh! You’d better take it up with the writer.” But Lions Led by Donkeys does rather sound like a Ben Stiller Hollywood bestiality frat-com. Godforbid there should exist such a thing, of course. And the misquotation begs a lot of questions about our responsibility to our times. We, of course, remember the famous line from John Wayne’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence “when the legend becomes truth, print the legend”. But should we? Our politicians would certainly like us to follow this dictum and Noam Chomsky consistently proves them wrong. The Lefties of the BFI Southbank still balk at the word escapism in film comment, and someone like me who dares to even think that word, is still treated with great suspicion if not at times downright derision. But let’s face it, arty cinema is still a minority pleasure, so why do all the factions continually fight over the same crust of bread? And isn’t all film escapism in a sense? Not escapism in terms of relinquishing one’s conscious but in terms of escaping that make believe world of politicians and corporations. A search for an inner light and truth for the filmmaker, the audience and history itself. In discussing ‘magical realism’ once with Brazilian director Hector Babenco (long before the current ‘mr/esoterica’ renaissance), he said that what intrigued him was that ‘magical realism’ in one country is everyday life in another. Just as a child’s world is constructed through observations of detail we adults are mostly blind to in our daily rituals, the lion on a packet of tea, the face in a tree’s bark.

Is the digital age killing our children’s Proustian development or increasing it? A whole day of the London Film Fest (LFF from hereon) was devoted to a conference Power to the Pixel. Ira Deutchman (founder of the radical Fine Line Features and now head of NYC based digital distributor Emerging Pictures) opened the day with an evangelicalism for the pixel that became a running joke for the day “a latent Messiah”. Clearly not anti-capitalist, he said, “We can now give consumers what they want. The current distribution mechanism is broke. The digital world is closer to ideas than things.” As with the music industry, filmmakers now have the power to cut out the middlemen and promulgate their art to the world. There are no gatekeepers. Or are there?

One of the characters in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild says there is no such thing as power. But clearly there is, it just depends whether you’re in power’s sphere of influence. At the lavish (compared to LFF standards) reception ironically held in Mayor Livingstone’s former Thatcherite bulwark County Hall, I met a French doco distributor who founded Veilleur de Nuit (the night-watchman). His latest project Le XV des Cités follows French Muslim Rugby players from the Paris suburbs. He was very sceptical about the romantic notion of removing gatekeepers. “Someone will always have keys. One will be awake, one asleep. There will always be at least two dimensions.” Some speakers cited Facebook as aggregating consumers in a “you’re in control” model of “empowering your audience to become part of your network”.

Matt Hanson’s A Swarm of Angels
Jeremy Nathan’s commercial South African model DV8
Lance (The Last Broadcast) Weiler’s Head Trauma case study
Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s Four Eyed Monsters and
David Strauss/Joe Neulight from Withoutabox

Every year, the LFF cleverly allows studios and larger film companies to use festival Leicester Square (West End) slots as a promo springboard for some of their general releases a few weeks later: Eastern Promises, Interview, Lions for Lambs, Brick Lane, Sicko, Into the Wild. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is a series of duologue conversations about Americans’ involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It resembles the dialectics of a stage play rather than the vision of film and there’s little that is unfamiliar here even to a mainstream audience. And yet. Redford’s consummate skill is in his pacing and his direction of colleague actors. Tom Cruise’s toothy smile, waistcoated would-be President senator figure has been seen more often than we’d like. Yet Cruise makes us believe that this senator truly cares and believes in a Republican solution to the War while at the same time bordering on a stereotype. Meryl Streep’s ‘CNN’ style journalist is less convinced. It makes interesting comparison to the fiction/faction of Rendition with its great cinematography, performances and happy ending, well the hero’s tortured but released back to the States. “Extraordinary rendition” was American government policy to covertly shift suspect terrorist foreign nationals for torture and detention to overseas prisons, in this case Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally). Meryl Streep is the CIA honcho responsible in a scary ‘you wouldn’t want to cross her’ performance in a film that though bold and impressive otherwise lacks those childlike details to frighten and fascinate us.

Friday night, I popped my head into a Southwark shell of offices awaiting planning permission and now temporarily the Climate Change Action gallery. Three floors of very mixed quality art but with a really nice vibe. Apparently they plan to bike pedal power the electricity for the stage. There wasn’t much other energy saving in evidence, though. A poem pinned outside the entrance uttered “every breath is sacred” but most people in the waiting queue were puffing non-herbal cigarettes. Chetana Thornton had only one of her spiritual paintings popped above a doorframe but her catalogue looked promising enough to see more in the flesh.

