in the picture

Quai des Orfèvres (France 1947)

2008-05-20T12:00:00.006+01:00

Dora photographs Jenny in Quai des Orfèvres

I picked this up in a bargain bin of DVDs -- pleased with myself because I'd been wanting to watch it for a while. Later I was deflated when I noticed that a trio of Henri-Georges Clouzot's most famous films (this one plus Le Corbeau and Le Salaire de la peur) were on offer at a better overall price in an online store. C'est la vie! But I wasn't disappointed by my purchase, even though it was a dodgy DVD that kept crashing during the opening menus. Optimum are to be applauded for releasing French classical cinema, but they don't offer much in the way of extras -- only a trailer on this DVD.

Quai des Orfèvres came to my attention after I'd watched 36, Quai des Orfèvres (France 2004) the policier starring Daniel Auteuil and Gérard Depardieu. Several commentators made reference to the earlier film and some suggested that the newer film was a remake. The title of both refers to the address of the headquarters of the most important French police organisations – something like the equivalent of '(New) Scotland Yard' in the UK. However, the title is the only direct link between the two films and the title of the earlier film is not particularly revealing since although the narrative does feature a lengthy interrogation at police headquarters, it is primarily a film noir melodrama.

Clouzot has suffered in retrospect from his decision in 1942 to work for the German 'front' studio Continental during the Occupation. One of the films he made then, Le Corbeau (The Raven) was named as 'propagandist' and Clouzot was denounced as a collaborationist. I saw the film a couple of years ago during the Leeds Film Quarter experiment and it is clear now that the film was much more ambiguous (it concerns a flurry of poison pen letters that gradually undermine a small town community).

A useful essay by Fiona Watson on the Senses of Cinema site gives a clue to Clouzot's influences and importance as a filmmaker. She tells us that Clouzot began working for Ufa at Babelsburg in 1932 dubbing films and this was where he developed an interest in the work of Fritz Lang. Later it became clear that whilst Clouzot had learned much from Lang, his competitor in the 1950s would be Hitchcock and the two would vie for the title of 'Master of Suspense'. Many of the American reviewers of those Clouzot films available as subtitled DVDs begin with the Hitchcock comparison, but this might not be the best place to start with Quai des Orfèvres.

My own interest in French films of the late 1940s and early 1950s has always been fuelled by a desire to test out the criticisms contained in the polemics by Truffaut and the other Cahiers writers. Was the French 'Quality Cinema' of the period as hidebound and stuffy -- 'le cinéma du papa' -- as they maintained? Watson points out that Truffaut was obsessed with Le Corbeau as a teenager, memorising whole chunks of dialogue and I did start thinking about one aspect of Truffaut's own work -- his interest in French popular culture -- as I watched Quai des Orfèvres.

The film focuses on an unusual ménage à trois. Maurice is a trained musician reduced to working as an accompanist. At the same time, his rather dim but attractive young wife, 'Jenny Lamour', is beginning to gain attention as a chanteuse. The couple live in a flat and below them isthe studio of a 'glamour photographer', Dora, who is in love with Jenny. When Jenny accidentally kills an ageing lecher (who sends young women to be photographed in 'erotic poses' by Dora) the other two both become involved in trying to avert Jenny's arrest. Although Dora is not an 'out' lesbian, the inference is clear and I was reminded of the representation of the lesbian relationship in Rossellini's Rome Open City, which must have shocked American audiences around the same time as Quai des Orfèvres was released in France.

As well as the music hall scenes of the chanteuse and the glamour photography shoots, the film also offers the auditioning rooms of a showbiz agent and the backstage of a circus in its overall representation of Parisian popular culture. The second half of the film involves the investigation of the death by an eccentric (but effective) police inspector. There is an intriguing mixture of comedy, suspense and detail of procedure in the investigation and the presence of a pack of hungry newshounds made me think of His Girl Friday. The other factor in this mixture of emotions is that the later action takes place in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve and as if to emphasise a Dickens connection, the inspector's adopted son (an African boy from the Inspector's time in the army) turns up at the police station almost like Tiny Tim. This delirious concoction is beautifully staged and photographed, echoing both pre-war French and Langian noirs and also the similar noir melodramas being produced in both the US and the UK in the late 1940s. In this respect it confirms the Cahiers view of 'quality cinema' -- it's also based on a 1942 novel. What it lacks in comparison to some of the American and British films is the new sense of 'street realism' that was introduced around this time.

The critic who really despised Clouzot was Jacques Rivette who described him as "sickening", whereas Godard merely rated Clouzot as not as interesting a filmmaker as Roger Vadim. Clouzot's crime was, like Réné Clément and Claude Autant-Lara, to be interested only in 'style' and to disavow 'social cinema'. Sometimes, the New Wave critics do seem very precious and it seems to me that a film like Quai des Orfèvres is stylish, entertaining and, if not a comment on the 'reality' of its period, at least populated with interesting and richly detailed characters.

Yella (Germany 2007)

2008-05-19T23:24:00.004+01:00

Nina Hoss as Yella

I missed Christian Petzold's appearance at the Bradford Film Festival earlier this year, so it was good to catch up with his latest release, Yella on DVD. Yella is an intriguing film that creates a metaphor about both a sense of East Germans looking for an escape to a better future and a sense of the empty and soulless capitalism of the West, represented here by the glass-walled offices rented by venture capital companies on the Autobahne outside major cities.

The striking Nina Hoss plays a young woman who leaves her abusive husband in the East seeking a new job on the other side of the Elbe. What she finds is a situation in which another version of her husband -- a more successful and organised venture capitalist -- properly appreciates her skills as an accountant. Or does she? The film has a twist. It was recommended to me as rather like Kim Ki-duk's 3-Iron and, surprisingly perhaps, I can see the connection. The twist will no doubt anger some audiences -- perhaps it will be thought obvious, perhaps it will be taken to be wilfully obscure. Either way, it works for me and I found the film to be a much more interesting account of East and West than the more hyped films such as The Lives of Others. Yella is beautifully filmed and carefully and intelligently directed. The DVD release by Artificial Eye (Region 2) has interviews with both Petzold and Hoss that are revealing of the methods used. I hope more of Petzold's films are released in the UK.

Happy-Go-Lucky

2008-05-04T22:09:00.005+01:00

Sally Hawkins is Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky

I decided to see the latest Mike Leigh film in the cinema because (a) it focuses on a primary school teacher in North London (a job that means quite a lot in our household) and (b) it won the major prize in Berlin and was widely touted as being 'upbeat'.

The screening at Leeds Vue, The Light was interrupted by a fire alarm, but the cinema management handled the ensuing melee quite well and it didn't spoil the film for us (complimentary tickets was a nice idea too).

Overall, I thought the film was, as usual, impressive as a production with direction, cinematography and acting of the highest standard, but 'upbeat'? -- hardly. I do wonder what people remember about Leigh when they make these kinds of judgments. I've missed some of Leigh's later films (Naked, Career Girls etc.) but I've seen the rest, including all the TV plays. Happy-Go-Lucky for me is absolutely in the mainstream of Leigh's work. The central character is complex and interesting, but although I warmed to her as a good classroom teacher, I'm sure she would drive me mad in a few weeks. Some of the other characterisations are excellent. I liked the housemate, the school headteacher and a wonderful flamenco dance teacher.

The crunch in Leigh's films comes with the creation of characters and situations which are essentially 'real' – we've all met these people and we've been in situations like this. But Leigh then pushes both characterisation and situation that little bit further. Here the typical situation is the lead character Poppy's family argument with her two sisters, one a controlling conformist, the other a more 'out of it' student. But this is only a sub-plot next to Poppy's main confrontation with her increasingly intolerant driving instructor. This has great potential and I can see that Leigh could be argued to deliver a justified pay-off that is certainly not conventional. My problem is that this involves yet another working-class character in a Mike Leigh film who is portrayed as a grotesque. It's a sterling performance by Eddie Marsan (excellent in Vera Drake) but like The Office and other comedies of embarrassment, it's very difficult to watch. For me, that extra push makes it difficult to accept the disturbance that Leigh engenders in the relationship -- I can't engage at the very moment Leigh makes his point.

I'm quite happy to accept that the fault is mine in having too rosy a view of the world, but I consistently find Leigh too cruel in his depictions. I'm also less interested in his stories because I can't recognise any coherent political perspective. The Leigh film that remains enjoyable for me is Topsy Turvy, the Gilbert & Sullivan biopic. I want to enjoy all the skill and artistry, so I hope Mike Leigh comes up with a different kind of narrative soon.

Telegu Film

2008-04-14T16:51:00.002+01:00

A Telegu language film, Jalsa, appeared in this week's Screen International "International Box Office Chart" at No 22 with a release on 454 screens across seven territories for a total of $4.6 million. I'm interested to see these figures which challenge the too common view outside India that only Hindi films matter in Indian Cinema. I also came across an old (1980) copy of the Guinness Book of Film Facts which had an entry on the long lists of Indian languages in which films have been made and which confirmed Tamil and Telegu as the languages with most productions in that year.

Le Voyage du ballon rouge (France/Taiwan 2007)

2008-04-07T18:44:00.008+01:00

Fang Song and Simon Iteau in Le Voyage du ballon rouge

I saw this in the cosy and comfortable seating of the Old Town Hall, Gateshead -- the temporary home of Tyneside Cinema -- at the end of a very hard day. As a result, I found it hard to concentrate on a film which requires proper attention. But I struggled on with determination because the film had been recommended. I'm glad I did because I enjoyed the experience -- although at the end I wasn't sure I'd understood everything. Fortunately, a group of young Chinese behind me were talking after the screening and I picked up some ideas and later I trawled a few websites. Gradually it started to make sense.

There isn't a lot of plot. A single mother, Suzanne (Juliet Binoche) lives in a two story apartment in Paris with her young son. She advertises for a childminder so that she can work as the narrator on a Chinese puppet show. The childminder turns out to be a film student from Beijing, the quiet and implacable Song, who seems to be creating her own version of the classic children's film Le ballon rouge (France 1956). Song helps Suzanne with some translating and also with the transfer of some home movies to a digital format. Other than that there are some journeys around Paris and Suzanne falls out with her lodger, an old friend of her (estranged ?) husband's who lives in the downstairs rooms.

I guess what kept my interest was the contrast between the quiet Song and her charge, Simon, and the much noisier Suzanne and also a sense of mystery about exactly what was going on. There was a very slight sense of the menace of Hidden in the scenes both in the apartment and around Paris. Does the boy actually see a red balloon? Is it following him? I'm not sure if I've ever seen the original film -- perhaps it has some of this mystery?

Because it is Hou Hsaio-hsien, a disciple of Ozu Yasujiro, the film invites the audience to spot Ozu traits. I can report that there are several train trips which I enjoyed and that it is possible to summon up some Ozu like compositions in the tiny apartment. Unlike the minimalist style of Japanese interiors, however, Suzanne's apartment is cluttered and cramped with piles of books and eventually the piano from downstairs. Most of the time the camera remains static, focused on the table which seems to be at the centre of the life of the room. After a while, I began to think about Michael Snow's famous avant garde film Wavelength (in which the camera very slowly zooms/tracks in towards a photograph on the wall of a warehouse floor). I became fascinated with the detail of the room and the small movements of characters in it.

I've looked at several websites and blogs on the film and they point towards other familiar traits from Hou such as the cultural differences between China and France -- the Chinese film student attempts to recreate a French film, the French actor narrates a Chinese puppet play etc. There is also a sense of history with the past (the original film, the family's history on film) bleeding into the present. Many critics and audiences have apparently been bored rigid and some are outraged by being seduced into seeing an 'art film' like this. I found it restful and intriguing.

