Port Reports: the 25th FIDMarseille

Mary is 150 years old and 27 feet tall. She is hollow, made of copper, with gold-leaf epidermis; a chubby infant rests in her arms. The kid’s hair is a halo of tight curls à la early-80s David Gower. Mother and son stare down over Marseilles from the belfry of Notre Dame de la Garde, the hill-top basilica we see in the opening seconds of both The French Connection (1971) and French Connection Part II (1975). And, down at sea-level, on the other side of the yacht-infested Vieux Port, Euthymenes stares right back.

The ancient explorer’s huge, square, stone visage faces sternly south atop his eight-foot plinth, forming one half of a double-headed ‘Janus-statue’ – designed by Barthélémy-François Chardigny and completed by Joseph-Antoine Chinard in 1809 – a few yards from the august Town Hall. Euthymenes’ abundant hair merges into that of Pytheas, who faces north. Unlike Marie et fils, this duo  are – or rather were – locals.

Back in the 6th century BC when France’s current third city was a Greek colony named Massilia, Euthymenes sailed out into the Atlantic and south along the African coastline. He returned with extravagant tales of a mighty river, which he misconstrued as the Nile. Euthymenes’ accounts have been widely questioned over the centuries, and today are reckoned to have been significantly fictionalised.

No such ambiguities tarnish the name of Pytheas, who lived from about 285-350BC and was the classical world’s first visitor to Britain (he effectively coined the term ‘Britannia’), the Baltic region and the Arctic; first scientific observer of the Midnight Sun; first to identify the moon as the source of tides.

The double-headed statue – joining the ‘factual’ with the ‘fanciful’ – would thus make a fitting logo for FIDMarseille, the city’s International Film Festival which this year (July 1st-7th) celebrated its 25th edition. Like all International Film Festivals worthy of the name, FIDMarseille (aka ‘FID’) looks north and south, east and west for its globe-spanning programme.

Janus-faced, it is simultaneously retrospective and forward-leaning. This year, tributes were devoted to French novelist/filmmaker Marguerite Duras and African-American pioneer Oscar Micheaux; many of FID’s newer works (the bulk of them world-premieres) occupy 21st century cinema’s edgier reaches, especially in the non-fictional and essayistic fields. Indeed, until 2011 FID was officially the Festival International Documentaire; the acronym remains in place.

An industry event running parallel with the public parts of the festival since 2009, ‘FIDLab’ an “international co-production platform” which brings together film-makers and potential funders. This year’s 10 projects included British photographer Richard Billingham’s Ray and Liz. In 2011 FIDLab’s slate featured embryonic versions of Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA – Golden Lion winner at Venice last autumn – and British director Phillip Warnell’s Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys In the Air, an International Competition contender at this year’s FID.

Ming of Harlem – based on the case of Manhattan’s Antoine Yates and his unorthodox, carnivorous pets – won the festival’s Prix Georges de Beauregard, named after the Marseilles-born producer behind Godard’s Breathless, Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7, Demy’s Lola and Melville’s Le Doulos. de Beauregard was also responsible for The Secret Killer, Operation Leopard and Blue Panther  – fitting, then, that his prize should go to a movie named after a 500lb Bengal tiger, who resided in Yates’ flat with a caiman named ‘Al’ among other, more orthodox household critters.

A classic example of debutant overreach, Warnell’s film struggles to reconcile ‘straight’ documentary material with more experimental aspirations: many viewers will lose patience during a punishingly lengthy mid-sequence which seemingly recreates Ming and Al’s domestic arrangements, accompanied by a narration of precious, pseudo-philosophical verbiage. But as a glimpse into the life of a true New York eccentric – the loquacious Yates is a compelling screen-presence – Ming of Harlem at its best exerts a sly, offbeat appeal.

The slightly dangerous glamour of Yates’s home turf also added spice to several of the Oscar Micheaux pictures screened at FID. Micheaux (1884-1951) made over 44 films from 1919 to 1948, and of the quintet selected for (and chucklingly introduced at) Marseilles by David Schwartz – chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NYC – three were receiving their extraordinarily belated French premiere: The Exile (1931), Ten Minutes To Live (1932) and The Girl From Chicago (1933).

Presented via scratchy video with scratchy, tinny sound that rendered chunks of dialogue inaudible, the films are dated, stilted curios which provide an invaluable snapshot of the ‘Race Films’ subgenre: pictures made for black audiences in the days of segregated movie-houses. The Exile and The Girl From Chicago are especially creaky affairs, sunk by lousy acting (Trinidad’s Carl Mahon a repeat offender on that front) and barely-functional screenplays. Technical ineptitude is the norm – unsurprising when one learns of Micheaux’s habitual breakneck workrate and cheapjack parsimony, which in these films combine to make Roger Corman look like Stanley Kubrick.

Micheaux’s films come alive, however, during their many visits to the nightclubs of Harlem – or ‘Harlem!’ as one intertitle raucously exclaims. Here, the incompetence of Micheaux and his collaborators is starkly contrasted with, and flamboyantly counterbalanced by, the skilled exuberance of the dancers, musicians and singers – all of whom came straight to Micheaux’s rickety sets from the actual places of nocturnal employment.

Although (despite its catchpenny title) utterly tensionless as a drama, Ten Minutes To Live is at its best a particularly vivacious time-capsule of Harlem’s Depression-Era diversions – even sourpuss Popeye Doyle would likely find his toes automatically tapping – with the performers’ risqué contortions blithely shoehorned into a nonsensical diptych plot about a ‘deaf-mute’ killer. At one point the miscreant’s prey takes a taxi-ride through the city, her entirely uneventful journey taking up well over a minute of screen time.

Micheaux, who was presumably seeking to pad out the picture’s skimpy duration, somewhat randomly uses Beethoven’s Fifth on the soundtrack – rudely interrupted by car-horns – for an extended sequence that stands as a spellbinding documentary survey of ordinary New York streetscapes, including a French Connection-style elevated railway.

Moving on to the NYC of the present day,  Bx46 – by the debutant French duo Jérémie Brugidou and Fabien Clouette  – proved one of the real finds of FID 2014. A rough-edged, mainly hand-held immersion in an obscure industrial corner of The Bronx, the agreeably no-nonsense affair is named after a bus-route which traverses the district of Hunts Point. Surveying the sprawling Fulton Fish Market and a nearby waste-processing plant,  the directors accumulate knockabout oral testimony from the grizzled, chatty employees, reality’s twangy tang more convincing than any scripted dialogue. Doyle’s kind of guys, you might say.

Neil Young
20th July 2014
written for Tribune magazine