In the same spirit but in the Marlborough Gallery’s much posher premises, is Cathie Pilkington’s White Elephant sculpture show on the theme of childhood “assembled from disparate lowly or debased sources, folk museums, souvenirs, self-taught road-side sculptors and the like” according to the press release, and the catalogue rather grandly places her in the context of Rilke and Rodin. I’d rather place her in the context of Walter Benjamin, the Baroque and the allegorical. History appearing as nature in decay, in ruins through upward lift and collapse. In the gallery window is the show’s title piece – a ‘Punch’ dressed as a chef balancing a wedding cake of cascading white elephants (for his ‘Judy’?) as he revolves on a mirrored platform. Majolica is a similarly large more Rococo Bosch-like ceramic figurine of little worlds. Gonk has a hairy troll on a polished steel motorbike. And Pantheon: figurines of naked bodies and faces of babies in a Victorian Museum cabinet. Children will no doubt see more in this ingenious show than their adults will.

Bumped into an energetic Ms. L. studying at Central Saint Martin’s resplendent in a full-length Scandinavian folky coat (it’s so nice when students make an effort to dress :) If you’re buying early for Christmas, cute if ‘girly’ earrings from her friend Hannah with the wonderful Bauhausian web nomenclature www.hannahmakesthings.com. For something more far-out and computer designed, Lynne Kirsten Murray is an ex-Royal College of Art jeweller who I met at Matthew Bown’s gallery opening. A friend of radiant ex-Slade artist Katie Pilkington whose Snow Shot from 100 Trees is the audio track of exactly what she did with a catapult in Epping Forest. An Icelandic glacier groaned on a mobile phone in Vatnajokull (the sound of) and she also transmitted Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back with the result played back on a grand piano. She’s off to excite Tokyo with that piece.

Back to the LFF and Sean Penn’s 2.5 hour Into the Wild (Kyoto Planet Gala) adapted from John Krakauer’s book about the real-life 22 year-old Christopher McCandless who abandoned his privileged graduate city existence for the wilds of Alaska. This is a really great film (with first rate cast) because Penn never judges his characters. McCandless becomes Alexander Supertramp and all the folks he meets on his travels are escaping something. One kindly old timer even wants to adopt him as his son. There’s a moment when McCandless returns to Los Angeles, is helped get a bed at a city mission, but then runs like an animal caught in the headlights of the urbane existence of suits, smiles and platitudes he sees through the city’s windows. But McCandless becomes as much as a wilderness Romantic as the urbane Romanticists he is escaping. There’s a strong similarity to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, another true story in which a disillusioned actor Timothy Treadwell goes to live with the grizzlies but transgresses the park rangers’ rules of getting close to the bears to his cost. The rules are there for good reason but McCandless is bemused at the license he needs and ignores because of a 2-year wait list, to canoe down the river rapids. He survives his transgression. The trouble is that well-intentioned rules will always ossify into bureaucracy. But maybe McCandless did, after all, find his inner light. And maybe that’s why the grizzly, sniffing him up and down in the film’s final minutes, leaves him alone.

The much-maligned Michael Moore had the Documentary Gala slot with Sicko, his expose of health care in America juxtaposed to France, the U.K. and Cuban systems. Even if you’re not so in favour of Moore’s approach and sympathies, Sicko begs too many questions to ignore and that is packaged in a film that the general public will want to see. Moore presents the social welfare systems outside the U.S. as utopias, but the effect of his film is more of a Lions for Lambs dialectic than Moore perhaps realises. I can’t speak for the French system but the U.K. system probably haemorrhages as much money, relatively speaking, to corporate and political coffers as the U.S. private health care funds. It’s a little akin to the opening two page fairy tale of Italo Calvino’s collected Italian fairy tales in which Dauntless Little John fights off the limbs of his oppresses only to suddenly turn around and drop dead on seeing his own shadow.

Ermanno Olmi famed for The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (L’albero degli zoccoli, 1978) had One Hundred Nails (Centochiodi) at the LFF and likely, he says, to be his last narrative film “summarising the meaning of [my] entire existence”. A disaffected professor drives 100 spiky nails through priceless library texts and flees his former life rebuilding an abandoned hut on the River Po and endearing himself to the small local community until judicial laws are enforced. The Jesus allegory is obvious and Olmi now wants to return to making documentaries. In Memory of Me (In memoria di me) by Saverio Costanzo, now on general release, is far more austere with a young monk finally abandoning his monastery to find his own inner truth.

Pressure is mounting on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to resign over the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

Police not tackling serious crime due to targets

Marc Evans’ In Prison My Whole Life documents the struggle of former Black panther and radical journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal arrested for the murder of a police officer in Philadelphia 25 years ago, sentenced to death and awaiting execution ever since. What interested Evans was “how Mumia’s voice, so resonant of the great speech-makers of the 60’s Civil Rights movement, fits into today’s post-modern, post 9/11 world and how counterculture America has changed...attempting to place Mumia within that radical American tradition of the dissenting voice [asking] ‘is anybody really listening anymore?’ Harrowing is Chomsky’s observation that while some stolen Watergate tapes became history, nobody speaks of the enormous covert government operation against campaigns such as Civil Rights and the Panthers.