Princesas (Spain 2005)

2008-03-27T23:51:00.004Z

Candela Peña (left) and Micaela Nevárez in Princesas

I really enjoyed this film. I didn't know too much beforehand, but I was immediately drawn into the world of the central character, Caye. The film works simply as a character study of a lonely woman and the friendship she makes with another prostitute, from the Dominican Republic. At times it might be a thriller, a (family) melodrama or a romance, yet none of the potential genre narratives are carried through. Instead, we are given the chance to engage with a character who is naive at best, sometimes pathetic, but also resourceful and open to new ideas and relationships. As I watched the film, I thought again how easy it is to 'see' film acting only when it is a highly visible construction of an unusual character. Candela Peña's performance as Caye is as skilful in bringing to life a 'ordinary' character as any barnstorming performance that wins an Oscar. Fortunately, Spanish critics recognised Peña's achievement and she won several awards at home.

My main query is to why it took two years for this excellent film to get UK distribution. I missed the previous release by director Fernando León de Aranoa, Mondays in the Sun with Javier Bardem and now I'm keen to catch up with it.

The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

2008-03-24T19:24:00.005Z

I was shocked when Anthony Minghella's death was announced last week. He was far too young and it must have been dreadful for those around him. There have been tributes from all sides of the UK and international film, theatre and oprea communities. He obviously helped a lot of people in the industry and was highly respected. I wasn't that interested in his films which I assumed to be in the 'international Miramax mode' and the only one I saw in a cinema was Cold Mountain, which after a fantastic opening battle scene I found quite literally cold and ultimately disappointing. As a result I approached the film pilot of the projected TV series of The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency with some trepidation.

I was further taken aback to discover Richard Curtis was a co-exec producer and co-writer. His presence usually puts me off completely, but I'd heard great things of the novels that were the series' inspiration and I was intrigued by how Botswana would look on film. The cinematography in the film pilot was by Seamus McGarvey and it was very beautiful -- far too beautiful really. The opening sequences had numerous crane/cherrypicker shots that might have graced a mainstream Hollywood feature. Unfortunately, the novels (I'm told) are small scale, gentle tales that don't need the epic treatment.

I have no problem with the BBC screening a series set in Africa (in a Sunday night 'comfy telly' slot, just like ITV) and I have no problem with Africa being represented by a gentle comedic series – I readily accept that it's important to have alternative representations of African stories -- they don't all have to be about civil war, refugees and famine. But . . .

I do have problems with this series. I only lasted for less than half the running time and found something better to do. The opening was slow for no apparent reason. It looked like a one hour idea was being spun out over 100 mins or so. The beauty of the cinematography then began to look likeit was offering an alternative to the slow story. But my main concern is that the film isn't really an 'alternative' to the other representations of Southern Africa. In fact it follows the usual British/American strategy of shipping in actors from the US and UK as well as writers, director, producer etc plus some heads of department. The heavy promotion of the film suggested 'local' sourcing of other crew, but as far as I could work out, this meant South African crew members alongside a couple of South African actors. Great play was made of being unable to find an African actor to play the lead role. I interpret this to mean that no African actor was considered suitable for a UK/US audience – I'm sure there are Zimbabwean women who could have played the character, or even South Africans. It wouldn't be so bad if the BBC (or other UK channels) were prepared to put some money into African film production in Anglophone countries in the way that the French do in Francophone countries -- or at least show some African film product.

South Africa is potentially the major source of African 'films' (ignoring for the moment the hundreds of video films being produced in Nigeria and Ghana) but as yet the South African industry has remained in thrall to Hollywood. I guess it was too much to expect the Weinsteins and HBO to do anything very different with The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

Uwasa no onna (Japan 1954)

2008-03-21T10:43:00.004Z

Mother (Tanaka Kinuyo) and daughter (Kuga Mishiko) in conflict.

In one of my fantasies, I learn how to manage time so well that I am able to work my way through all the available films of the directors I love. In reality, this means being decisive now and again and buying a DVD which might get watched.

Mizoguchi Kenji is my sentimental favourite amongst the Japanese and I was delighted to discover that Masters of Cinema are releasing a series of double DVD packs of his films. Of course, this means that I will probably have to buy films that I have already got (or rent the films separately). However, in the case of Uwasa no onna it has been paired with Chikamatsu monogatari, which I think I did see many years ago, but certainly haven't got.

Uwasa no onna is an untranslatable title that has sometimes been rendered as 'Woman of Rumour' or 'Woman in the rumour' – summoning up a common Mizoguchi theme of the lives of women in the context of restrictive social mores. This is one of Mizoguchi's contemporary set films (although most of it takes place in the 'pleasure' district of Kyoto, where many of the women are employed as geisha). It's a melodrama based on a triangle of mother, daughter and young male doctor. The great Tanaka Kinuyo plays the mother, a widow who has invested in a geisha house. Her daughter returns from Tokyo after a failed suicide and is shown as shamed by her mother's profession. The doctor who comes to visit her is the 'house doctor' in whom the mother has more than a professional interest.

The DVD carries a Tony Rayns introduction in which spends most of the time discussing how Mizoguchi didn't wish to make the film which was forced on him by his studio Daiei and how it was the last film he made with Tanaka, with whom he fell out when she became a successful director herself (the first significant female director in Japan). The introduction is both tantalising and frustrating. Rayns reminds us that Mizoguchi himself knew about the world of the pleasure houses (i.e. brothels) both from personal experience (common and acceptable for middle-class Japanese men of his era) and from his research for several other films which explored the same milieu. In this sense, it is clear why Daiei thought that this was a suitable property. It was written by Yoda Yoshikata, Mizoguchi's long-term collaborator and Narusawa Masashige, who would go on to be a major collaborator, so something was wrong if Mizoguchi turned away from the script. Rayns suggests that he was simply tired after winning three successive prizes at Venice or disdainful of what was clearly a straightforward genre piece. Daiei's motives become clear in the trailer included on the DVD which announces a 'dramatic epic' with all the sumptuousness of the geisha world. These now seem rather ridiculous claims for what turned out to be an 84 min film with relatively little visual splendour and none of the bravura camerawork that graces a film like Sansho Dayu from the same year.

But this lack of epic scale doesn't detract from my pleasure in watching the film. What I see is the competent genre work of a team of highly skilled filmmakers and performers. Most of all it makes me wonder about how films like this were seen in Japan in the 1950s. Presumably, this would have been half of a double bill in an upmarket cinema in Tokyo or Osaka. What would it have shown with? Were cinemas at this time controlled by the studios themselves? As one of the newer, smaller studios did Daiei have access to their own cinemas or did they have to rely on their larger competitors for bookings? An interesting brief history of Daiei by Greg Shoemaker answers some of these questions, but raises further seeming contradictions -- writing in a fantasy magazine, Shoemaker is more interested in the science fiction and exploitation films which Daiei were making in the same period. Mizoguchi's more artistic work was an important part of Daiei's attempts to produce commercially successful period films that would appeal to foreign markets (hence the festival screenings). The more generically inclined period films would then become reliable commercial earners at home in the later 1950s and early 1960s. But though I love Mizoguchi's period films, I find his contemporary films equally interesting. My question remains. Who were the audiences who got to see what appear now to be small genre pictures for older middle class audiences – in the 1950s perhaps the equivalent of audiences who enjoyed Douglas Sirk's melodramas?

The obvious thing to do is to compare Mizoguchi's contemporary films with those of Ozu and Naruse -- something increasingly possible now that the DVDs are appearing. Mizoguchi seems to me the more painterly (he was a trained painter I think), less realist but perhaps more concerned overall with ideas of art and society. I think three representations will remain with me from the film. First, the daughter (played by Kuga Mishiko) reminds me so much of Audrey Hepburn and is wonderfully fresh and modern in a mise en scène which is otherwise so traditional. Secondly, Mizoguchi offers us the contrast of the stage life and 'real life' with performances of both kabuki and noh plays (the latter being relatively rare in contemporary set films). Finally (and another Mizoguchi trait) is the sense of community shown by the girls in the house who effectively introduce us to all sides of the courtesan's life.

A note on the DVD: these are direct transfers from Daiei masters and surprisingly for UK DVDs they are NTSC discs. My DVD player/TV set can cope, but the image is never as good as PAL and appears here as rather lacking in contrast. It works fine on my Mac, though here the primitive sound quality is more evident. The DVD twin pack also has a small 56 page booklet, most of which deals with Chikamatsu monogatari, but there is a short extract from Keiko McDonald's out of print book on Mizoguchi. I found this useful in thinking about the mise en scène of the geisha house itself with the contrast between the cramped quarters of the girls and the more lavish use of space (so precious in Japanese buildings) in the mother's and daughter's rooms. No mention of Mizoguchi's reluctance here but McDonald does note, the Western style of camera work and editing and she concludes that Mizoguchi was, in terms of social critique, adopting an attitude of detachment and of "showing us how it is".

The final page of the booklet is something to cheer every cinephile – a set of instructions about how to watch a film in Academy ratio on a modern TV set, complete with illustrations showing how the image will be distorted or cropped on widescreen TVs set to 'fill the screen' defaults. What an excellent idea -- all DVDs should carry this!

Battle for Haditha (UK 2007)

2008-03-19T22:25:00.005Z

I remember enjoying and being impressed by one of Nick Broomfield's early works, Soldier Girls (1981). His later high profile series of authored, 'performative' documentaries such as Biggie and Tupac (2002) tended to leave me cold. I could see that they were important in terms of introducing new documentary styles but I just found his presence irritating. I was therefore intrigued by his turn to documentary drama in Ghosts (2006) which I was glad I caught on the big screen. I wish that was where I saw Battle for Haditha.

Instead, I saw this film about the Iraq War on Channel 4. It was broadcast on the day it was released on DVD in the UK. It did in fact get a cinema release – one week in three cinemas according to the UKFC website. I assume that this was to get some reviews and to qualify for awards. This wouldn't matter except that I was shocked to discover that the film was shot on Super 35 and the film print was 'Scope 2.35:1. The Channel 4 broadcast was 16:9 or thereabouts (whereas Film 4 usually gets aspect ratios correct). I don't really feel like I've seen a film properly if it is in the wrong ratio and coupled with the annoying ad breaks this ruined my concentration. More 4 screened a documentary co-directed by Broomfield's son immediately after the Battle for Haditha ended. At one point they trailed the doc. in an ad break and I became confused – I thought the film had started again. If Channel 4 does get some public money after all its lobbying I suggest that Ofcom forces them to restrict ads to the gaps between programmes, not during them.

This long preamble is just to make the point that I find it difficult to judge a film that has aroused controversy – because its presentation was so flawed. The events depicted took place in 2005 and Broomfield recreated them in Jordan using non-actors with some connection to the original 'players' in the incident. The main American character, the marine corporal, was played by an ex-marine who had been wounded in Iraq (and who shows his battle scars in one sequence). The case of the marines who were accused of murdering civilians after a roadside bomb exploded has not yet been resolved. This has led to some attacks on Broomfield, as has the overall representation of the Americans. Yet the film does attempt to portray three sides to the argument in a dispassionate way – the marines, the 'insurgents' (both foreign fighters and locals) and the local families who were both innocent bystanders and victims of the conflict.

I don't think it is Broomfield's fault that I had least sympathy with the marines. I know soldiers have to be tough and that these young men have been brutalised by the war. In principle, I don't hold them responsible for what Bush and Blair have unleashed. But I found it hard to engage with faceless guys in combat gear who seem to shout and swear most of the time. Most people would surely sympathise with the families, including the young couple pictured above, whose lives are shattered. Oddly though, it is the two men who plant the bomb who seem to be the characters we get to know best. At least they have a reason for what they do -- and remorse when it goes wrong. The real villains of the story are the American commanders and the Al Quaeda/insurgent leaders.

