Tag Archives: film

Ways of viewing

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This post was contributed by Nick Eisen, an alumnus of Birkbeck’s Postgraduate Certificate in Journalism.

Roth_masterclass_allBirkbeck’s audiovisual hub, the Derek Jarman Lab, presented two events in the second week of November. Ways of viewing was an important theme in both. How does the subjective outlook of someone in an audience influence the way that individual views a film? How does the way an audience sees a film differ from the way the filmmakers see it? And what control do filmmakers have over how an audience views their films?

That theme chimed with elements in the Derek Jarman Lab’s current project , a series of films to be launched shortly (watch this space) and referred to in the Lab’s “Masterclass with Christopher Roth”, which a group of film enthusiasts attended on Monday 10 November.

Contrasting approaches to editing

Christopher Roth

Christopher Roth

Film director Roth began the session by contrasting different forms of editing – one (citing Hitchcock’s Rear Window) where the editing of scenes illustrates an explicit, overriding, directorial narrative; the other (citing Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil) where the sequence results in something more open, which recognises that audiences tend to find for themselves links between different visuals and sounds with no explicit connection.

The intricate layering of images, words and sounds that emerged from the examples of Roth’s work, as presented at this session, resembled the more open approach.

Finding connections

That way in which viewers find links between different sequences in films could be seen as comparable with the way ancient peoples saw constellations when looking at stars.

In film each viewer may find a particular narrative link in a given sequence of images, so that one film may generate as many narrative perspectives as viewings, with each audience viewing differing from the way the filmmakers view that film.

Bartek Dziadosz, the Lab’s Managing Producer, looked at this tendency of audiences to create narratives in his presentation on Wednesday 12 November, when the Lab presented a session entitled “What Film Can Do For Your Research Career”, part of the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research series on developing careers in research.

Reflecting that filmmakers must remember audiences bring their own outlooks to viewing and their own senses of narrative, Dziadosz emphasised that filmmakers cannot assume their own views of a film will be communicated or accepted by its audience.

He illustrated this later in the session with reference to his own film about Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, describing how some saw the film primarily as a personal portrait, while others viewed it as a ‘sociological essay film’.

Dziadosz also discussed ways of using visual methods in humanities and social sciences, and those with a particular interest in this area should contact him via the Derek Jarman Lab.

Reaching audiences

After Dziadosz, the Lab’s Head of Post-production, Walter Stabb, described how film offered an exciting and, for many, new way for researchers to engage with peers and students. He also looked at some of the platforms researcher/filmmakers could use to show their work, including film festivals, academic bodies, galleries and online streaming.

Platforms for new filmmakers to consider include –

Planning your film

Lily Ford, the Lab’s Head of Production, then offered a practical overview on planning your film, setting out points to consider, ranging widely – from defining intentions, purposes, aims and objectives, and potential audiences, to obtaining funding, to planning a shooting schedule and even groceries for a crew on a shoot, a vital area, because film crews can shoot – like Napoleon’s armies marched – on their stomachs.

Accompanying the session was a handout summarising the points, which could also serve as a template for planning a specific project.

Ford also referred to the Lab’s potential as a source of advice and equipment, open to approaches from those with proposals for film projects.

Next steps for researcher/filmmakers

As the potential of the internet expands, the signs are that new ways of making and using films, combining media, bringing them to audiences and interacting with them will continue to grow, with vast implications for universities.

Those interested in exploring these and other questions further should contact the Derek Jarman Lab and ask about its courses in filmmaking.

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Fire Walk with Me: Trauma, Catharsis and the Fantasy of Fantastical Kinship

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This post was contributed by Louise Smith, a student on Birkbeck’s MA Creative Writing.

IMG02074-20140523-1822

Andrew Asibong and Hannah Eaton outside 43 Gordon Square during the fire alarm.

In a coincidence David Lynch would appreciate, Andrew Asibong and Hannah Eaton’s screening of the director’s seminal 1992 film Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, was interrupted by a fire alarm at 43 Gordon Square. It was an amusing and unpredictable start to a Q and A, which focused on Lynch’s groundbreaking treatment of incest trauma and the influence he’s had on their own creative work.

Eaton’s graphic novel, Naming Monsters, was inspired by Lynch’s feminist treatment of the female body. Victim, Laura Palmer’s subjectivity, is central to the film’s power, creating a narrative that rejects judgment in favor of an empathy for the incest survivor’s quest; the battle to reform an identity obliterated by abuse trauma. Asibong said his novel, Mameluke Bath, was influenced by the film’s supernatural elements because, “Evil can only be represented in fantasy, the only form that’s possible is quite ridiculous.”

These feminist and genre-bending elements probably account for the film’s hostile reception at Cannes. Audiences booed and American critics were scathing, although The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley, whilst missing the point that artistic truth requires aesthetic vision at least acknowledged the film’s power, describing it as, “a perversely moving, profoundly self-indulgent prequel.”

But the cliché’ that time heals all wounds must ring true for Lynch since his savaging twenty years ago. Fire Walk With Me has a unique surreal vision that portrays the lonely nightmare of incest by merging fantasy and reality, relocating the monsters in the mind to the world outside. His aesthetic which mixes comedy, teen pop-culture and small town American Gothic not only influenced Eaton and Asibong but a whole generation of TV and film makers, from the producers of Northern Exposure and Six Feet Under to the Cohen Brothers.