Israeli born Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (Bikur ha-tizmoret), now on general release, has the cash-stripped Egyptian Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra stranded on the outskirts of a small Israeli town in the desert. They would almost look camp wheeling their trolleys in their immaculate powder-blue uniforms if it weren’t for the dignity they possess. They are befriended by cafe owner Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) and invited to stay the night until the morning bus arrives. Tewfiq, the conductor (Sasson Gabai) loves Chet Baker, and if you find his rendition of My Funny Valentine sentimental, then I guess you’ll think the same of this film. If not, it’s a truly beautiful picture with warmth and “tons of loneliness” in Dina’s words. “It’s strange, half of Israel was fighting with Egypt, but we all sit and watch the Arab movie [on TV]”, remembers Kolirin. Tewfiq, never without his pride or his baton, opens himself to Dina that evening bitterly regretting his harshness on his son, who subsequently committed suicide.
The Band's Visit Turned Away by AMPAS, Middle East Fests

The film’s producer Sophie Dulac has also given us LFF’s Heartbeat Detector (La question humaine) directed by Nicholas Klotz (France) and screened again on the weekend as part of UK Jewish Film Festival. For 7 years, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) has been the company shrink for German chemical firm SC Farb. Deputy director, Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), asks Simon to covertly monitor the mental health of the firm's director, Mathias Just (Michael Lonsdale) who head office thinks has gone a bit doolally. His cover is to establish an orchestra in order to maintain worker productivity – Mathias Just played violin in the company’s Farb Quartet- and the film follows a Holocaust mystery trail. This is another 2.5 hour film but it’s quite engrossing: the music mix is superb (though I wish it wasn’t Schubert’s so oft heard Death and the Maiden quartet again), so too the camera and performances. And the viewer feels strangely involved yet distanced by Klotz’s director technique.

Ulrich Seidl's (Austria) Import Export (135 min) has a similar feel of an unstoppable tide beneath your feet without the spectator ever entering the water. UK released next year by newcomer Trinity Filmed Entertainment (also Heartbeat’s distributor) it’s social realism but with comic almost ‘exotic’detail that’s totally engrossing. Co-written by Veronika Franz, Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a Ukrainian single-mother who trains it to Vienna to better her life after stints at internet porn and nannying fail, finally getting a cleaning job in an elderly care unit. Young Pauli (Paul Hofmann), disaffected but diligent, loses his Vienna shopping centre security job after being attacked by a gang of youths himself, and is in financial hock to his stepdad (Michael Thomas). They end up in lugging a videogame machine to the Ukraine. Again, great performances.

A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (part of LFF’s Experimenta) is director Esther Robinson’s doco delving into her mysterious uncle Danny who only made shorts for about 6 months, but who was one of the very few people to whom Warhol ever loaned his Bolex. He began as an editor for the Maysles brothers, no less, and became a regular at Warhol’s factory designing lighting for the Velvet Underground shows. In 1966 he disappeared without a trace. I began my breakfast chat with Esther with memories of my own quest Hybrid Magazine many years ago (Page 2) for another failed New York legend Jack Smith. Mary Jordan was the one tenacious and brave enough to deal with the estate’s rights issues with her doco finally surfacing in last year’s LFF.

“Yes, Mary and I compared war stories. [But, of course, Danny was family]. I'm a musky American full of love. But I don't think there was much love in 60's experimental work. Artists have two families their birth and artistic. [And it's about] the choice you make. Jack Smith chose [his artistic family] well. Danny did in the beginning but it wasn't a nurturing family. When he needed something emotional from that [Warhol] world it wasn't there. Drugs derailed Danny and it didn't Warhol. The amphetamines increased that singular, narcissism in the centre where you remember yourself. Danny was much more a chronicler of what happens, watching and capturing. Jack Smith was [more about] being in the world. Jack had this spectacular frame [of existence]. Danny had exuberance through his frame - sensual and joyful. And Warhol was almost operatic because they were all kids, fighting, with promise but how do you actualise that promise. [There was] a rapid breakdown of social codes, high-class kids' world blown apart, wanting something to hang their personalities on. They didn't have scrappy survival instincts. Drugs gave them bravery.” One of Robinson’s most revealing interviewees is musician John Cale who reflects that each of the Warhol group really wanted to remember Danny in their own image, constructing the myth to fill in the voids. Esther: “I was speaking to one of my interns [about this] that nobody chooses this [profession] out of sheer ego, at some point it chooses you. The orbit of something eclipses you. But the world likes neat categories.”

To be continued...