The film is very well made on a tiny budget of $2 million, but in the end I'm not sure whether it 'works' in terms of the documentary drama style. It doesn't, for me, have either the fluid action of Paul Greengrass, the melodrama intensity of Ken Loach or the real sense of 'being there' that Michael Winterbottom achieves. But if I'd seen it in a cinema I might feel differently about it.

Auf der anderen Seite (Germany/Turkey 2007)

2008-03-09T00:07:00.004Z

At last a day off and the chance to watch some movies. In fact it started the night before when I saw Juno, but Friday was the day when I managed to see the new print of Bertolucci's The Conformist and the new Fatih Akin, 'On the other side'.

I enjoyed The Conformist, especially because of the performance by Jean-Louis Trintignant and the sumptuous mise en scène. It is wonderful to return to the films of 1970 and to embrace a cinema that could mix a traditional story with a strong sense of atmosphere and no worries about narrative. But it is equally wonderful to watch a contemporary movie as riveting as the Fatih Akin.

As an aside, I was not impressed by the cinema showing the film. The Curzon Soho is supposedly the premiere UK art cinema, but it isn't a patch on the Cubby Broccoli or Pictureville at Bradford. I really don't like a cinema where you have to look up to the screen (the Prince Charles off Leicester Square is the worst offender – but I haven't been there for a while, perhaps it has changed?). Which means that is even more impressive that Auf der anderen seite can so exert its power. I'm now seriously considering how I can get to Istanbul by train.

I found this film much less aggressive and 'hard' than Akin's previous film Head On, but equally moving. I hadn't expected the Tom Tykwer style coincidences to be so important and I loved the sequence in which characters in a car pass a train carrying other important characters – two narratives interconnecting without the protagonists' knowledge. Great too, to have such an open ending. I just hope that the deal with Sky Box Office pays off and that more people get to see the film this way – I just worry that it won't get seen in cinemas by more traditional arthouse audiences if the digital pay per view release cuts the number of film prints in distribution.

The Wedding (Wesele) (Poland 2004)

2008-02-10T23:06:00.000Z

After a hectic few weeks, the chance to watch a film in peace was too good to miss, even if it was related to our Central European Cinema course. Wesele actually translates as 'Wedding Reception' (I read somewhere). Although a new script by the writer/director Wojciech Smarzowski, there appear to be references to an Andrzej Wajda film from 1973 which was itself based on a play from the turn of the century (19th/20th). Certainly this has all the elements of a traditional wedding farce/black comedy, especially one set in a rural village.

The film trundles along at a fair pace with everything fuelled by copious amounts of Slovakian vodka. As the events unfold, they bring ruin to the bride's father who works on the basis that any problem can be solved by bribery. Perhaps his worst mistake is to be too mean to pay for anything legitimately and so all his cut-price plans backfire. The film is clearly some form of satire with lots of symbolism. The central narrative premise is that the father has bought a new Audi cheaply via an in-law of the local priest as a wedding present for the couple. But the deal requires the grandfather to give up two hectares of land -- which he decides not to do. That land should be the crucial element suggests a traditional tale about peasants and access to land (although the real reason that it is so valuable rests on a familiar modern development).

Apart from the endemic corruption and alcohol consumption, the other striking features include the venal priest and the call to all the men to release their macho desires. This isn't unique to Poland by any means, although the combination of Catholicism, vodka and nationalism is probably unique to the region (i.e. parts of Central Europe). I was at various times reminded of Bunuel (the peasant's orgy in Viridiana) and Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball – partly because of the array of older and less 'beautiful' characters and the occasional, almost documentary inserts of ordinary people having a good time. The final shots of the guests departing, taken from a high angle, also made me think of a Cuban film, The Waiting Room (in which bus travellers are marooned in a provincial bus station). All these three films represent communal celebrations which in some way (certainly not the same way in each film) explore the nation as community.

I'm sure I didn't get all the jokes but the Poles in the audience certainly laughed. It was a digital print and therefore in the National Media Museum's largest screen. In the more intimate atmosphere of the smaller cinema it might have been a different experience. Exhibitors Dogwoof are showing their Polish films in one-off shows in small towns across the UK. I wonder what it is like watching this in a rural area in the UK?

Anna M.

2007-12-20T23:20:00.001Z

I've spent an interesting time trying to decipher Anna M., a French film generally touted as in the mould of The Page Turner or Haneke films such as Hidden or The Piano Teacher. In fact it is something rather different and much more like À la folie . . . pas du tout, a film I used with students very successfully a few years ago. And the connection is quite spooky since the young woman playing Anna, a stunning performance by Isabelle Carré, was also one of the main players in À la folie. In the earlier film, Carré played the wife of a doctor who becomes the focus for an erotic obsession by a young artist played by Audrey Tatou. In Anna M., she is the young woman with erotomania -- an obsessive love for the doctor who treats her after a failed suicide attempt. The two films share several narrative elements and even one identical shot, but overall they are quite different with À la folie working as a 'twist' narrative and being driven by Audrey Tatou's distinctive screen persona. Anna M. is, in one sense, more conventional, but also more puzzling since its 'significant objects' and the clues they hold to Anna's life are harder to pin down.

Anna M. is, I think, an auteur movie in the French sense. At least it was hailed at Berlin this year and its director Michel Spinosa has been interviewed as an auteur on several sites. I noted however, that in France it opened on 91 screens, expanding to 99 before dropping out of the French Top 20. (In the UK it opened on two prints from Metrodome.) The newspaper reviewers have been OK-ish about the film, but it has suffered the fate of many similar films. For the cinephiles, it is tainted by a too strong a reliance on genre and for the popular critics it is too slow or confusing in telling its story. I'm so tired of this, why not just deal with it on its own terms?

As with À la folie, I was drawn to comparisons with Polanski rather than the obvious Hollywood films (Fatal Attraction, Play Misty For Me etc.). Repulsion and The Tenant are two possible Polanski models. I quite like the 'collapse into melodrama' as one reviewer puts it and I enjoyed the frisson of horror in scenes with children and also Anna's relationship with her mother (with its oblique nod towards Carrie). As Sight & Sounds reviewer suggests, there are hints that mother too may have history of mental illness. Bizarrely, most of the UK critics make little mention of the central cultural references in the narrative. Eventually I tracked down the painting which seems to link Anna's obsession to the doctor -- The Childhood of the Virgin by the 17th century Spanish painter, Francisco de Zurbarán . I don't want to give the ending away, except to say that it is quite baffling unless you accept the obvious explanation (and, yes, the painting features). (The ending is filmed in the French Alps as one of the public funding agencies involved is the Centre Européen Cinématographique Rhône-Alpes.)

Anna works in the National Library restoring antique books (and stealing several, it would seem). She also connects the doctor with The Song of Songs. As an ignoramus in terms of Biblical and classical education I didn't get much from these references as I watched the film, having to do my homework when I got home. Rather different cultural references are the songs from CocoRosie and Au Revoir Simone. I was reminded (somehow!) of watching Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, which conveys a sense of the ethereal world view of (suicidal) teenage girls. But perhaps this is not surprising since all the music for The Virgin Suicides came from the French duo, who recently toured with . . . CocoRosie. Isn't the internet wonderful?

Both The Virgin Suicides and À la folie were directed by women. I must find out what women filmmakers and theorists have made of Anna M. -- a film which takes an almost forensic interest in Isabelle Carré's body, primarily as a means of staying as close as possible to Anna's perspective on the world. Nevertheless, it raises interesting questions about the male and female 'gaze'.

The other interesting feature of Anna M. is its CinemaScope ratio and amazing mise en scene. Again, I have to give credit to Catherine Wheatley in Sight & Sound for pointing out that the warm palette complements the choice of locations in suggesting late 19th century Vienna rather than 21st century Paris and that this fits with the Freudian allusions to the 'case of' Anna M.

Can I show this to students? I'm not sure.

Talk to Me

2007-12-16T16:25:00.000Z

Kasi Lemmons and Taraji P. Henson on the set of Talk to Me

I can't remember the last time I had so much fun in a cinema. Talk to Me has to be one of my favourite films of the year. I've always liked Don Cheadle and I've been a big fan of Chiwetel Ejiofor since Dirty Pretty Things. Director Kasi Lemmons I knew from that wonderful melodrama Eve's Bayou so I was looking forward to Talk to Me -- I just didn't expect it to be so knock-out.

The structure of the film is that of the classic show-business biopic, although the action is compressed into the period 1966-72 with a brief coda ten years later. Many critics are sniffy about biopics, but if I'm interested in the star/personality, I can live with a conventional story arc. The difference here is that by starting in the mid 1960s, we don't learn anything immediately about the early lives of the two central characters, Petey Greene and Dewey Hughes. Instead the narrative has to contrive ways of getting the two to tell each other about their backgrounds. One of the best examples of this is the terrific pool game in which Hughes/Ejiofor turns the tables on Greene/Cheadle.

Petey Greene was a radio star in Washington DC who was famous for 'keeping it real' and building up a large African-American audience during the period of Civil Rights triumphs leading into the Black Power period (when the backlash was felt). The film can thus draw on music, humour and politics as well as melodrama in terms of personal relationships. Perhaps the movie won't be such an emotional experience for younger audiences, but I found the sequences dealing with the assassination of Martin Luther King enormously affecting. The music throughout was terrific (the great Terence Blanchard creating the score) but when Cheadle played Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come I was destroyed.

At heart, the movie is a male melodrama and deals with the emotional relationship between the two male characters. In a central dialogue exchange they both assert that they need each other -- Dewey can do the things Petey can't and Petey can say the things Dewey can't. The two men symbolise the different approaches by African-American men towards 'getting on' and preserving a sense of clear personal identity -- 'keeping it real'. The whole film hinges on the ability of the two actors to represent the nuances as well as the dramatic emotional highs and lows of this relationship. In a way, I think that Cheadle has the slightly easier task. He has to represent a fast-talking 'larger than life' character. He does this brilliantly but we have seen him do it before. On the other hand, Ejiofor has a much less defined character -- in the sense that Dewey has to be represented as 'buttoned-up' and conservative. But the character changes over the course of the narrative. Ejiofor actually has more to do to get this across, even if the performance has to be 'smaller' than Cheadle's. I confess that I watched Ejiofor so closely that I sometimes thought I could see him changing gear. I had a similar feeling watching Samantha Morton, another actor I rate very highly, in the marvellous Control. I decided then that my 'gaze' was far too focused on the one character and that in the context of the narrative, the performance worked very well. I think the same about Ejiofor as Dewey (and many respected critics have praised Ejiofor for the role). What certainly worked well was the changing facial hair and head hair of the characters. Ejiofor in full beard at the end of the film was significantly different from the rather preppy young man at the beginning.

Costume as well as hair was terrific and gave me lots of pleasure as well as neatly marking the transition through the late 1960s into the 1970s. It also enhanced the very big performance by Taraji P. Henson which had a section of the audience behind me in full appreciative voice. I guess some might question the portrayal of the woman who formed the third point of a triangle with Petey and Dewey as quite so 'out there' in a film directed by a woman. However, I think Kasi Lemmons handled the male relationship very well and the women in the narrative are necessarily in the background -- a consequence of sticking close to the facts in a biopic perhaps. There were some great performances from players in the minor roles, especially Martin Sheen as the studio boss and his secretary/receptionist Freda played by Alison Sealy-Smith who said more with a raised eyebrow than many actors manage with several lines of dialogue. Some critics have suggested that the early comic scenes in the radio station are very different in tone to some of the more dramatic scenes that come later. Again, it is demanded by the biopic structure and it works for me. Thinking about those scenes, I'm reminded of the wonderful ensemble playing in Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune.

