Tag Archives: film

A screening of Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’

Recently Birkbeck’s School of Business, Economics and Informatics and International Student Administration (ISA) held a Netflix party screening of Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning film, ‘Roma’ that was open to all students. In this blog, two Birkbeck students share their experience of watching and discussing the film as part of the event.

Azucena Garcia Gutierrez

Azucena Garcia Gutierrez

Being an international student at Birkbeck has been one of the best experiences I have ever had in my life. One of the things I have found the most fascinating in an international atmosphere is the fact that you get to know people from all over the world. Not only have I had the opportunity to learn from my classmates’ traditions, lifestyle, religion and mindset, but I have also learnt to share what my own country represents as well. The cinema screening for international students organised by William Richards and La Young Jackson has been such a wonderful opportunity to share more about Mexico and its history in the 1970s through the movie called Roma.

Roma, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, received ten nominations at the 91st Academy Awards and it also became the Best Foreign Language Film for the Best Cinematography and Best Director. Not only is Roma worth watching due to its extraordinary appraisal, but I also considered it demonstrated a slice of Mexico’s reality at that time. I believe that Roma is a good opportunity to show Mexico and part of its salient topics in history that strike a chord in our country. The use of political issues, protests, earthquakes, and single-parenting loneliness are among many of the reasons why Roma is worth seeing.  I strongly believe that knowing about the history of a place and community sheds light to a better understanding of its present in a different perspective.

Azucena Garcia Gutierrez is studying MA Applied Linguistics and Communication and is a Chevening Scholar.

Natalia

Natalie Albin Legorreta

During the viewing, done through Netflix Party, we discussed various things as we watched the film. I believe it added a good deal of commentary to watch with native Mexicans who could contextualise and explain parts of the history while allowing the viewers to form their own opinions and questions as well. It is through watching these films that evoke so much from a specific culture but resonate with people outside of it that we can truly begin to understand what it is to be a global citizen.

Roma is told through the perspective of Cleo, a maid to a middle-class family living in Mexico during the 1970s. Her and the family’s tribulations are almost autobiographical for Cuarón, however feels as though it is the story of most Mexicans. From a father leaving his family, to earthquakes and students killed by political oppression, everything feels all-to-familiar to several generations of Mexicans.

It is interesting to see how the film has not only reached a special place for Mexicans, but for everyone who watches it. It feels like a perfect slice-of-life to understand the culture for a specific country but it seems to touch a cord with most people. Perhaps, as La Young pointed out during the viewing, it’s the camera movements, how it follows Cleo around through panoramic shots as if she were a soldier in a war film. Or perhaps it’s the subtle way in which the film shows the grand scale of collective pain through the world with images of oppression and depression. Whichever it is, watching Roma with other Birkbeck students was a wonderful experience that I hoped they enjoyed just as much.

Natalia Albin Legorreta is completing an MA in Screenwriting at Birkbeck.

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Celebrating the cinematic richness of Belgium

Vladimir Seput, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Film Programming and Curating, discusses a recent event looking at Belgian cinema. 

On Wednesday 21 February, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image was once again filled with people. This time, BIMI hosted Belgian film lovers (and those who might become ones) who came to watch and listen about the latest trends in Belgian cinema in a special, introductory event to the programme, Focus on Belgian Cinema. With the support of Wallonie-Bruxelles International and Flanders House, film critic and author Louis Danvers and Wouter Hessels, the film lecturer and cinema programmer at the Brussels Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound travelled across the Channel to give talks on the state of contemporary Belgian Cinema.

