LONDON FILM FESTIVALS : highlights from upcoming LFF and Raindance
GET INTO THE CINEMA : A preview of the 2010 London Film Festival
“It began as simply a study of weather-worn billboards around Los Angeles,” writes Thom Andersen of his new film Get Out of the Car. “I’ve loved these billboards with their abstract and semi-abstract patterns since I was a teen-ager, and I would sometimes take photographs of them, but I resisted the idea of putting them in a film because ‘it had been done,’ notably in still photographs by Walker Evans and Aaron Siskind. An interest in decayed signs had become a commonplace in contemporary art.
“But it happened that there was one quite beautiful ruined billboard quite near my house that went unrepaired for many months. I drove by it at least once a week, and its presence was becoming a reproach: ‘You cowardly fool, I won’t stay like this forever.’ So on Sunday, February 22, 2009, with my friend Madison Brookshire, I filmed it with his 16mm Bolex [camera]. For some months, when somebody asked about the film I was working on, I could simply say it was a film designed to destroy my reputation as a film-maker.”
By this measure, Get Out of the Car must already be reckoned a failure – having, if anything, boosted Andersen’s reputation in its first few North American screenings. While not exactly a household name, the 67-year-old Chicago-born California resident is established as one of the most seminal influences on contemporary cinema thanks to his work as a teacher, a programmer and as a film-maker, though as the 34-minute Get Out of the Car is only the third “picture” he’s made in the last 35 years, he can’t exactly be called prolific.
The arrival of any new Andersen is therefore a rare, major event in cinema, and Get Out of the Car has its UK premiere at the 54th London Film Festival – which runs under the auspices of the BFI from 13th to 28th October, and whose full programme, packed with flashy galas and much-touted fare from the big international festivals of Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Berlin and Toronto, has just been unveiled at www.bfi.org.uk.
Showings of Get Out of the Car are scheduled for Sat 23 (9pm) and Tue 26 (2pm) in NFT3 as part of a double-bill entitled ‘Hit the Road’ – the other element of which is Duncan Campbell’s Make It New John, an ambitiously unconventional 55-minute portrait of disgraced US car-magnate John DeLorean that starts in promisingly high gear only to sputter out of ideas some way before journey’s end.
Andersen’s film is a sequel of sorts, to his sprawling LA found-footage patchwork Los Angeles Plays Itself – a dazzling three-hour epic which wowed LFF audiences back in October 2004 and which remains one of the great achievements of recent American non-fiction cinema. His relatively bite-sized follow-up is part of the Experimenta strand, expertly curated by Mark Webber to showcase the best from the current avant-garde and one area where the smorgasbord-like LFF (197 features and 112 shorts this year) shows real distinctiveness and focus.
This year’s selection includes the latest work from American luminaries James Benning (challenging two-hour video-essay Ruhr), Lewis Klahr, Nathaniel Dorsky, John Gianvito (264-minute Vapor Trail [Clark], which manages to justify its daunting duration) and Sharon Lockhart (Double Tide), plus Austria’s living legend Peter Tscherkassky (his recent Venice award-winner Coming Attractions can be found in the shorts compilation ‘People Going Nowhere’) and Chinese newcomer Li Hongqi (Winter Vacation.)
One work which could easily have slotted into the Experimenta sidebar but which instead has been put with the “regular” shorts is Jonathan (Tarnation) Caouette’s All Flowers In Time, showing as part of the programme ‘Right Place, Wrong Time’ on Wed 27 and Thu 28, and described as “genuinely nightmarish” by those who’ve seen experienced it.
If Experimenta can be relied upon to show adventurous audiences the wilder margins of contemporary film, the ‘Treasures From the Archives’ section is always a similarly unmissable delve into underexplored avenues of its past.