I'm looking forward to watching the film again on DVD -- I understand that on the US DVD there are some interesting deleted scenes. Overall a great film -- and another triumph for the Canadian film industry since the studio work was all filmed in Toronto as far as I could work out.

Kilometro 31

2007-12-15T13:08:00.001Z

Earlier this week, I went to Cineworld to see the Mexican horror movie, Kilómetro 31, with Nick. This was the third time we have been in the 'De Luxe' screen with the reclining seats as the only patrons. The previous occasions were also for subtitled films (the first Grudge film and Denys Arcand's Oscar winner, The Barbararian Invasions). Each of these three films represented a chance taken by a distributor in opening subtitled prints in a multiplex. All clearly failed in Bradford (although to be fair, it was the early evening show). What to make of this? I checked the UK Film Council's box office chart at the end of the week and Kilómetro 31 recorded one of the lowest screen averages of any film on a release of more than a few prints in my memory -- an average of £187 for 27 prints giving a weekly box office of not much more than £5,ooo. That's a pretty poor return for Yume Pictures who must have spent £25,000 getting the prints out. Unfortunately there was little if any promotion and only limited support from the specialised press. Yume have done some good work in getting cult films out there, but they boobed this time.

One question is whether the film would have done better showing a few weeks later at the National Media Museum -- i.e. on a 'specialised screen'. It might, but I also remember that The Host struggled last year at this time in both multiplexes and on specialised screens. Like The Host, Kilómetro 31 is not a 'specialised' film. It's a popular genre movie that in its domestic market did sensational business and ended up as one of Mexico's top box office films of recent years with 3.6 million admissions. The real problem is that UK audiences are not prepared to go for subtitled popular films. The arthouse audience seems to think that such films will be trashy and offensive and the popular audience perhaps thinks that they can't enjoy a film with subtitles. This last doesn't seem to be the case with the subtitled films I have shown to large student groups.

But is it any good you ask? We both thought that there were problems of pacing and plotting, but that overall it worked well and would certainly be worth showing to a student audience. For slightly older audiences (i.e. early 20s) it may be that the film suffers from coming at the tale end of the Ring Cycle and its American remakes. The ingredients are all familiar in the watery environments, young women with long black hair and a ghost child straight of The Grudge. Younger audiences might find these elements slightly less familiar. Of course, these generic tropes make the film much easier for critics to dismiss -- stand up Xan Brooks in the Grauniad with a fairly sloppy mini-review. Once again, the venerable Philip French in the Observer shows a more measured approach, recognising what Kilómetro 31 actually is and granting that it does its job pretty well.

The story is based on a 'local myth' which is a familiar narrative in other horror movies. In this case it is La Llorona or the 'Crying Woman' who appears to motorists on the highway and who in her way is just as dangerous as the mad hitchhiker of urban myths (or indeed as the old women who seduce and murder passing samurai in Japanese horror). Director Rigoberto Castañeda has claimed that the script took a long time to develop and that he was not directly influenced by The Grudge which appeared during the shoot. Hmm, perhaps! But The Ring was certainly out earlier. Does it matter? Not really, what is interesting is how the familiar elements are used and what they mean in a Mexican setting.

One interesting link is to Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también in which the three central characters -- from Mexico City -- tour rural areas and Cuarón uses a voiceover to tell the audience something about the lives of the people by the roadside and how they have been overlooked, oppressed by the urban 'neo-colonialists'. The four central characters here are urban motorists driving through a suburb where, at the time of colonisation, an Indian mother lost her child because of maltreatment by the Spanish (or as the subtitles intriguingly put it 'a Spaniard man'). Like Y tu mamá también, Kilómetro 31 has a Spanish character as one of the protagonists. The film is a Mexican-Spanish co-production, but the inclusion of the Spanish character is also an important narrative element.

A second link is to other US horror narratives such as the Poltergeist films, in which a modern town/suburb is built over traditional burial grounds, allowing both a thematic of colonialism/materialism and the narrative promise of the 'return' of a ghost, who cannot sleep until injustice has been put right. This focus on the 'phantasm' is something which Guillermo del Toro has spoken about at length, especially in relation to his ghost creation in The Devil's Backbone. I wonder what del Toro thinks of Kilómetro 31? The Mexican reviewers have generally claimed that Kilometro 31 is a 'return' for Mexican horror after a 20 year absence. They tend not to count del Toro's Cronos (which I would certainly call horror), so I'm not sure what was the last Mexican horror film to be seen outside the country.

Finally, it's worth saying that the film looks good in 'Scope with a familiar (from The Ring) blue-green palette. Perhaps the most striking visual aspect is the director's penchant for extreme close-ups. One kiss in particular sees two noses in profile edging towards each other from either side of the 'Scope screen. Very disturbing!

Brick Lane

2007-12-05T23:42:00.000Z

Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen in Brick Lane

Seems a long time since I last posted. October/November are the busiest time of the year for me and I've taught lots of films, some several times over in the last few weeks. Perhaps between now and the New Year I'll get to see more for pleasure.

And so to Brick Lane with no prior thoughts, having not read the book but aware of the controversy. I enjoyed the film, but I can recognise that there are problems. The most obvious comparison for me is with My Son the Fanatic (UK 1997), one of my favourite films of the 1990s. It isn't that the narratives are necessarily similar, but something about the general theme of generations and coming to terms with living in another country -- as well as a rather gentle and muted mise en scene disrupted by occasional bursts of colour and excitement. With Udayan Prasad directing Hanif Kureshi's script, I think Fanatic wins out, but Brick Lane has much going for it.

I was impressed with the even-handedness of Brick Lane. The husband is not an ogre, but a well-meaning and thoughtful man with genuine feelings. The family feels like a recognisable family and the mother/central character should break the hardest heart. I've seen several reviews that make comparisons to Satyajit Ray, which seems a little strong, if well-meaning. In some ways the flashbacks to Bengal were the problem for me. I can see why they are there and separately, the scenes in Bengal and Whitechapel worked. But cut them together and I wasn't sure. I gather from some reviews that this is an issue in adapting the book and perhaps that is why Fanatic with its original script seems more coherent. What does work very well in Brick Lane for me is the music and I'm rediscovering the beautiful voice of Natacha Atlas all over again.

Generally, I love 'Scope films and the opening scenes of Brick Lane -- in Bengal -- work very well visually, but I'm less sure about the aesthetic decision when the film moves to London. There is nothing wrong with a London drama in 'Scope (Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland is one of my favourite films) but it does suggest a 'big' film, either in scale or in melodrama excess. Brick Lane is perhaps a 'small film'. But, despite my cavils, one which is well worth watching.

Tough enough?

2007-10-20T18:10:00.001+01:00

I was pleasantly surprised by Knallhart (Tough Enough) a German film from 2006 which sneaked out in September in the UK without my noticing it. I caught it at Cornerhouse in Manchester and was glad I did. It's always good to see a film when you know nothing about it and this intrigued me from the off. The 15 year-old central character is well drawn and offers a range of emotions that seemed believable. It's a film which in different ways reminded me of La Haine and Sweet Sixteen and I can't think of higher praise.

Michael Polischka is a 15 year-old with an attractive mother of "only just over 30" as she reminds him. At the beginning of the story, Michael and his mother are thrown out on the street by her rich lover in the leafy suburbs. Michael finds himself in a tough inner city area of Berlin in a dismal flat and forced to attend an inner city school which seems rough even by UK standards. And the story moves on from there in quite conventional ways. The film makes the usual connections between crime and delinquent youth and recent immigrant communities, in this case two East European youths, who befriend Michael at school and take him home to chill out, and the 'enemy' gang, led by a Turkish youth. Eventually Michael gets involved as a drug-runner working for a suave and attractive young Turkish crime lord. He also casts envious eyes at Turkish family life (and a gorgeous young Turkish woman). The ending is well handled and explains the enigmatic beginning -- all in all a well-executed youth picture/crime story which offers a view of the 'New Berlin'. Well worth catching.

Becoming a pod person

2007-10-12T23:11:00.000+01:00

In the week when a fourth version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is released in a vain attempt to recreate the success of the 1956 Don Siegel original, it seems appropriate to reflect on pods and podcasting. My free iPod shuffle arrived today, a gift from Sofa Cinema for subscribing for a minimum of 4 months. It seemed a good deal at the time and I'm very pleased with what I've heard so far, having transferred a playlist of my favourite Canadian artists in a single click. Brilliant!

Tonight I've also achieved something else in recording a streamed radio programme from BBC Radio 4 via the 'play again' function. Recording was very simple using Quicktime Pro. The programme recorded was The Archive Hour celebrating the births of the five 1907 centurions of UK documentary. I have listened carefully all the way through, but Marion Grierson and Paul Rotha weren't in the segments I registered. The main attraction of the programme for me was the archive recordings of John Grierson, Basil Wright, Edgar Anstey etc. as well as Lindsay Anderson. There wasn't too much new in the actual content, except for occasional gems such as Basil Wright meeting Grierson for the first time in a 'communist club' in Soho called the 1917 Club or some such. It was also good to hear Andy Medhurst affirming that if you wanted to know about the lives of the working class in the 1930s, you should watch a George Formby film.

This is also the week when the BBC launches its podcast service and I think I'll subscribe to at least one Radio 4 programme, probably Laurie Taylor's Thinking Aloud (which this week also included a hymn of praise to the aforementioned Mr Medhurst). Finally, I must record how pleased I am to hear Jane Garvey on Woman's Hour on Radio 4. I'm a long time fan of Jane on Radio 5's drivetime programme and it will be a shame if she will no longer be heard teasing Peter Allen, but she deserves to get a chance on Radio 4 as the consummate broadcaster she surely is. She is the third of the first generation of Radio 5's women to make it to Radio 4, following Diana Madill and Fi Glover. Radio 5 is dismissed by some snobby radio commentators in the UK, but there is plenty of real talent on the station.

Who is The Brave One?

2007-10-02T23:26:00.001+01:00

The answer to the question may be Jodie Foster who stars in The Brave One. It might be Neil Jordan for taking on the direction. Both of them risked a critical mauling, but seem to have been rescued at the pass by the great American audience. I'm not sure if it is the prospect of this audience or the film itself which frightens me more. I've rarely been so exercised by a film.

I'm a Jodie Foster supporter, though I haven't seen that many of her films. I could say much the same about Neil Jordan, whose Hollywood pictures have never attracted me as much as the Irish/British ones. Putting the two together should promise something worthwhile. And indeed, for most of this film, Foster is excellent and Jordan provides several standout sequences. The script, however just isn't up to the job for me. As several critics have pointed out, the problem lies somewhere in the film's reference to genre repertoires. If The Brave One is judged as a 'revenge' thriller, it falls far short of the narrative economy and sheer drive of Abel Ferrara's Ms 45. I've not seen Death Wish, but I've read suggestions that it too is superior as a genre/expoitation film (whatever may be the worries about its politics). The Brave One wants to be more than an exploitation film but it lacks the clear sense of purpose that a film like A History of Violence offers. Instead, it features various subplots like the potential romance between cop and victim/avenger (prompting references to Jane Campion's In the Cut, a film which itself has genre problems, but which overall is more coherent) and the cod philosophy associated with a protagonist who is a very rare breed, a radio soundscape designer cum commentator. These aspects of the film mean it has the potential to be an interesting character study.