Mr Danvers talked about French-speaking films from Wallonia and Brussels and the often paradoxical situation that they are facing, namely because they cannot reach large audiences even though they regularly win numerous major awards at international film festivals. For example, the Dardenne brothers still hold the record, among a few others, of the highest number of precious Cannes’ Palme(s) D’Or. Even so, their movies often struggle with reaching a significant amount of audiences. Unfortunately, the reasons for such a poor result on the domestic market are, as often, multiple and complex. Besides the fact that the subject of those works is often the gloomy topic of social injustice, which is hardly a crowd-pleaser anywhere, French-speaking Belgian cinema lacks infrastructure that would help in the promotion of films outside their habitual audience. Such infrastructure exists in Flanders, Mr Danvers said, and it would be beneficial to have it in the French part as well. As a result, in 2016 the most successful Flemish film in terms of audience attendance did 15 times better than the most popular French one. However, French-speaking Belgian cinema is a prolific creative industry of a rich documentary tradition and often surreal fiction films, with the latest trend in making films inspired by true events, such as A Wedding (Noces) from 2016, also part of this year’s festival.

Genre cinema is often a key to success if a film wants to reach a large audience and Flemish filmmakers know that quite well. Under the title Belgian Cinema: Made in Flanders Wouter Hessels presented the Flemish film wave which started in 2002 and the conditions that preceded it. Mr. Hessels emphasized five key elements of success of Flemish films in recent years: founding of the autonomous Flemish Film Fund (VAN) in 2002, introduction of the tax shelter in 2003, the project Faits divers by Flemish commercial television VTM, numerous international film festivals in Flanders like Ghent, Ostend and Leuven and the increase in quality of student films realized at five different schools in Flanders. Some of those conditions resulted in commercial and/or artistic successes through the works of filmmakers like Felix van Groeningen, Fien Troch and Erik van Looy, whose film The Loft from 2008 holds the record for the most popular Flemish film (more than one million tickets sold).

After the presentations on French-speaking and Flemish Belgian Cinema, BIMI screened the film King of the Belgians from 2016 made by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. The film presents a new direction for Brosens and Woodworth who were, prior to this film known primarily as documentary filmmakers. In this satire, they tackled the issue of a Belgian division in an almost farcical way, inspired by the Belgian mockumentary tradition of comedy making, best known from the cult Belgian film Man Bites Dog from 1992. Along with the five latest titles from the Belgian film factory, Man Bites Dog will be shown at the French Institute as a part of Focus on Belgian Cinema.

The event was concluded by a discussion chaired by Janet McCabe, director of the Film Programming and Curating MA at Birkbeck in which Mr Danvers and Mr Hessels talked about different aspects of the creation behind co-existence and shared with the audience their thoughts on encounters between identities, cultures and languages.

Focus on Belgian Cinema runs at the French Institute from 22-25 February.

For more on Belgian cinema, see Wouter Hessels’ choice of most representative Belgian films.

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Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image: Winter term 2016

Kelli Weston, MA Film, Television and Media Studies graduate, reports on the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image’s (BIMI) recent events. 

This season the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) has hosted a variety of collaborative events, from special screenings to horror film-inspired lectures. From its inception, BIMI has aimed to address a broad range of issues within an interdisciplinary context. Here are just a few highlights from the past year:

  • On October 14, BIMI hosted the annual University of Pittsburgh lecture with Adam Lowenstein, who spoke to guests about the urban spaces of Detroit, Michigan and all its implications in the recent horror film It Follows (2014). The discussion touched on the film’s framing of scarcity within an unconventional landscape and contemporary connotations. Listen to Lowenstein’s talk and the following conversation.

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  • BIMI partnered with Birkbeck’s Sci/Film on October 28 to present a special Halloween screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) followed by a talk from Professor Alex Kacelnick of Oxford University on the nature of birds, complete with recordings.
  • On November 4, in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research and Dogwoof Pictures, BIMI presented The End of the Line (2009), a documentary based on Charles Clover’s 2006 book of the same title about the widespread decline in fish stocks around the world. After the screening of the film, Clover was in conversation with the BISR Guilt Group’s James Brown. You can find more information about the Guilt Group on their website.
  • On November 7, with the London Korean Film Festival, BIMI presented ‘Detours through the History of Korean Cinema’ a focus on essay films – My Korean Cinema (2006) by Kim Hong-Jun and Cinema on the Road: A Personal Essay on Cinema in Korea (1995) by Jang Sun-woo –  which both explore and interrogate the history of Korean cinema.
  • On November 11, just in time for filmmaker John Berger’s 90th birthday, BIMI and the Derek Jarman Lab presented Seasons of Quincy: The Four Portraits of John Berger followed by a symposium the next day where a group of panellists discussed Berger’s legacy as a broadcaster, activist, artist and art critic while showing clips of his work over the years.