This year’s grab-bag includes twin examples of “pre-Code” Hollywood, made in that brief anything-goes window between the coming of sound and the arrival of the government-imposed censorship guidelines in 1934: James Cagney in Archie Mayo’s crime melodrama The Mayor of Hell (1933) – showing on Thu 21 in NFT3 (8.45pm) – and William Keighley & Howard Bretherton’s ripped-from-the-headlines, ever-topical capitalism exposé The Match King (1932), showing on Tue 19 in NFT3 (8.45pm).
78 years later, the malign social effects of untrammelled greed are explored – among many other subjects – in the film which marks Patrick Keiller’s return to the big screen after more than a dozen years. Having established himself as a uniquely skilled and quizzical cine-essayist with London (1994) and Robinson In Space (1997), Oxford-based ex-architect Keiller has spent the intervening years teaching, programming and completing an unscreened Channel 4 documentary. In some ways a British counterpart of Thom Andersen’s, Keiller has now completed a loose trilogy with Robinson In Ruins, which was recently unveiled at the Venice Film Festival and shows on Tue 19 and Thu 21.
Having kicked off with an extended Andersen quotation, it’s therefore apt to end with one from Keiller: “Themes that emerged during the cinematography include oil, nuclear weapons, space exploration and, perhaps unsurprisingly, agriculture; I had been particularly keen to make some footage of the wheat harvest, which was slow, late and damp, continuing until the end of September, in the context of a high, if volatile, price inflated by increased demand and speculation in international markets… I recalled a sentence in the introduction to Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time: ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’”
Meanwhile, MATSUMOTO Hitoshi’s Symbol (Shinboru) is screening at the Raindance Film Festival in London on Saturday 2nd October. Cinema : Apollo, Regent St. Time : 9pm.
A little early to be seeing Symbol, perhaps, which should ideally have been given an 11pm slot… Japan has comprehensively dominated the “midnight movie” scene over the past decade or so, and my personal picks would be MIIKE Takashi’s Ichi the Killer (2001) and Gozu (2003), and SEKIGUCHI Gen’s Survive Style 5+. Symbol, however, is for me a cut above even that stellar trio – and a quantum leap ahead of director/co-writer/star Matsumoto’s debut Dai Nipponjin (2007), aka Big Man Japan, and not least because it runs a trim 93 minutes compared with Big Man Japan‘s sprawlingly undisciplined 113.
That said, a little patience is required during the early and middle sections, which switch back and forwards between two separate storylines which the viewer strongly suspects will eventually converge (or maybe not, if they’ve seen Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export).
In one storyline, we observe a pyjama-clad, Beatle-mop-topped bozo (played by Matsumoto) who wakes up in a featureless white room where he is afflicted by what might be best described as a series of bizarre phenomena. In the other (which provides the rug-pulling opening sequence), we follow a has-been lucha libre wrestler (David Quintero) in a dusty Mexican backwater. The wrestler’s nom de ring is Escargot Man, his kit amusingly resembling that worn by Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, and he’s preparing for his latest bout, with the help of his adoring young son.
When the two storylines do come together, over an hour in, the initial response is perhaps one of deflation. “Is that it?!”, one may ask, paraphrasing Michael Jackson, perplexed at what seems to be an arbitrary exercise in postmodern scriptwriting from Matsumoto and his co-writer TAKASU Mitsuyoshi.
But don’t lose faith – what follows sees Symbol quickly take off into the stratosphere, revealing the astonishingly audacious grand design of its structural conceit in a manner that may well leave you wide-eyed in delighted bewilderment (and itching to watch the whole thing over again, pronto.) To say any more would be unfair – criminal, even – and anyone who gives away the climactic “twist” to this divinely delirious, hilariously nightmarish, delightfully inventive and utterly sui generis brain-scrambler wants locking in a white-walled room.
Neil Young
15th September 2010
adaptation of an article written for next week’s issue of Tribune magazine.
SYMBOL : [9/10] : Shinboru : MATSUMOTO Hitoshi : 93m : {24*/28}
seen 23rd January 2010, Fokus cinema, Tromsø (Norway) – public show (complimentary ticket) – Tromsø International Film Festival
* rating upgraded to 26 after 2nd viewing, Ljubljana, November 2010