Well I did indeed see Paranoid Park.
It seemed more unreal than previous films in a similar vein like Last Days and Elephant. Whilst it continued the tracking shots of people walking and the jigsaw-puzzle narrative that were seen in those films, it added an extra dimension to take one out of the immediate situation. Music nodded to something else, something that wasn't at first obvious. This continued throughout the film. There was always something else to think about, what you were watching wasn't the whole story.
Within in the first few minutes, Alex's narration is abandoned for dreamlike, nearly elegiac camcordered shots of the Paranoid Park skaters. The camera dips and rises with the skaters, moving about at will to the accompaniment of music made from understated French vocals and lo-fi instrumentation. These shots, if not always with the same music, reappear throughout the film, as if a reminder of the purity of skateboarding in Alex's confused and now impure world.
This is a film with multiple narratives, but you wouldn't really say that. It doesn't set them up in the way cineastes expect these days, with the film-maker flitting between the separate strands before bringing them all together at the end. In Paranoid Park they are always just there. Van Sant doesn't make you forget this. Ignore context at your peril.
Van Sant should be, and pretty much is, "down with the kids" now. In his search of Portland for the right kid to play Alex, he's unearthed a performance from Gabe Nevins that captures note perfect those elements of inscrutability, uncertainty and a-shrug-of-the-shoulder insouciance that is - for adults at least - the life of the teenager. It would feel almost like a documentary at times, if it wasn't for the stylised imagery. There is a perfect understatedness to it all. As Alex is being questioned by the police, we don't get histrionic beads of sweat or nervous fingers drumming the table. Alex is relaxed, and only a little change of his story makes anything seem amiss.
There's something about this film I can't quite put my finger on, which I suppose is apt. That's exactly the feeling you have coming out of the cinema. All these little moments that somehow have added up to something much bigger. And yet they're still identifiable as small moments - a shower, a conversation at a skate park, each one is something and nothing. What Gus Van Sant manages here I suppose is to make you aware of the big moments encased in small ones, but to never let you forget that casing. The two exist in parallel.
Tuesday 30 October 2007
Monday 29 October 2007
Work and Non-Work
The other day I put into practice that theory (is it really a theory?) of continuing to write even when you know it's shit. I think it worked out pretty well, but it will obviously need retouching. It'll probably change completely by the time we film it. I'd be worried if it didn't, to be honest. A script is never a completed film.
Nevertheless, all that success was mitigated by my failure to upload the scene to our Partnerpage, thus preventing me from working on it for the next week. Which is highly frustrating.
Still, it's given me something to write about on here.
And I'm going to see Paranoid Park later.
Could be worse.
Nevertheless, all that success was mitigated by my failure to upload the scene to our Partnerpage, thus preventing me from working on it for the next week. Which is highly frustrating.
Still, it's given me something to write about on here.
And I'm going to see Paranoid Park later.
Could be worse.
Saturday 20 October 2007
Handsworth Songs
Today at Document, I saw Handsworth Songs, a film made in 1985/6 by the Black Audio Film Collective about what have come to be known as "race riots" in Birmingham and London.
In introducing the film, director John Akomfrah talked of an idea he and fellow members of the Collective came into contact with during their time at art college, that of the cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, who talked of political crises as simultaneously crises of narrative, of a failure to tell a story (or the real story? this was unclear) of events that were taking place. As I took it, each failure informed the other to the extent that they were inseperable and led to further crises and unrest.
The film itself, whilst ostensibly focussing on the Handsworth riots deals with the entire legacy of migrant travel to Britain, and Windrush in particular. It tries to unpick the long and complicated story that led to the riots. Akomfrah talked in praise of the collage technique and the film uses collage (and I suppose by extension Eisenstein's practice of montage) to gather in all the threads of the Afro-Carribean experience in Britain up until that point.