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  • On December 2, BIMI and Dogwoof Pictures presented The Age of Stupid (2009), Franny Armstrong’s drama-documentary-animation hybrid film starring Pete Postlethwaite about the last man on earth pondering the consequences of human apathy toward climate change.
  • On December 10, as part of the Children’s Film Club and the Irish Film Festival, BIMI screened Song of the Sea (2014) followed by a free shadow puppet theatre.
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Records of War: Film, History and the Art School

Conny Klocker, intern at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) and PhD candidate at the School of Law writes on a recent screening of 1930s propaganda film. 

As part of the UCL Festival of Culture, the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) was showing two propaganda films about the Italian invasion in Abyssinia in 1935/36 according to a programme first presented at the London Film Society in 1937. One film depicted a Soviet account of the events from the Abyssinians’ perspective, the other from the invaders, the fascist Italian perspective.

The screening itself presented a difficult task for the two projectionists, who were doing a live montage of the films. Having to perform quick changes of 35mm film rolls, to work with two projectors at once, to rewind film rolls to the exact starting point and to turn projectors on ahead of their use to get their motor warmed up over and over again certainly includes complex manoeuvres which they performed brilliantly. In that sense, the Record of War screening could be rather seen as a performance by the two projectionists, not just as a screening.

In 1937, Thorold Dickinson, the director of the programme shown at the London Film Society, saw an opportunity to confront his ‘fashionable Sunday audience’ with a challenging screening programme. The films were shown in dialogue to each other, with one depiction of, for instance the preparations for the war from the Italian side, followed by the war preparations undertaken by the Abyssinians. The chemical weapons attacks carried out by the Italian side followed by their impact on Abyssinian civilians. This direct interaction illustrated the contradicting narratives of the same event. And the audience in 1937 was seemingly not prepared for it. As one of the organisers of this year’s event, Henry K. Miller, pointed out, 1937 was ‘a time when seeing was often equated with believing’. Film material on recent affairs was shown to the public only occasionally, for instance in cinemas before the start of the film screening.

Taking up on this aspect, the reconstruction of the programme in 2017 (the third time that the programme has been shown in this form at all) appears timely. Although seeing does not equate with believing in today’s reality, it is rather a form of seeing but not believing. The sheer amount of film material on current affairs on offer on news portals or sometimes rather flooding one’s social media accounts might well lead to a certain degree of scepticism. Of mistrust or suspicion towards “the media”.

war

However, the challenge presented to the audience in 1937 and the audience today has remained the same. It is a question of making up one’s own mind. Of consciously deciding to take a stand. And that of course, means to defend it if challenged. Today it appears that more and more people do not want to engage with their environment in that sense and most discussions on political issues come to a quick halt after everyone has repeated the most recent one-liners. Anything going further than that is rather considered an annoyance, something people do not want to engage with in their spare time.

The resurgence of such sentiments requires to be challenged. And events such as the Record of War screening can contribute to that aim. Seeing the themes coming up during the invasion of Abyssinia and the way in which they were communicated by fascist as well as Soviet propaganda, one is invited to reflect on the presentation and narration of current affairs. Of the glorious restoration of peace in Abyssinia by the Italians or the struggle for independence of the Abyssinians, trying to fight against foreign occupation and colonisation. Similarly, there are quite a few issues today which are framed in such contradicting, opposing ways by various interest groups. The question here is then, if one decides to take those narratives as presented and to repeat them unfiltered, or, if one decides to question those narratives and to take a stance.

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