But I have to own up. My real problem is with American politics and gun control (the lack of it – the Jodie Foster character gets around it immediately). As a European, I just can't take seriously a film with no sense of moral purpose whatsoever apart from the belief that this 'good person' can do whatever they need to do to regain their confidence after a brutal attack. So, people are killed as if they were not human beings and a supposedly liberal character and a police officer can ignore the law without any sense of loss or any impact on their sense of moral well-being or mental health. In 1983, Tony Garnett, best known as a producer for Ken Loach, directed his second feature, Handgun, set in America and featuring a woman who is raped and who buys a gun seeking revenge. I don't remember the film in any detail, but I'm sure it was a considered argument against the use of firearms. In one of the more obvious role models for The Brave One, the Scorsese/Schrader Taxi Driver from 1976, there is a single major shootout, a psychotic protagonist and a deeply moral and disturbing take on American urban culture at the time of the withdrawal from Vietnam. In The Brave One there is a mention of Iraq and a character representing the terrors of wars in Africa where children are armed and trained to kill their parents (I'm assuming the character who makes this comment is from Sierra Leone). There are, I think, eight killings in The Brave One that are apparently 'justified'.

If you want to get depressed, read the IMDB comments. The first one I read that made a concerted attack on the film's politics as rightist ended up by claiming that it would be supported by "rabid feminists". As the Americans say, 'Go figure!'.

Daratt

2007-09-09T22:46:00.001+01:00

Ali Barkai as Atim and Youssouf Djaoro as Nassara in Daratt

Daratt (Dry Season) (Chad/France/Belgium/Austria 2006) is a simple tale which nevertheless seems to say a great deal. It takes place in Chad where a 'Justice and Retribution' Commission is reporting on war crimes after a long civil war. Atim (a name that means orphan) is summoned by his grandfather and instructed to find the man who killed his father and execute him. Atim sets off for the city and finds the man (Nassara), now a baker with a young wife and suffering from various wounds and ailments. Atim is hired by Nassara to work in his bakery, despite his aggressive stance. Eventually, Nassara comes to rely on Atim – will the execution take place?

I found the film engrossing despite its slow pace. It's a while since I've seen any new African films (I actually have the previous film by this director on DVD, but I've not watched it -- I will now) and I'm struggling to place it in relation to what I know. There is little here of either the magical realism of a Souleymane Cissé, the politics of a Sembene Ousmane or the postmodernism of a Djibril Diop Mambéty. Perhaps the films of Idrissa Ouedraogo are more relevant. Visually, this film is very spare with long shots and MLS of dusty streets and the bakery with occasional MCUs and CUs. The nighttime scenes are distinctive with Atim walking into pools of light and then back into total blackness.

Atim is at once a 'country boy' in the city and a modern 'rebel' figure. When he jokes on his mobile 'phone and suddenly sprays his armpits with deodorant, we are reminded that this is a young man in a young man's world. He speaks only rarely and it is a sign of the desperate loneliness that Nassara feels, that he quickly grows to love Atim despite constant rebuffs. I'm strongly tempted to see the film as in some way metaphorical in that Atim represents a future in which the young men of Chad can escape from the ravages of the past and come to terms with reconciliation without losing everything of tradition. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic -- I hope not. Definitely worth seeing.

British Film Forever?

2007-09-03T17:02:00.000+01:00

This has been the Summer of British Film, a concoction dreamed up by the BBC and the UK Film Council, comprising three linked 'strands' -- newly minted digital copies of well-known British films in cinemas on Tuesday evenings, a series of 'themed' documentaries on Saturday night on BBC2 and a linked series of screenings of British films scattered around the BBC2 schedules.

It isn't absolutely clear what the purpose of the whole enterprise might have been. The cinema screenings have been for very well-known films that only the youngest audiences wouldn't know from TV screenings. It's nice to see these films get a cinema outing, but it's difficult for me to get excited by them. However, if it gets any new audiences into cinemas, fine.

More problematic is the BBC2 contribution. On the whole this has been an excellent opportunity badly wasted in my view. The expectation, on BBC2, is for a reasonably sensible documentary with an educational or artistic purpose as well as being entertaining. This hasn't been in evidence. Talking heads such as Phil Jupitus, Billy Bragg and Ewan McGregor share screentime with noted film academics such as Ian Christie. There is a woeful voiceover delivered by Jessica Stevenson, presumably to attract younger audiences and the script is all over the place (Matthew Sweet is mentioned, but I'm sure he isn't totally responsible). The programmes are themed by genre, but little thought seems to have gone into what a genre might be or how to explain it. The clips are chopped up and usually presented in the wrong ratio (i.e. Academy becomes 16:9 and so does 'Scope). I watched the first in the series and decided not to bother with the rest. I then relented and thought I'd give it a second chance, but Saturday's programme roughly themed around 'war' was just as bad. I wept for Jack Cardiff and Thelma Schoonmaker, interviewed between clips of Powell & Pressburger films cropped to fit into 16:9 frames, destroying careful compositions willy-nilly (and nearly cutting Pressburger's name off a title card). These programmes, if they are meant to attract a new audience for older British films, should be on BBC1 (or BBC3?).

The film screenings have included some interesting titles, but also several have been ruined by 'pan and scan'. Poor Sidney Furie -- three of his early 1960s films have been on in the last few weeks (The Ipcress File, The Boys and The Leather Boys), all panned and scanned.

Something very strange is going on at the BBC. Perhaps producers and schedulers no longer talk to each other? On Sunday night, a second documentary, this time under the Arena label, was shown on BBC2 with the title 'Flames of Passion'. Bizarrely, it used some of the same clips from the British Film Forever doc of the night before -- but this time they were presented properly in the correct ratio and from excellent prints that positively glowed in terms of expressionist lighting for the late 1940s pictures. No talking heads and a voiceover by the mellifluous Miriam Margolyes, more time on each film and a structure (with chapter heads) that at least made sense and the inclusion of some much less well-known material -- by comparison with the night before this was a gem of a programme. I guessed that Bob Murphy must have been involved somewhere and he was listed as Research Consultant. Cheers Bob! I remember the course you put on at the BFI on the sensationalist melos of the late 1940s with much joy.

I imagine a lot of teachers will think about using the British Film Forever docs for background. I urge them not to -- or at least to contextualise them very carefully. But 'Flames of Passion' is a must (fans will recognise the title as being the film trailed when Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard make their trip to the cinema in Brief Encounter).

GCSE Media Results

2007-08-23T10:37:00.000+01:00

Today attention switches to GCSE Media Studies. Over the last few years, entries to GCSE Media have risen dramatically. Since media studies as a subject is not part of National Curriculum, examined courses at KS4 (14-16) in England and Wales have always suffered in comparison to the more market-led situation post 16. At A Level, some 4% of candidates take AS/A2 Film or Media Studies, but only around 1% take GCSE Media. This means that the numbers are significant, but don't as yet cause the same murmurs amongst traditionalists in education as the presence of A Level Media in the Top 10 subjects.

This year's results posted by the Joint Council for Qualifications show that in 2007 there were 66,425 candidates for GCSE Media, representing a significant increase on the 57,521 in 2006. In fact, according to the 'trends' report on the JCQ website, media studies shows a 15.4% increase in take-up. This makes it No 3 in the 'Top 10 subject increases', but since this table is topped by the relatively small numbers representing Additional Maths, media is still growing as fast as in 2006 when it was No 2. The champion is Statistics with an increase of 21% for a total of 82,000. It does look as if all the attempts to boost Maths are having some effect at both GCSE and A Level and this may deflect some of the predicted attacks on media. However, a little lower down the Top 10 increases are the three separate science subjects. There has been a clamour for a return to single science GCSEs because combined science does not seem to be 'stretching' students. Biology, Physic and Chemistry are, as a result of official promotion, growing by 4-5% a year, but this clearly doesn't match media studies which, without official sanction, is ahead of any of the single science subjects. I suspect that this will be picked up by commentators. It's worth remembering though, that media is still relatively small beer at this level. The main National Curriculum subjects each attract over 200,000 candidates. Religious Studies has been one of the recent success stories and it now attracts over 170,000.

In the next couple of years, Film Studies GCSE will make its appearance and will no doubt add a few more thousand. For the moment, more attention might be paid to the vocational alternatives. The new 'Applied Media' course has only been piloted in a few centres so far, but it has produced some results (300) so far. I was also intrigued to discover that a Journalism GCSE is offered by the Awarding Body in Northern Ireland, CCEA and this produced 170 candidates in 2007. BTEC results are not included in the JCQ press release, so I will report on these when I find them.

Floating Clouds and Late Chrysanthemums

2007-08-23T01:12:00.000+01:00

The second Naruse Mikio screening at the National Media Museum this week provided an interesting comparison with When A Woman Ascends the Stairs. The same two stars, Takamine Hideko and Masayuki Mori were the leads in Floating Clouds (Japan 1955) and the focus was again on a 'suffering' woman in a melodrama, but there were also some striking differences.

First Floating Clouds was shot in Academy ratio, 1.33:1. Naruse does not have a distinctive visual style and the change of screen size should not be too significant, but for me the 'Scope film seemed much more coherent in its use of framing and composition. Floating Clouds was quite conventionally shot and perhaps it was the rather abrupt edits marking shifts in time periods (i.e. character's memories) that made it feel less coherent. Many of the scenes in small houses and narrow alleys in Tokyo were reminiscent of Ozu's Tokyo Story. However, where Ozu's camera often stays at the eye level of a child or someone kneeling on a tatami mat, Naruse simply follows the characters -- when they are in a traditional room, the camera is low level but at other times it rises with them.

Floating Clouds has the attention to social detail that I'm coming to realise is a Naruse trait. The story deals with a couple returning to Japan after the war has ended from their posting with a forestry team in Indo-China (presumably Vietnam). The misery of the Occupation and the struggle to survive economically and morally provides the context for an abortive romance. Unlike When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, written by Kikushima Ryuzo, responsible for many of Kurosawa's scripts, Floating Clouds is an adaptation of a novel by the very popular Hayashi Fumiko. In fact, Floating Clouds was the fifth Naruse film based on Ms Hayashi's novels. Perhaps then Floating Clouds is more like the norm for Naruse? When I got to see Late Chrysanthemums (Japan 1954) just a few days later, this naive assumption was soon discarded.

In the pub after the screening someone suggested that the film was 'Bressonian' and that seems like a good reference. Whereas Floating Clouds is a fairly conventional melodrama in terms of structure and presentation, Late Chrysanthemums, based on three short stories by Hayashi, is almost a pure character piece with little plot but a lot of opportunity to reflect on the lives of ageing geisha. Four women in early middle age, like four flowers whose bloom is fading, struggle to make ends meet. Or at least three of them do. The fourth has become a moneylender (and property speculator), but money can't buy her happiness and she is disappointed to find that men only want to borrow money. This film seemed linked, thematically and structurally, more to When A Woman Ascends the Stairs. Once again, we get the detail of everyday life in Tokyo. If anything, there are even more scenes of money changing hands. Aesthetically, the film seems more fluent and coherent than Floating Clouds, which now seems much more of a genre piece.

The two earlier films did make me think about Ozu. They show ordinary families in ordinary settings (although Ozu's families are perhaps more genteel). There are plenty of Ozu railway scenes. Neither Ozu or Naruse got commercial releases in the UK in the 1950s and in retrospect it's not difficult to see why. Mizoguchi and Kurosawa offered films that were at once more 'exotic', more exciting, more expressionist and more obviously 'humanist'. Naruse's films do require an appreciation of the day to day nuances of Japanese cultural life. Late Chrysanthemums also refers to memories of Manchuria (and rather surprisingly, to the prospect of going to Korea) -- some knowledge of Japanese imperialism is required to fully appreciate these references. I'm not sure I would have appreciated Naruse when I was younger and when i was even more ignorant of Japanese culture.

