Introducing Vladimir and William

Beg Steal Borrow News, New projects, Uncategorized, Vladimir and William

While we are busy working simultaneously on ~~This is Cinema~~, La Belle Noise, The Benefit of Doubt and The New Hope 2, we are also delighted to announce the completion of Vladimir and William.

Vladimir and William consists of eight video letters sent between William Brown and Macedonian experimental filmmaker Vladimir Najdovski between 2017 and 2018.

The film is inspired by various epistolary movies, such as Chris Marker’s Sans soleil, Erik Baudelaire’s Letters to Max and Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari’s Life May Be.

Featuring images of Skopje, London, Edinburgh, New York, Paris and Abu Dhabi, the film offers thoughtful considerations of various contemporary issues as well as perennial philosophical conundrums.

Here is a link to the film. If a password is required to view the film, then do get in touch with us and we shall happily send one to you.

The fidelity and treachery of images (thoughts inspired by Maryam Tafakory and John Torres)

Blogpost, Film reviews, Iranian cinema, Philippine cinema, Uncategorized

What is a title?

In some senses, a title gives to things an authority, a name. Something that is titled is also entitled. To have a title, to be titled: these are things that connote importance.

A title can also sum up a work of art, or even a human being. Or rather, the title Lord Snodgrass not only sums up a human being, but it also covers up that human being. For, ‘Lord Snodgrass’ tells us little about a flesh and blood person who has weaknesses and foibles like everyone else. Instead, the title becomes inhuman, a symbol of power. If you don’t have a title, you are nothing.

There is naturally a tradition within pictorial art – but less so in other forms – for works not to carry titles (even if they carry signatures).

But in film, it is quite rare for a work to be untitled.

Nonetheless, titles clearly are important.

But if titles wield power and impose meaning upon a person, then they might also do the same for a work of art, including a film.

As ‘Lord Snodgrass’ takes us away from a flesh and blood human being, then, does a film title not in some senses take us away also from the film itself?

Perhaps it is for this reason that John Torres gives to one of his short films the improbable title of Wala kaming pakialam sa demokrasya. Ang gusto namin: pag-ibig, pag-asa at ang kamukha nito/We Don’t Care About Democracy. This Is What We Want: Love, Hope and Its Many Faces (Philippines, 2010).

In its very unwieldiness, the title gets us away from an imposed meaning, and instead perhaps reminds us of how titles impose meanings, thereby perhaps allowing the film to ‘speak for itself’ – without the title interfering.

Indeed, in giving to us an unrememberable and convoluted title, perhaps Torres asks us to get away from normal cinema, which is defined by titles, and into a new realm of cinema, perhaps even a non-cinema (as per the non-films that Torres’ Philippine compatriot Khavn de la Cruz creates – often using equally impossible titles), in which we see images not constricted by the meanings of words and titles, but images that speak for themselves as images. Strange, alien, perhaps undecipherable – the essence of cinema, but which by virtue of being unquantifiable and unsellable without titles, language and meaning, become non-cinema because not ripe for capitalist exploitation.

Except for the fact that Torres’ short film is all about titles, because as the action of the film unfolds – as actors Edgardo Maynar and Manilyn Glemer discuss their relationship on a bed – we get simultaneous English-language and Mandarin titles sprawling across the bottom and the right-hand side of the screen respectively.

Similarly, Maryam Tafakory’s I Have Sinned a Rapturous Sin (Iran/UK, 2018) also involves titles working their way into the fabric of her short film – be they written in white on a black cloth as she writes out the words of Forough Farrokhzad’s poem, ‘Sin‘ (from her collection The Wall), or as words from the poem appearing in various sizes across the frame of the images of her film.

It is widely proven that when viewers watch a film with subtitles, their eyes spend a long time looking at the subtitles in order to read them, meaning that their eyes cannot spend so long looking at the image itself. Especially if the film involves fast motion and a fast cutting rate, then this means that viewers watching a film with subtitles miss vast amounts of visual information presented to them – more than the already huge amounts of information to which they do not attend even when the film does not have subtitles.

It is notable that Torres’ film involves a discussion of fidelity, while Tafakory’s is also infused with exploring active female desire in the context of an Iran that seeks systematically to repress that desire, as is demonstrated in the film by the use of footage of imams and other figures of authority explaining how to prevent women from feeling desire (feeding them lettuce is put forward as a decent ploy).