In quickly scribbled notes during the Q&A afterwards I wrote down "attempt to intervene in status quo narrative", that being the generalised, establishment-accepted version of events which had to all intents and purposes been 'agreed' on in the time between the making and the screening of the film. In fact Akomfrah told of an article by Salman Rushdie attacking the film for restricting the voices of Handsworth's inhabitants. By attempting to tell their own story, to contrast the "official" line, the Collective had been equally as guilty of denying the voiceless a voice.
I'm not sure how much I agree with that. What Akomfrah talked about were the distinctions, similarities and interplay between history and memory. Whilst obviously contentious, the Collective's aim he said was to mingle the two in the tradition of the black poetry he was reading at the time. Not a faceoff but a friendly meeting between the public and the personal, perhaps an attempt to bridge a gap.
Up to a point it succeeds. It is a gathering in of footage from libraries, footage discarded by mainstream TV channels, the films of Phillip Donnellan and that from the public. This latter category includes some fantastic coverage of Malcolm X wandering around Smethwick.
I felt lucky to see this film in the prescence of its very articulate director. By rounding out and elaborating on a film full of allusions, songs and words that meant more than their immediate literal meaning I felt I grasped a huge part of what the Black Audio Film Collective were all about, what the riots were about and crucially what life in Britain was like during the 80s, not just for immigrants and their families but for all of us.
In introducing the film, director John Akomfrah talked of an idea he and fellow members of the Collective came into contact with during their time at art college, that of the cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, who talked of political crises as simultaneously crises of narrative, of a failure to tell a story (or the real story? this was unclear) of events that were taking place. As I took it, each failure informed the other to the extent that they were inseperable and led to further crises and unrest.
The film itself, whilst ostensibly focussing on the Handsworth riots deals with the entire legacy of migrant travel to Britain, and Windrush in particular. It tries to unpick the long and complicated story that led to the riots. Akomfrah talked in praise of the collage technique and the film uses collage (and I suppose by extension Eisenstein's practice of montage) to gather in all the threads of the Afro-Carribean experience in Britain up until that point.
In quickly scribbled notes during the Q&A afterwards I wrote down "attempt to intervene in status quo narrative", that being the generalised, establishment-accepted version of events which had to all intents and purposes been 'agreed' on in the time between the making and the screening of the film. In fact Akomfrah told of an article by Salman Rushdie attacking the film for restricting the voices of Handsworth's inhabitants. By attempting to tell their own story, to contrast the "official" line, the Collective had been equally as guilty of denying the voiceless a voice.
I'm not sure how much I agree with that. What Akomfrah talked about were the distinctions, similarities and interplay between history and memory. Whilst obviously contentious, the Collective's aim he said was to mingle the two in the tradition of the black poetry he was reading at the time. Not a faceoff but a friendly meeting between the public and the personal, perhaps an attempt to bridge a gap.
Up to a point it succeeds. It is a gathering in of footage from libraries, footage discarded by mainstream TV channels, the films of Phillip Donnellan and that from the public. This latter category includes some fantastic coverage of Malcolm X wandering around Smethwick.
I felt lucky to see this film in the prescence of its very articulate director. By rounding out and elaborating on a film full of allusions, songs and words that meant more than their immediate literal meaning I felt I grasped a huge part of what the Black Audio Film Collective were all about, what the riots were about and crucially what life in Britain was like during the 80s, not just for immigrants and their families but for all of us.
Decisions, decisions
Writing is always about decisions. To take anything forward, you have to decide one way or another. There's never a middle road. And if there is, it only seems like one for a while until you realise it's one of the forks.
I usually shy way from the decisions, to be honest. Perhaps that's why I struggle to finish things. Come up against even a relatively simple decision like "does this character like or dislike that person" and I run away. I'm learning, slowly but surely, to blast through the walls, even to ignore the need for a decision if I have to and just KEEP WRITING. As Hemingway once said, "the first draft of anything is shit" and you don't have anything to de-shit if there's nowt on t' page.