I'm glad I saw these films and I'll look out for the DVD titles that are already published.

National Treasures

2007-08-22T22:47:00.000+01:00

Caught the end of this week's repeat of 'National Treasures' (Radio 4) - which pitched Canterbury Cathedral up against Damien Hirst's diamond skull for their national cultural value. Great prgramme and referred to programme two, where the Cutty Sark and the BFI national archive were discussed as worthy causes for public money.

On listen again, caught a fascinating programme about the value of the moving image against an ancient, preserved monument - the whole programme worth it to hear Terence Davies argue so convincingly and passionately about the value of filmmaking. It was a done-deal - BFI won hands-down.

The ability to access this archive now at the BFI is a fantastic asset - one perhaps to develop for dispersal on-line, or otherwise to benefit 'Our Friends in the North'?

A Level Media results day

2007-08-16T10:09:00.000+01:00

The 2007 A Level Media and Film results are available from the Joint Council for Qualifications on its website. The 2007 trends statement is also important to download.

My first impression is that the great expansion in numbers has now slowed down. Total entries for A Level Media/Film were 31,942 (an increase of 3.16%). This drops Media down the league table for 'increase in entries' from 2nd to 8th and should kill the comments about diverting students from Maths etc. In fact, Maths, Science and Spanish are the subjects with noticeable increases this year. AS Film/Media had 44,392 entries (an increase of 3.19% which didn't even get a mention in the Top 10 of subject increases).

At both AS and A2, Media/Film now accounts for 4% of all candidates. Females still outnumber males and they perform significantly better in terms of grades. At A Level the overall pass rate at Grade A for Media/Film is 14.1%, but for females alone it is 16.3%. Media continues to be a relatively 'hard subject' in terms of getting a Grade A.

Overall, Media/Film has moved up one place to Number 9 most popular A Level subject (changing places with Geography). Of all the 'new' subjects, Psychology is by far the most successful -- at Number 5 in the chart with 52,000 candidates.

What the current figures don't show is the split between Media Studies and Film Studies. It may well be that the increases relate more to Film than to Media.

The Applied A Level in Media has now reached A2 and there were 567 candidates (slightly more males) of whom 11.3% gained a Grade A. This is a far higher proportion than in other Applied A Levels, but overall Media attracted only 1.7% of entries. At AS numbers rose from 735 in 2006 to 912 and females were back in front and gaining more Grade 'A's. But at AS, only 1.8% of candidates took Media, down from 1.9% in 2006.

Communication Studies at AS/A2 is running at around o.3% of all A Level candidates, showing a slightdecline to 3,261 at AS and a very slight increase to 2,144 at A Level.

Pick 'n Mix

Two examples of interesting combinations of subjects from Blackpool & Fylde College (This is Lancashire website).

"Outstanding students this year included Leanne Hyland who gained A grades in Film Studies, Maths and Psychology as well as an A in A/S level Further Maths. Leanne is going to go to Edinburgh University to study Maths.

Lauren Martin came to the College from St Mary's High School. She gained an A in Psychology and B grades in Film Studies, Business Studies and General Studies. After a year out she is aiming to go to Lancaster University or Manchester University to study for a degree in Marketing Management or Business."

. . . more traditionally, this from 'Cambs Times': "Amongst the college success stories is Joshua Butler of Wisbech who achieved straight A's at A Level, in film studies, media studies, English language and literature. Joshua is intending to read film with English studies at the University of East Anglia."

Tanzania and Nollywood

2007-08-15T11:54:00.000+01:00

Yvone Cherry and Stephen Kanumba as the couple in She Is My Sister

There are only a handful of Tanzanian films produced each year and few of these are screened outside the festival circuit. As a consequence, I've never seen one. When the British had colonies in Africa their policy was to offer training in making documentaries and instructional films. One consequence of this in East Africa is a general lack of commercial, entertainment-based filmmaking. Something similar was also the case in West Africa, but in Nigeria and Ghana an alternative, highly populist, video cinema movement began in the 1980s. 'Nollywood' now claims to be the world's third biggest film industry after India and the US, with hundreds of cheap video films produced each year.

Nollywood has now spread to East Africa and I was fortunate to be given a VCD of a joint Tanzanian/Nigerian production entitled She Is My Sister (2007). This follows a previous joint venture Dar 2 Lagos (2007). I was given She Is My Sister because it is performed mostly in English. Most Tanzanian cultural products use Swahili but in this case three of the leads are Nigerian (as is the director) so English may simply have been more convenient. However, I'm not sure how that would affect the potential market for the film.

VCD is the preferred format for cheap film distribution in South and South East Asia and I've also noticed them in the Middle East, so it's no surprise to find films on VCD in Africa as well. The image quality on my computer is not great, but it is watchable. There are two discs in the box and the total film length is around 74 minutes with 6 minutes of trailers on Disc 1.

She Is My Sister is recognisable as a melodrama in terms of its plot and exaggerated acting style. To deal with the stylistic features first, there is little to say. The film is presented in a standard TV ratio of 4:3. There are a couple of establishing shots of streets in Dar es Salaam, but otherwise the film is composed in medium shot, like a television soap opera, with occasional close-ups and occasional tableaux to show characters in their surroundings as in the shot of the couple with their new furniture above. The overall style is quite constrained compared to the trailers for other productions. (The trailers are highly wrought with flash edits and zooms, but this may simply be a trailer style.) Overall, the camerawork and editing is competent, although some shots are held for far too long. (At the beginning of the film we have to watch nearly every passenger get off a long distance coach before we meet the first significant character.)

Far more interesting is the overall narrative. This is in part a universal morality tale. Melodrama has often been an important mode for exploring social relationships at times of major societal change -- such as in Europe in the 19th century. She Is My Sister focuses on a young woman, Rose, from a rural village who gets to university and then is able to get a job/open a business selling imported electronics goods. This all happens before the narrative begins and we see her return to her village where she finds her childhood sweetheart who she takes back to the city and introduces to her girlfriends. The 'country bumpkin', Danny, turns out to be very good at running the shop and before long the couple are married with a small child. Danny, played by Steven Kanumba who also wrote the script and seems to be one of Tanzania's successful young stars, also becomes very attractive to Rose's friend Flora. Flora is a repugnant character, an uber bitch played with relish by Nigerian actress Nkiru Silvanus. When she steals Danny, Rose's whole life falls apart.

The plot is very thin and there are few surprises. The only narrative device of note is the use of flashback so that at the beginning Rose's sister arrives in the city for a visit and discovers Rose no longer lives in a 'gated mansion', but is now in a squalid back street apartment. Rose then tells her the story . . . It is the elements of the narrative that are interesting. The rural/city contrast is often represented by an opposition of cunning v. authenticity and here the couple from the country are corrupted by the city lifestyle. The woman has an education, but she has been seduced by material gain and may lose everything when her man succumbs to the sophisticated woman. As in many of the Nollywood films, there is a second part to the story according to the title at the end of the film which warns us to "Watch out for She Is My Sister 2". Perhaps Rose fights back?

Tanzania is a poor country, but most of the action in this film takes place in a world of flatscreen TVs, gated houses, servants and expensively decorated rooms. There is clearly an aspirational lifestyle being offered. The film has an 18 certificate, but there is no overt sexuality or graphic violence. Perhaps the immorality alone is enough to get this rating? Tanzania has strong Christian and Muslim communities. I don't know if this has had an impact on certification. There is a hint of possible domestic violence, but nothing like what is evident in the Swahili language films trailed on the VCD in which violence, mainly, but not always, by men towards women seems to be a common feature.

Aflad.co.uk is a UK online seller of Nigerian VCD/DVDs.

A Level Media Results

2007-08-15T00:41:00.000+01:00

As usual the same tired arguments about A Level Media Studies have been trotted out again in the last few days in the build-up to the release of the actual results. In the Guardian last week Peter Wilby wrote quite a sensible piece offering a refreshing view on the debate -- but was then deluged by bloggers representing the 'dumbing down' camp. Today the Daily Telegraph has had the nerve to repeat more or less the same story that ran in the Mail at this time last year with rent-an-education-quote Alan Smithers on 'soft subjects' like media studies.

This year I'm going to try to rebut at least some of the charges on behalf of the Media Education Association. The 'soft subject' charge is made against a raft of subjects. They are likely to be either potentially radical (sociology is still in this category and still being described as 'soft', just as it was in the 1970s) or possibly too 'vocational' like business studies. The prejudices come from traditionalists and those whose own educational background has involved either 'high culture' arts or 'hard sciences'. The charges have very little to do with any kind of evidence.

Media studies may be many things, but like most subjects it offers the opportunity for students to stretch themselves or to take an easier option and just pass the exam. The problem is really the exam system. The same people who think media studies is a soft option are also those who claim that students are all exam grade chasers. But this is contradictory logic. No student who chooses a course because they think they will get a higher grade would then select Media Studies at A Level, since the proportion of A grades is low compared to most traditional subjects. So, does that mean that students who choose media are the less 'street smart' students who don't know what they are doing? That could be true at AS, but they soon learn that it isn't a doss and many drop out before A2. We know that media students come from all kinds of schools and colleges and there are now enough of them (about 4% of all A Level students) to be confident that the media cohort is representative of the whole student population. There is a small percentage of students who don't consider taking media studies because the press, their school or their parents have attempted to put them off. Whether these students would get higher grades if they did take media studies is impossible to know. The truth of course is that the students who make it to A2 Media Studies are there because they want to be, because they enjoy the subject and think that it is relevant to their lives.

Provocation

2007-08-13T00:02:00.000+01:00

Lisa Ray and John Abraham in Water.

I finally managed to see Deepa Mehta's Water (Canada/India 2005) and I surprised myself by being quite moved by the film which deals with a clash between the tradition of widows being effectively imprisoned for the rest of their lives and the possibility of change in India coming from Ghandian political ideas. The focus of the narrative is a romance between a young widow and a law student and its impact on two other widows. My sense was that, despite the controversy which caused production in India to be stopped and moved to Sri Lanka and the film's subsequent success in gaining an Oscar nomination, the UK reviews were rather lukewarm. I remember enjoying Fire (1996), the first of the 'elemental trilogy', but also finding it a strange Indian/Western hybrid. I'm intending to watch Earth (1998) later this week.

Water, I was convinced, was an Indian film. I didn't research the film before I watched it so I wasn't aware that it had been filmed in Sri Lanka. However, I did get a sense during the screening of watching landscapes in South India rather than on the Ganges. Lisa Ray and John Abraham were new to me. I can understand some of the comments about the realism question. Both actors are very beautiful and their parentage (Ray is Indian/Polish and Abraham is Iranian/Indian Christian) means that they look exotic in an Indian setting. But really it isn't a problem and in a way their casting adds another level of meaning to any reading of the narrative. I was also surprised to be offered a selection of A. R. Rahman songs. At least one of these was mixed badly in the film print I watched, but overall they seemed to work.