The films do not quite use titles in the same way, but they do in some senses reflect upon the same issue, which might be as follows: to spend one’s time looking at the subtitles rather than the remaining contents of the image is thus in some senses to be unfaithful to the image.

Indeed, in I Have Sinned… one of the talking heads from the film’s found footage suggests that to look is at the root of desire, and that if one does not look then one might not fall into sin.

Perhaps it is true of films: titles (which perhaps erroneously are referred to most commonly as ‘subtitles,’ even though they dominate our attention) force us to look away from the film itself and to desire instead not the film as it is, but the film as it is controlled by the use of language.

More than this.

For if titles ascribe meaning to images that might otherwise remain free and ambiguous, titles in part do this, then, by imposing their own rhythm on the images, which in some senses is to impose a certain narrative on the images that might otherwise defy that narrative.

So in some senses, then, titles impose a temporality or a rhythm on images – they subject images to the time of translation and control – rather than allowing images to be free, to breathe at their own rate, to be themselves.

Titles, then, in some senses betray images – as René Magritte perhaps knew all too well in adding to his 1948 painting of a pipe the title Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or ‘this is not a pipe.’ And what is the official title of the painting? La trahison des images, or ‘the treachery of images.’ For the title betrays the image, just as the title also forces the viewer to betray the image by imposing on that image a meaning that curtails that image’s potential to mean so much more. (Khavn may yet have it right when he says of all of his movies that ‘this is not a film.’)

treachery-of-images

But there is yet more.

For as Torres’ film continues, the titles come to speak for the male character, suggesting his own thoughts of infidelity to his partner. That is, the titles do indeed come to signify infidelity – to the woman and perhaps to the cinematic medium, but reducing to literature something that is cinematic (just as cinema routinely is reduced to scripts by film industries that must pre-approve all movies in their literary form before they even have a chance to become movies at all).

For Tafakory, meanwhile, the whisper of her voiceover, the distributed nature of her titles (sometimes hiding in the frame, sometimes announcing themselve boldly) and the pictorial nature of the Farsi script all ask the viewer to indeed be unfaithful in some senses to the image, but in other ways the titles also ask our eyes to caress the image, to hunt for the titles, which themselves are incomplete.

That is, Tafakory’s use of titles means that titles work against themselves (even if in some respects it chimes with the increasing desire for film producers to create expressive titles that are embedded into the film’s mise-en-scène, including for those hard-of-hearing audience members that need the titles in order to follow the film’s action).

While Torres plays explicitly with infidelity and treachery in his titles, Tafakory induces a sensual relationship between text and image, as the female figure that we also see remains mysteriously hidden behind her hair – in a fashion not dissimilar to Mania Akbari under bath foam in her and Mark Cousins’ other homage to Forough Farrokhzad, Life May Be (UK/Iran, 2014), and in opposition to the speaking imams who are all given faces. It is as if language here is courted precisely in order to bring us to a ‘sinful’ relationship with the film – which wants to explore the poetry of sin and the sin of poetry rather than the straitjacket of prosaic desire.

(My memory is not working properly – but the use of the whisper also recalls the female whispers that are used extensively in I think Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sib/The Apple, Iran/France, 1998… but my brain not be remembering properly.)

In both cases, then, the ongoing and problematic relationship between language and images is intelligently and beguilingly explored, unsettling at all times our understanding that a film has a singular, controlled existence.

For, if we are not sure whether we fully understand everything, and if we are not sure which ‘version’ of the film is the correct one (with or wthout subtitles? even if with subtitles, which titles?), then in some senses the film remains mysterious, sensual, other and alive. We can have a loving relationship with such a film, rather than the sort of controlling relationship that patriarchal logocentrism claims is love, but really is a kind of imprisonment.

Torres and Tafakory thus paradoxically set cinema free. Long may they continue to do so.

*The screening of these short films was part of Day for Night’s Asia through the Aperture workshop held at the University of Westminster on Tuesday 18 September 2018, and which was jointly organised by the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), the University of Westminster, and Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival.

Some notes on cinema in 2016

Blogpost, Film education, Film reviews, Uncategorized

I saw 416 films for the first time in 2016. I saw 237 of these at the cinema. I saw 128 online. I saw 27 on DVD or from a file. I saw 13 on an aeroplane. I saw 9 in a gallery. And I saw 3 on television.