Lynchian tropes that were considered self-indulgent are now the aesthetic mainstream. However, his many imitators have not achieved the mystical power of Fire Walk With Me, or replayed it’s central disturbing message, that the journey towards truth is a paradox, a horrifying ride where salvation can become merely the epilogue to destruction. As Alfred Hitchcock another genius auteur once said, “Reality is something that none of us can really stand.” Those who care to look can anticipate the re-release on DVD of Fire Walk With Me (with previously deleted footage) later this summer.

A podcast of the event is now available.

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One Mile Away

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This post was contributed by Emma Pearson, a MSc Politics student at Birkbeck. She also writes for dailyinfo.co.uk and blogs at emmalouisepears.wordpress.com.

The first event leading up to Birkbeck’s Surplus: Waste, Wealth, Excess forum in June was a screening of One Mile Away by Penny Woolcock, a documentary at once fascinating, subtly flawed, and an engaging trigger for debate.

It traces the fledgling peace efforts of two warring Birmingham gangs, following in particular two young visionaries for peace, Dylan of the Burger gang and Shabba from the Johnsons. They work tirelessly to recruit fellow gang members and elders to their cause, warn the younger generation away from violence, and soliloquise over the graves of its victims. All this is interspersed with rap performed by their recruits – a tell-tale sign of the theatricality underlying the facts.

Anthony Gunter, lecturer in criminology at UEL and author of “Growing Up Bad: Road Culture, Badness and Black Youth Transitions in an East London Neighbourhood”, led the discussion after the film. It is, he argued, very easy to categorise inner-city violence under ‘gang warfare’ and forget about it. It’s nicely self-contained, outsiders need not trouble themselves with any deeper causality, and David Cameron can label the 2011 riots as “criminality, pure and simple” without too much responsibility coming his way. For the media’s part, gangs are a well-understood drama. It’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, tribal war. There is no need for context, and One Mile Away gives very little.

But context should be everything, because the situation facing many young black males in Britiain’s cities today is dire. Lack of education, meagre employment prospects and a broken down relationship with the police mean that many feel – and are treated – like surplus population. The ‘road culture’, far from its roots in the Caribbean drive towards social being and outdoor living in the cradle of the community, has become a thing of chaos – something aptly illustrated by Woolcock’s film. Shootings and stabbings abound in the silences between camera takes, but no one really knows where, or why, or even who. The one time when details are given, it turns out the dispute was about money, not gang membership at all.

So on the part of the young men in the film, perhaps the gang narrative – the regurgitated language of the press – is at least partly a means to impose order. Perhaps the film and the ‘peace process’ were simply something to do, a way to have some purpose when the system seems to deny them everything else. The fact that all the young men were performers, and Dylan possessed of powerful charisma, may indicate that we shouldn’t treat this documentary as an accurate representation of real life.

It is a performance, however, that still has a lot to tell us about the state of Britain today. Because even if this absorbing film is propelled chiefly by the enactment of myth, its flaws as a real-life documentary point us towards the truth of the chaotic situation. We should not use the ‘gang’ label to distance ourselves from inner city violence. Far from being “criminality, pure and simple”, we are all a part of the complex system leading to it.

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Moving Images: Mark Lewis and David Campany in Conversation

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This post was contributed by Carrie Mcalinden and Meg Hanna,  both students on Birkbeck’s MA Film, Television and Screen Media.

It is only recently that Mark Lewis has begun to embrace the label of filmmaker. The screening of three of his works in the Birkbeck Cinema last week provided a seemingly appropriate context for his discussion with David Campany, writer and curator, though we were quickly instructed to “imagine what this would be like in a picture gallery.”

As the intended exhibition space for Lewis’s films, the gallery is referenced directly by both Black Mirror at the National Gallery (2011) and Outside the National Gallery (2011). Both films exhibit the defining characteristics of most of his work – the long shot and silence – and for Lewis it is these elements of the ‘pictorial’ that deem the gallery a fitting environment for this display of his moving images.

However, now that he has come into the title of ‘filmmaker,’ he seems to be more open to letting the spectator experience his work as films and not as pictures. He used to say when installing his work in a gallery, “we should pretend that they’re not films,” and now he is setting up benches and encouraging a more relaxed environment. Still opposed to the rigidness of the cinema, he would rather his films be experienced in something more akin to the avant-garde’s dream of the ‘smokers cinema.’

In his early work, Lewis relied on the four minute film reel to make the choice of duration and has carried on this limitation into his current digital work. Keeping the context of the gallery as well the spectator in mind, he is not interested in projects of endurance, and keeps each of his current films under eight minutes. Such explanations are emblematic of Lewis’s attempts to distance/efface himself from his work. Outside the National Gallery in particular suggests the absence of the filmmaker, despite his assertion that what looks like one long take is actually several takes edited together. As such, his films evoke the actuality films of the Lumiere brothers, yet also embrace elements of artifice in the tradition of Melies.

This distancing of the filmmaker from his work brought up questions of the ‘location of consciousness’ in his films. In the third film screened, Beirut (2011), the camera, on a crane, moves up and over buildings, slowly investigating the world and embodying a ghost-like perspective. Here we see illustrated one of many examples of the “consciousness of the camera” – an idea explored in much of Lewis’ work. Given its limitations, “what would a camera do if it had consciousness?”, he asks.

But perhaps he puts too much emphasis on the camera doing all of the work and not enough on his own ingenuity. “Anyone can make a film,” he proclaimed, provoking a prompt objection from the programmer of the evening, Laura Mulvey. Speaking directly to the ambitious mechanical engineering that went into the filming of both Beirut and Black Mirror at the National Gallery, Mulvey pointed out that “some of Mark’s films are completely crazy.” He is not in fact just some guy with a camera, but rather often finds himself doing something which is “excessive and makes no sense and is irrational, but actually seems to work.”

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