The big issue, of course, is whether the film works in the same way in the West as in India. On IMDB, the Canadian reviews are generally excellent, partly pride in Canadian Cinema, partly a Western liberal response to the plight of widows in 1930s India, I guess. IMDB reviews and comments by Indians on the other hand are sometimes extremely negative. I attribute this to the obverse of the Canadian response -- a feeling that the filmmaker has somehow betrayed Indian culture/is not proud of Indian Cinema, but also from a Hindu perspective, the film is disrespectful of religious teachings. There is a great deal about the controversy over Water scattered across the internet and I don't particularly want to get embroiled in the politics of Hindu Nationalism. What interests me here is what the Indian critics have to say about the film -- as a film. I came across this blog, seemingly by an NRI/desi with deep knowledge of Indian 'parallel cinema', that offered a withering appraisal -- much of it focusing on aspects of the film requiring cultural knowledge. For instance, the spoken Hindi in the film is 'stilted' and doesn't convey any authenticity. Similarly, the saris are polyester, the taxis in the street are wrong, the costumes are wrong and so is the representation of Ghandi at the end of the film. The blogger is angry with the film on nearly every level, including what is seen as a crass use of quotes from Hindu writings. Overall, the blogger pines for the directors and stars of parallel cinema. Lisa Ray and John Abraham are criticised for their acting. I'm always worried by these criticisms since appraisal of acting styles is often highly subjective. However, I can see that the film would have been very different if Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das had appeared as the two adult widows (the third widow is a child) as Deepa Mehta originally intended. (A report on the original shoot with an image of Azmi and Das is on this Bright Lights Film Journal page.)

I wish my knowledge of parallel cinema was more extensive, but I've seen quite a few and Water wouldn't stand up to a comparison with the films of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen or of Shyam Benegal. There were moments when the scenario and some aspects of the cinematography reminded me of those earlier films (I think it's the second film of the Apu Trilogy from Ray, Aparajito (1956) which features the ghats of Benares) but overall Deepa Mehta's aim was different. Like Mira Nair, she is trying to make films about Indian culture for both a Western audience and a younger popular audience in India. And on this score, according to a number of Indian reviews, she seems to have succeeded. The film is: "Art without being arty, which is truly rare and wonderful" as one young Indian blogger puts it. This doesn't negate the cultural criticism (and I did find more) and I think that is a weakness. On the other hand, shifting production to Sri Lanka must have been a nightmare and to manage to acheive what she has in the circumstances deserves support. To attract audiences to a consideration of social issues, even if it involves some misunderstandings is something Bollywood hasn't managed. Despite the criticisms some Indians seem to have supported Water as an Oscar contender (as the Canadian foreign language entry) over the Indian entry Rang De Basanti -- I guess I should see that soon and look at a comparison.

Perfection?

2007-08-05T23:21:00.001+01:00

Takamine Hideko as Keiko, the Mama-san in a Ginza bar.

When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (Japan 1960, dir. Naruse Mikio) has just about everything I could wish for in a movie – a beautiful heroine presented in a B+W 'Scope melodrama in which she must make almost impossible decisions about how to gain her independence in patriarchal Japan. Whilst the story reminded me very much of Mizoguchi Kenji's suffering women, the milieu of early 1960s Tokyo was reminiscent of Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well (also 1960) and Masumura Yasuzo's A Wife Confesses (1962). However, Naruse's mise en scène seems less expressionist -- or perhaps just more subtle than that of the other three directors. The compositions are careful and usually quite simple and the story is carried by the acting and the use of locations, costume and set design. What impressed me most about the film was the wealth of social detail.

Tokyo in 1960 seems on the cusp of the great leap forward towards the Japanese economic resurgence. The cars on the street are still American and in the bars the brands are British, French or American. Keiko's apartment is 'modern', but her family home in the suburbs by the river could still be part of 1930s Tokyo. The mixing of traditional and modern/Western costume, decor and food tells us a great deal about the characters. Keiko is always dressed traditionally ('conservatively', as she tells her mother).

The central premise of the narrative is that the 30 year-old widow Keiko is facing the reality of her situation as a popular hostess (in fact the senior hostess or Mama-san) of a bar in Ginza, Tokyo's entertainment district. Her options appear to be to set up her own bar or to marry one of her rich clients. She can't really afford to stand still. Everyone is struggling to make their way in the new world of potential prosperity, so whatever she chooses she will have to face the unpalatable consequences of her actions (e.g. other hostesses who have set up in their own bars have been driven to suicide by the economic pressure involved in borrowing money and repaying the interest). The social context is economically summed up in Keiko's voiceover in which she tells that at 11.30 each night, 15,000 women in Ginza leave the bars and other places of entertainment. The first-class women take taxis, the second-class take the train to the suburbs and the others go home with their clients.

There are two more Naruse films in the short season in Bradford. I can't wait.

Constructing TV?

2007-08-01T21:30:00.000+01:00

I'm really not sure what to make of the current hysteria about 'faking it' on television. I can't decide whether this is an indictment of media educationists -- that there are still people out there that think that what is on television is 'real' -- or that it shows just how important universal 'media literacy' is. It's the latter of course. What the current controversy shows is not that television is 'dumbing down', but rather that no matter how 'media savvy' or sophisticated television audiences may appear to be, they don't reflect on what they watch with any critical distance. As regards what happens within the TV industry, I was struck by (66 year-old) Paul Watson (director of the programme on the couple coping with Alzheimer's) suggesting on Radio 4 that the mistakes in presentation were being made by "young guys with mortgages" desperate to get the ratings. He's probably right.

I can't really pontificate on the current range of programming that is under fire since I haven't seen any of the programmes in question. I'm not going to argue that this is because I have superior viewing tastes, but there is a cultural change taking place that I'm clearly not part of.

Holiday viewing

2007-07-21T17:24:00.000+01:00

Watching movies on a plane is at best a welcome diversion from the tedium of flying. On a long-haul flight it becomes more attractive. Even so, it isn't the best basis for commenting on individual films. The screen is tiny on the back of the seat in front, the aspect ratio is usually wrong and there are constant interruptions. Even so I was grateful to see a Hindi movie (with English subtitles) on a flight to Nairobi, thanks to the selection of films on offer by Kenya Airways. Khosla Ka Ghosla (India 2006) proved to be a gentle and enjoyable social comedy, an almost 'pure' genre film with none of the usual trappings of Bollywood. A middle-class father is approaching retirement and the day has come when he has finally purchased a plot of land on which to build the family home of his dreams. However, he is conned out of the land by an unscrupulous builder/speculator who claims to have already purchased the same land and who has the legal resources to defend his claim. The key character in the ensuing comic narrative is the second son 'Cherry' – a young computer executive not really interested in the family and preparing to take up a career opportunity in North America. But, of course, at the last minute he can't see his father humiliated so he attempts to help. The strategy that is finally adopted seems almost Ealingesque. Cherry's girlfriend is an actor and she recruits her teacher and his son to effectively become con artists and to trick the evil speculator into 'buying' land that belongs to a government agency.

I thought the acting all round was very good and I thought I recognised some actors. Checking on IMDB, I found the father had also played the father in Bend It Like Beckham and the son had been the bridegroom in Monsoon Wedding.

On the return flight, slightly miffed that the Chinese (Hong Kong) movie showing on Boeing 767 services was not available on the 777 flight, I decided to try out the Hollywood studio offerings. It was probably meaningless to watch Casino Royale on such a tiny screen, but the action was certainly well staged and Daniel Craig is a decent performer. However, I found the plot incomprehensible at times. After spending a fortnight in Tanzania, I felt I really should look at The Last King of Scotland and how it captured events in Uganda in the 1970s. I had avoided watching the film in the cinema because I just didn't fancy the story. All the clips I'd seen just made me wince. The film has been highly praised, not just for Forest Whitaker's performance but also for the gradual development of what seems like a light-hearted story into the nightmare of Idi Amin's presidency. Well, I gave it twenty minutes or so and it just didn't work for me (which may have been a result of sleep deprivation). I just couldn't believe in the James McAvoy character at all. I know this young actor is highly regarded and the profiles of him suggest he is a good guy, but he still looks like a clever schoolboy to me. I found Whitaker as Amin almost impossible to take. The IMDB entry on the film carries several interesting comments (and several stupid ones) and one young viewer suggests that the film worked precisely because he had no knowledge of Amin at all. Therefore the gradual revelation was very effective. I remember Amin very well and he wasn't funny (although he was certainly widely satirised, I think).

I'll have to give the film another go at a later date. The same goes for Hotel Rwanda.

Losing the plot

2007-07-01T23:42:00.000+01:00

I really wanted to like Grow Your Own, a British film supported by the UK Film Council which received a decent release, but attracted generally sparse audiences.

It features two ingredients I'm passionate about -- the treatment of refugees and the allotment movement -- and it's written, in part at least, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Boyce is one of the most respected scriptwriters in the UK and he has produced great scripts for Michael Winterbottom and Danny Boyle. His name on the credits was certainly what attracted me, alongside a strong cast. According to the attractive, but over-designed, website for the film, originally the story was going to be a documentary. The idea came from the experience of asylum seekers from Kosovo and Angola who were offered the chance to work on their own allotments in Liverpool as part of a scheme set up by a psychotherapist. Because asylum seekers can't take paid work, the chance to work on the allotment gives them a focus.

The script for the feature film includes the stories of three families of asylum seekers and the initial hostility they face from the local allotment-holders. I think these stories are strong and a moving drama could have been the result. Unfortunately, what finally emerged was a meld of the emotional drama and a rather tired and silly social comedy which to me seemed like a throwback to Ealing in the predictability of much of the action. Boyce says in the Production Notes that he wanted to give it a 'Bill Forsyth feel'. I think I can see why he thought this would work and there is a quirkiness about the set-up which could be developed in ways similar to Comfort and Joy (1984). However, such a strategy would need a highly skilled and sensitive director and Richard Laxton is a TV director with just one feature credit -- the critically derided Life and Lyrics (2006). I haven't seen anything else by this director, so it would be unfair to judge him on this film. Intriguingly the film was shot in CinemaScope and features an unusual colour palette (painting the sheds on the allotment is a plot feature). In fact, the setting in Liverpool is visually striking and unusual with lots of potential.

I don't really understand what went wrong. The co-writer Carl Hunter from the Liverpool band The Farm had the original idea and he was also a producer. I can only assume that someone lost their nerve in allowing the comic elements to become dominant. The central relationship between a South Chinese family group and an ex merchant seaman on an adjacent plot has all the elements for great drama (including black comedy), but it isn't allowed to develop. At one point the script even clumsily spells out what has happened in dialogue -- even though we have already begun to understand events through the sensitive performance by Benedict Wong.

There are plenty of good things in the film and I laughed several times, but overall I just felt it didn't hang together -- the music wasn't well used either). I hope Frank Cottrell Boyce bounces back soon.

Tamil film in the UK Top Ten

2007-06-25T21:12:00.000+01:00

The Top 10 films in the UK for the weekend of June 16/17 included two Indian films. At No 6 the Hindi film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom registered a screen average of over £5,000 from 47 screens. There is nothing unusual about this as Hindi films regularly feature in the Top 10. However, at No 9 Sivaji represents what I think is the first Tamil (i.e. 'made in Chennai') film to register. Not only is it in the Top 10, but from only 12 screens with a screen average of over £14,000 it was easily the best earner of the weekend, beating all the Hollywood blockbusters. I rate this the most surprising result I've seen in many years of logging the chart.

Sivaji stars the veteran (57 year-old) superstar Rajnikanth in a story about a software engineer who returns from America to attempt to set up a hospital for the poor. IMDB lists the film as being partly shot in all four South Indian languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telegu and Malayalam. Distributor Ayngaran is the only outlet for South Indian movies in the UK and it must be delighted by its success, which as far as I can see is based on screenings in Cineworld cinemas in London. I confess that the movie sounds like it will not necessarily be attractive to UK audiences not steeped in South Indian culture and it is possibly not subtitled. Nevertheless, this is a breakthrough in revealing to UK film pundits that actually South India produces more films and sometimes has bigger audiences than the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai (i.e. 'Bollywood').

Sivaji opened in 15 territories worldwide and the diaspora audiences in Malaysia and elsewhere propelled to number 15 in Screen International's worldwide chart.