I do not know how well qualified I am to judge anything like Films of the Year, although I suspect that I have seen more films than a number of people who have offered up their thoughts on the matter. But as a result of the number of films that I have seen, I can at the very least draw upon a wider knowledge base – if not a stronger understanding of what I have seen – than those others in order to summarise the year.

In my view, there were two films that really stood out for me at the cinema. The first is Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade), which I understand many other people also greatly to have liked. The second is We Come as Friends (Hubert Sauper), a documentary about South Sudan.

Beyond this, I was very much taken with Actor Martinez (Mike Ott and Nathan Silver), Güeros (Alonso Ruizpalacios), Under the Shadow (Babak Anvari), Baden Baden (Rachel Lang), Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven), L’Avenir/Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve), Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello) and I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach). So these films might constitute my Top 10 of sorts.

Films that then get a kind of proxime accessunt might include: The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu), The Big Short (Adam McKay), Spotlight (Tom McCarthy), Rams (Grímur Hákonarson), Chronic (Michel Franco), Obra (Gregorio Graziosi), Les Habitants (Raymond Depardon), Desde allá (Lorenzo Vigas), Notes on Blindness (James Spinney and Peter Middleton), Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson), Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas), Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu), Sweet Bean (Naomi Kawase), I am Belfast (Mark Cousins), Divines (Houda Benyamina), Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie), Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi), After the Storm (Kore-eda Hirokazu), Ma’Rosa (Brillante Ma. Mendoza), Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith (Stuart A Staples), Ta’ang (Wang Bing), Paterson (Jim Jarmusch), Les Innocentes (Anne Fontaine) and Your Name (Makoto Shinkai).

I feel that I ought not to given the hullabaloo about it, but I also found Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker) and Snowden (Oliver Stone) to be quite curious films that I cannot claim to understand, and yet the verve and self-confidence of which still remain with me.

Other highlights of the year included the British Film Institute’s retrospective of the work of Jean-Luc Godard, which provided me with the opportunity to see a bunch of films that I had not seen before. I was also especially taken with the retrospective of Kidlat Tahimik’s work that took place as part of the Essay Film Festival organised through Birkbeck. This involved a rare opportunity to see Who Invented the Yo-yo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy?, Why is Yellow the Middle of the Rainbow? and Balikbayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment – all of which are excellent.

MUBI continues to offer numerous pleasures, including a wee season of Jacques Rivette films (especially Out 1: Noli Me Tangere) that I enjoyed immensely, with an ongoing retrospective of Lav Diaz (whose Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) I also saw for the first time) also taking place. Meanwhile, MUBI also allowed me to see Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room and Horse Money. Furthermore, I enjoyed getting to know a bit the work of Joseph Morder and Jean-Paul Civeyrac through MUBI, while also being taken with White Dog (Sam Fuller), Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May), Los Hongos (Oscar Ruiz Navia), and Mes séances de lutte (Jacques Doillon).

Beyond MUBI, the internet also provided me with various other pleasures, including an introduction to the work of Paolo Gioli, about whom I spoke with John Ó Maoilearca at the Wilkinson Gallery, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade extended video. The BBC iPlayer allowed me to see Adam Curtis’ provocative HyperNormalisation, while I was also very excited to see Michael Chanan’s Money Puzzles online. The latter two are thought-provoking and wonderful films, with Chanan working on almost a zero budget to investigate the workings of contemporary capital.

Meanwhile, three fantastic gallery exhibitions were John Akomfrah’s solo show at the Lisson Gallery, William Kentridge’s Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery, and The Infinite Mix at the Hayward Gallery. I also enjoyed Tacita Dean’s Event for a Stage at the Frith Street Gallery, with Stephen Dillane’s performance being one of the most exciting things I have seen in a while. Finally, Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, which is showing at Tate Modern as part of their Media Networks exhibition, is well worth seeing, too.

With regard to actors, I did keep noticing Finnegan Oldfield cropping up in lots of French films; perhaps one to watch out for. The films in which he featured all seemed to draw upon a nexus of anarchic sex and/or violence from young people.

In a year of celebrity deaths, Brexit, Donald Trump, Homs, Aleppo, Mosul, Andrey Karlov and more, it struck me that there were a lot of films about child birth, lost babies, stolen babies, abortions and so on – from Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford) through to Blue Jay (Alex Lehmann). I have commented in my last post on Le corbeau on how I query that this relates to creeping fascism in our time.

There also seemed to me to be a number of films about the difficulty of distinguishing between life and death – including The Girl with All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy) and Swiss Army Man (Daniels).