I usually shy way from the decisions, to be honest. Perhaps that's why I struggle to finish things. Come up against even a relatively simple decision like "does this character like or dislike that person" and I run away. I'm learning, slowly but surely, to blast through the walls, even to ignore the need for a decision if I have to and just KEEP WRITING. As Hemingway once said, "the first draft of anything is shit" and you don't have anything to de-shit if there's nowt on t' page.
Friday 19 October 2007
Children of Solidarnosc
Lack of work on my part this week. Mainly due to overwork at the day job and volunteering at the Document Human Rights Film Festival at the CCA.
I did projection of two films tonight! One called Beslan: The Right To Live, which was a rather muddled film about the aftermath of the terrorist takeover of a school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia, and a fantastic film called Children of Solidarnosc.
The latter was a wonderfully assured, confident, incisive, thought-provoking (I could go on) piece following the children of leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland. It was a cross sectional view of modern Poland. It talked to a young teacher whose father wrote a wonderfully tender song for her when she was one, explaining why her dad was away all the time and how he hoped to bring about a better world for his little girl. The song became an anthem for the workers but had less impact at home, and she admits feeling bitterness towards her father. In a discussion round the dinner table she talks of the struggles for her generation in a capitalist society. Her parents are a little sceptical, listing the freedoms young people now enjoy. She finds life just as hard she says. At home she and her boyfriend bone up on Ireland whilst packing their possessions into boxes. They plan to live and work there for a few years in an attempt to save up money. "This is our last chance before we have children," they say.
We also met Lukasz, a media analyst in Warsaw who heads home every two weeks to his mother's farm and his 8 brothers and sisters. He worries about what will happen to the farm and his mother, and seems to find the balance between his two lives a hard one to achieve. He says people are leaving Poland and he himself went to the US and England, but "this is where my life is".
Artur, meanwhile, has met a girl named Ana and they are busy planning and building (!!!) their house. He works in the same shipyards his father did and whilst he seems a cheery fellow he moans at the unfair ratio of responsibility to salary.
All of the young people in this film share the problems most young people in the West have. Jobs, money, family, the usual stuff. What sets them apart is the acute realisation they all have that it could've been different, and was for their parents. The one problem they have that Westerners don't is to reconcile the legacy of communism and their parents part in its downfall with their new lives.
I did projection of two films tonight! One called Beslan: The Right To Live, which was a rather muddled film about the aftermath of the terrorist takeover of a school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia, and a fantastic film called Children of Solidarnosc.
The latter was a wonderfully assured, confident, incisive, thought-provoking (I could go on) piece following the children of leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland. It was a cross sectional view of modern Poland. It talked to a young teacher whose father wrote a wonderfully tender song for her when she was one, explaining why her dad was away all the time and how he hoped to bring about a better world for his little girl. The song became an anthem for the workers but had less impact at home, and she admits feeling bitterness towards her father. In a discussion round the dinner table she talks of the struggles for her generation in a capitalist society. Her parents are a little sceptical, listing the freedoms young people now enjoy. She finds life just as hard she says. At home she and her boyfriend bone up on Ireland whilst packing their possessions into boxes. They plan to live and work there for a few years in an attempt to save up money. "This is our last chance before we have children," they say.
We also met Lukasz, a media analyst in Warsaw who heads home every two weeks to his mother's farm and his 8 brothers and sisters. He worries about what will happen to the farm and his mother, and seems to find the balance between his two lives a hard one to achieve. He says people are leaving Poland and he himself went to the US and England, but "this is where my life is".
Artur, meanwhile, has met a girl named Ana and they are busy planning and building (!!!) their house. He works in the same shipyards his father did and whilst he seems a cheery fellow he moans at the unfair ratio of responsibility to salary.
All of the young people in this film share the problems most young people in the West have. Jobs, money, family, the usual stuff. What sets them apart is the acute realisation they all have that it could've been different, and was for their parents. The one problem they have that Westerners don't is to reconcile the legacy of communism and their parents part in its downfall with their new lives.
Wednesday 10 October 2007
Welcome
This is a test. It's also the first entry in a blog that theoretically will become dedicated to projects undertaken by Mind Mechanics.
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