I read a couple of student essays while teaching my World Cinemas class towards the end of the year, in which it was claimed that Bollywood recycles ideas, is thus unoriginal, but also unrealistic in its story lines – while the West is more invested in originality and realism.

My reply to the students who said this was to ask them to look at the highest grossing films of 2016. These include Captain America: Civil War (a sequel), Finding Dory (a sequel), Zootopia, The Jungle Book (a remake), The Secret Life of Pets, Batman v Superman (a sequel), Deadpool (based on a comic book), Suicide Squad (based on a comic book) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (a sequel) and Doctor Strange (based on a comic book).

If the West is so invested in originality, then why does the Top Ten list consist of eight sequels and/or adaptations based on existing material? Furthermore, if the West is so invested in realism, then why are all 10 of these films either about talking animals or flying humans (or both)?

The point is not simply to demonstrate how the young Western mind continues regularly to have little to no idea about its own cinema, its own reality, its own originality, its own understanding of what realism is or might be and so on – such that it can make such sweeping claims. Rather, the point is also to show that it is outside of the mainstream that the most interesting, the most original, and perhaps even the most realistic work might be found.

All of this said, I think I am still hoping for something really quite extraordinary from contemporary cinema – be that its makers (if it does not yet exist) or programmers/promoters (if it does exist, but we simply do not get to see it). Perhaps I am too beholden to cinema as a form (and really the most exciting stuff is circulating outside of cinema). I completed three films in 2016 – Letters to Ariadne, Circle/Line and St Mary Magdalen’s Home Movies, and I am proud of all of them (which is not to mention the compilation film that I have curated, Roehampton Guerrillas (2011-2016), with which I am deeply proud to be associated). It is a shame that there seems not to be an audience for these films (blanket rejections from festivals so far); I am not sure that there is much out there like them, and yet I personally (being biased) of course feel that there is much to like about them. What I mean when I say that I am ‘hoping for something really quite extraordinary,’ then, is that it would be extraordinary but wonderful to find some films that chime a bit with mine – however arrogant, narcissistic, stupid and plain twattish that might sound.

Ade, Sauper, Kidlat, Lang, Ott/Silver, Ruizpalacios, Depardon, Chanan, Mendoza, Rivette, Costa, Morder, Cousins, Lang, Steyerl, Hansen-Løve, Diaz, Dean (and Khavn de la Cruz, whose Goodbye My Shooting Star I also got to see this year, with Ruined Heart: Another Lovestory Between a Criminal and a Whore lined up for viewing shortly): perhaps they all have in common a sense that they don’t care about imitating the cinema of other people, and are instead making the films that they want to make, often disregarding the so-called rules – and regularly working on tiny budgets.

Far from being (overly) alienating as a result of its weirdness and difference, such filmmaking paradoxically becomes all the more exciting for it. It is in some senses a cinema of poverty, then, or a cinema of commiseration, that is most exciting to me. And I should like to see that pushed further. I certainly find it more exciting than the unoriginal mainstream stuff being churned out and which dominates the box office. I hope that makers, programmers, distributors, promoters, reviewers, audiences and others alike can encourage this other cinema – this micro-cinema, what Steyerl might characterise as the poor image, or the wretched of the screen, and what I might call non-cinema – to proliferate.

A Story of Children and Film (Mark Cousins, UK, 2013)

Blogpost, British cinema, Documentary, Film education, Film reviews

This blog post is written ahead of introducing A Story of Children and Film at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, London, at 6.30pm on Tuesday 27 May 2014.

A Story of Children and Film explores the way in which cinema has dealt with children over the course of its florid history. Mark Cousins, most famously responsible for The Story of Film (UK, 2011), makes a movie that involves clips from some 50 plus movies from all periods of film history and from all over the world.

Analysing clips from films as diverse as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1982), Beed-o baad/Willow and Wind (Mohammed-Ali Talebi, Iran/Japan, 2000) and La petite vendeuse de soleil/The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal/France/Switzerland/Germany, 1999), Cousins suggests that children bring to cinema an energy, a vitality and perhaps even an innocence that is not always present in mainstream, adult-centred fictional cinema.

Indeed, remarkably Cousins brings into the film his own niece and nephew, who themselves are by turns timid and performative as he trains his camera on them.

It is an entirely everyday scene, with Cousins and his young wards dressed in pyjamas playing with toys on his living room floor. Nonetheless, there are several things to highlight here.

Firstly, the very everydayness of the situation is important. For, in presenting to us a scene of everyday life, rather than a specific and rehearsed performance of children singing, for example, Cousins brings to his film precisely what he admires in those of other filmmakers, namely life.

This is in part Cousins’ documentary spirit at work, but with the child, it ties in with the sense of energy that children can and do bring to a film, and which Cousins describes in an interview. For, even when acting in a fiction film, there is a sense in which the child is not acting (even if they are acting up), but rather are performing themselves, performing as themselves, and thus revealing to us something more genuine than a studied performance.

In effect, in not being an adult, the child brings to cinema something unadulterated – and this sense of the genuine, of the unadulterated, is perhaps the most exciting thing that cinema can offer – not a projection of our fantasies, but a mirror that shows back to us our world, replete as it is with fantasies of being or becoming cinematic (kids can be and often are, after all, very aware of the camera).

As their moods range from timid to performative, we see in Cousins’ nephew and niece another of cinema’s chief powers, namely its ability to capture change. Cinema is perhaps unique among artforms in this sense, since it alone allows change to be made visible. Where painting and sculpture can show us the static, cinema shows change – and children help to bring both change itself and the possibility for change to the fore, since children are always on the cusp of change, always changing from day to the next, changing from minute to minute. Children are perhaps, then, inherently cinematic – and this is something that Cousins draws out in spades.

The ability for cinema to depict time means that cinema is also not just about depicting things and objects, but the relations between them. What I mean by this is that cinema is not necessarily about one moment and then the next – even if most mainstream films are structured in such a way as to suggest that cinema is precisely this.

Instead, cinema can and often does show us how we get from one minute to the next – the in-between moments that painting perhaps can never depict (although there is a whole history of painters that do try to do this). In showing us how we get from one moment to the next, cinema is interested in the relations between one moment and the next.

This ties in with what I am calling Cousins’ documentary spirit, or instinct: for, as children make clear to us a sense of the unadulterated, a sense of change and a sense therefore of relations, then cinema at its most powerful for Cousins is a cinema that shows a child struggling against elements in transporting a sheet of glass to his school (as happens in Willow and Wind).

That is, even if this is a scripted scene, it is a scene that takes place in the real world, and which takes time – or which is ‘slow’ from the perspective of mainstream cinema – because mainstream cinema often shows to us what needs to be done and then the thing done, with no sense of the work gone into it.

Cinema with more of an eye for documentary, cinema with more of an eye for what cinema, as a time-based medium can do, thus embraces the slow, it embraces work, it embraces effort, it embraces change, it embraces relations and how we fit into the world. Perhaps it is only apt that Cousins (no pun intended) would include his own relations in the film.

And perhaps it is only apt that he, too, should be such a prominent figure in the film – not least as a result of his voiceover – because he is not an abstracted observer of the world, but, too, is participant in, in relation to, the world – just as films exist in relation to us, influencing and changing us as we change in and with the world ourselves.

So cinema is about relations. And the breadth of Cousins’ choices, from America to Senegal to Iran, helps to demonstrate that all films, just like all humans, themselves exist in relation. Thinking of both cinema and the world ecologically, we come to the conclusion that Senegal is as important as America, even if from the commercial and/or economic perspective it is easy to overlook.

In effect, Cousins adopts a child’s perspective on the world – and finds fascination and takes delight in the so-called ‘small’ film as much as in the big-budget expensive film, because he, like a child, has not yet been trained to take notice only of what is big and loud, but he can be fascinated, too, by the small and the quiet.

In effect, Cousins is, like a child, undiscriminating in his tastes; he takes his cinema pure, unadulterated, not filtered for him by the mechanisms that typically make us view only the fast and the furious (which being full of sound and fury surely signifies little to nothing), but open-eyed and whole.

Cousins says in another interview that his films are all about the richness of looking. This is indeed true. His films are not about the solipsistic world in which, as we grow up, we are encouraged only to look out for ourselves, to think only of Number One, but in looking we also realise that we are in relation to other humans.

In private correspondence, Cousins has told me that he works on budgets for his films that are very similar in size to the budgets that I use to work on mine (which puts me to shame given how good his films are).

This, too, is important: he has made a small film here, about small humans. It encourages us not to look over that which is small, and he encourages not to be fooled by surface appearances. Like a child, we can instead look for and find joy in internal richness

We can find joy in the world as cinema presents it to us: perhaps a bit slow, but unadulterated and full of energy and life.