Mani Ratnam's Yuva

2007-06-17T23:44:00.000+01:00

Somehow, I found the time to watch one of the Mani Ratnam films I'd collected. Yuva (2004) represents something that used to happen in European Cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s quite regularly, but only rarely since – the same script made almost simultaneously in two different languages with different actors. Yuva is the Hindi version of a Tamil film produced by Ratnam's Madras Talkies. An accident delayed shooting on one film and both versions ended up opening on the same day.

The Hindi version did make it to the UK but I missed it. I found a DVD on the Lovefilm rental site. It's a poor quality DVD with a low resolution image, poor sound and dreadful English subtitles – not only with woeful spelling and grammar, but also out of synch with the images. It's very difficult to work out who is saying what to whom. The fact that I still enjoyed the film very much is a tribute to the professionalism of the creative team.

Yuva is an important film for several reasons -- even though it seems to have flopped at the box office. The title refers to 'youth', I think, though the youngest of the lead actors was about 26 in 2004. The story involves the chance meeting of three men on the Howrah Bridge in Kolkotta. As with his earlier film, Alai Payuthey (2000), the opening incident then moves into flashback to tell the stories behind the meetings before returning to the 'present' for the last hour (160 mins movie). The three men represent different class positions and different basic ideologies and the story focuses upon the attempts by student politicians to take a stand against a corrupt party machine. The great Om Puri, so well known in the UK, plays the politician villain to perfection.

The film is star studded, although I've seen comments that suggest that for Abhishek Bachchan, this film was very important since by accepting a 'heavy' role, he widened his range successfully. I did feel that the other actors were familiar, but it was only afterwards that I realised that three of them were in the Othello adaptation, Omkara (2006).

There is a great deal of violence in the film and the finale is rather cartoon-like. However, the violence is necessary, I think, and I thought Bachchan made an excellent villain. There are three aspects of the film I really liked. One was the political narrative and the way in which the script touched on what I take to be current political issues across India. The second was the range of songs and I loved the 'political' song sequence. Ratnam does seem to use song sequences differently than in mainstream Hindi films. Finally, it was just great to see a film set in Kolkotta. Several commentators have complained that only Om Puri managed a Bengali accent. I'm not equipped to spot that, but I appreciated the views of the city (although I noted that thanks went to Southern Railways, so I wondered how much footage was shot in Madras?). I realise that although over the years I have seen quite a few Bengali films, they have all been art films or 'parallel cinema' films. This was the first Hindi film I'd seen set in the city and it was good to see it soon after The Namesake. What a treat too to see trams and the metro as well as trains – Mani Ratnam's films seem full of scenes on public transport of all kinds as well as motorbikes and cars.

There is an interesting review of the film on this American university site, although I'm not sure that I totally agree with its analysis of the closing sequence of the film. It does seem odd that Ratnam chose to set the political narrative in West Bengal, although if he had to transpose it from the south, it probably makes more sense than placing it in other northern states. I suspect that I need to know much more about Bengali political parties to read the ending properly.

I'm going to try another Ratnam film soon.

British FIlm Institute writes to authors

2007-06-15T15:28:00.000+01:00

On the same day this week, I received a copy of my new book, Understanding Audiences and the Film Industry, published by the BFI, and a copy of the 'FAQ' sent out by the BFI to authors. This explains the realignment policy in terms of the impact on Education Publishing. It says that internal consultation re the realignment will end on 22 June and attempts to reassure authors that their rights are ensured if the list is effectively sold/transferred to another agency.

So, I have a book, but some doubts about who might be trying to sell it. I also have six sets of teaching resources jointly published with BFI Education. Add to that, I've been a member of the BFI since the early 1970s. I am a trifle miffed that the first formal indication of what the BFI has in mind, should come at such a late stage. The BFI is a publicly-funded body and a national cultural agency. As far as I can see it is facing a genuine funding problem with a freeze on the monies it has received via the UK Film Council. The BFI Directorate certainly should be thinking about how to respond to this situation.

But, funding crises are nothing new and we've seen many before. The BFI has many partners in what it does to support film culture in the UK. Previous regimes have usually tried to explain their proposals to partners. This time around, it seems that decisions have been made without all the appropriate consultation discussions. Who knows, the BFI directorate may have learned something? Let's hope that the flurry of responses hitting the mailboxes at Stephen St. will have some positive results.

BFI to write itself out of education?

2007-06-03T10:55:00.000+01:00

The British Film Institute in its latest review looks as though it is set to move its publishing out to another agency. The concentration of bfi activities on its London venues, alongside a withdrawal from direct involvement in education publishing and DVD distribution is a serious blow to the further development of film and media education. The institute is putting more of its resources into its online presence, but can this be a substitute for what it once did in a more concrete way? Awareness of the plans of bfi director Amanda Nevill is now beginning to seep out to a wider constituency of film and media teachers thanks to actions by leading academics, co-ordinated via Meccsa. For detailed information, go to Prof. Pam Cook's recently launched blog, bfiwatch.

Going domestic in East Asia

2007-05-30T15:36:00.000+01:00

In the week that Pirates of the Caribbean opened to record business on 17,500 screens in 102 territories, it's worth noting that it isn't all going Hollywood's way. In 2006, Japan and China joined India and South Korea as major territories in which the domestic film industry managed to achieve 50% of domestic box office. If you want to know what kinds of films these industries are producing, a good starting point is Leung Wing-Fai's review of the 2007 Far East Film Festival in Udine, which we are honoured to present on the in the picture website. Fai wasn't that impressed with what was on offer, but "telling it like it is" is part of her style. What's clear is that these industries function much like other commercial industries and we need to keep track of the range of their ouputs.

2007 looks like a good year for Hollywood, but it is increasingly looking towards East Asian markets -- the Pirates franchise brought in Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-fat for the latest instalment. The latest MPAA figures suggest that Hollywood's share of the global market has been falling. Partly this is because some territories are growing fast (e.g. Russia) and partly because the difficulties of collecting box office figures in many territories have led to an underestimation of some national totals. In 2006, MPAA quotes a global market for cinema of $25.8 billion with US on $9.49 billion and East Asia on $6.32 billion (an increase of 15% over 2005-6).

Helpless, helpless

2007-05-30T00:08:00.001+01:00

"There is a town in North Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there."

k.d. lang sings Neil Young's words for 'Helpless' at the end of Sarah Polley's wonderful film Away From Her (a recording taken from her album of Canadian songs entitled 'Hymns of the 49th Parallel'). Young's words are powerfully suggestive of the emotions in the film and the cover of k.d. lang's album could be a still from the film.

I was certainly helpless from about twenty minutes in when I began to weep (possibly as the strains to 'Harvest Moon' started on the soundtrack) and couldn't stop throughout the rest of the film. I had approached the screening with much trepidation. Like most people my age I've had some experience of Alzheimer's disease in the family and the prospect of Julie Christie gradually deteriorating was worrying to say the least. But what I watched was a sensitive and moving story of a marriage which was not sentimental or romantic, but nevertheless optimistic.

On reflection, this is a film in which a quartet (or possibly a quintet) of women effectively help a man to come to terms with being parted from his partner of 44 years (i.e. being 'away from her'). Some of the women help with compassion, the care home manager is coldly (and irritatingly) efficient, another woman is 'plain talking'. The chief nurse is the compassionate one – but is also to the point in her criticism of him. And at the centre is Fiona (Julie Christie) devastatingly beautiful and knowing, even as her hold on memory unravels. The man, Grant (a great performance of bewilderment by the veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent), worries that she may be putting on an act -- and perhaps she is because she does manage to get him to question what he has done during the marriage.

I've read some interesting reviews, including one on the Village Voice website by Ella Taylor. I haven't see too many comments about the style of the film, except to suggest that it is 'conservative'. I think it is probably a good idea for a first time director to be cautious in presenting a story, so that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The overwhelming sense is of whiteness, blankness and cold, which seems appropriate. The only visual flourish I remember is the series of cross-fades which removes the visiting relatives from the dining tables in the care home -- an appropriate and effective device.

I don't think I've read any of Alice Munro's short stories (this film is adapted from 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain'), but this reminds me of other Canadian women writers. There is something of Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood in it -- and also something older and more Nordic (perhaps it's the landscape). Fiona is supposed to be from Icelandic stock and Grant reads to her from Auden and Louis MacNeice's book 'Letters from Iceland'. Trying to research those Canadian stories I've read (and regrettably forgotten) I came across Marjorie Anderson, an academic and author whose bio explains that she is of Icelandic fisher stock from a community on Lake Winnipeg -- a background which is presumably common in Manitoba and Ontario. There is something about the landscape of Ontario , the Protestantism, the Northern European culture, that creates a tone that you just don't find in American movies. It's evident in this film (in the landscape seen through the car windows and in the "brand spanking new" facility that is Meadowdale (or similarly horrible name for a care home)). I'm nudged to think of Cronenberg films like Crash, eXistenZ and A History of Violence (filmed in Canada). Anglophone Canadian Cinema is usually 'weird' -- but in a good way! This film is simply very good. I must watch more Canadian movies and I'll certainly be looking out for Sarah Polley, who sounds rather like Jodie Foster in beginning as a child star and making it to respected indy star and now acclaimed director at 27.

(The film was actually shot in Paris and Kitchener in Southern Ontario. My research turned up a literary genre which was new to me -- 'Southern Ontario Gothic'. This includes Munro and Atwood and also my favourite, Robertson Davies. It includes the elements I listed above and tends towards themes of moral hypocrisy according to Wikipedia. Isn't the internet wonderful? But why isn't anyone making movies based on Robertson Davies? I guess they would just be too 'weird'.)

What's in a name?

2007-05-15T23:42:00.000+01:00

I've rarely been so engaged by a film as I was by The Namesake. What I mean is, that I was at the same time enjoying the story and the characterisation, wishing I was in Calcutta, remembering visiting the Taj Mahal, reliving Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak films and occasionally being irritated by the American characters (and possibly cross because they seemed a little too much of a type when the central couple were so beautifully drawn).

There is something about Bengali Cinema which is irresistible and nearly always involves trains, the Ganges and the streets of Calcutta. But perhaps it is those thick black-rimmed spectacles that only Bengali intellectuals (and Buddy Holly) can wear and still look cool. All of these iconic signs are present in this film and its much the better for their inclusion -- the first section of the film is wonderful. This was my introduction to Tabu and I wish I'd seen her before. (I've subsequently realised that I have seen her before in the wonderful Tamil adaptation of Sense and Sensibility under the title Kandukondain, Kandukondain, 2000) Now that I've discovered that she is the niece of Shabana Azmi, I'll be looking out for her. Irrfan Khan as the father is also very good and I hadn't recognised him from The Warrior.

I guess on reflection that I enjoyed the American scenes between the son and his partners slightly less than those featuring the parents, but overall the story held my attention (and Zuleikha Robinson is an actor well worth keeping tabs on). I've read a couple of fairly damning reviews of Kal Penn's performance as the son and I'm afraid I'd probably agree that his character was the weakest element of the film. On a simple structural level, Mira Nair did well to handle what was almost a family saga on a limited budget and within the boundaries of quite a small and intimate film.

Zhang's Yellow Chrysanthemums

2007-05-11T00:28:00.000+01:00

I've always associated Chrysants with Japan, so it was a surprise to see thousands of them in The Curse of the Golden Flower.

I went into this screening not knowing what to expect. I'd seen the trailer and got a sense of lukewarm reviews, but neither really prepared me for the film. I shouldn't be surprised that I was very taken with it -- after all, I've never been really disappointed with one of Zhang's films. He remains for me one of the top players in the premier league, whatever political confusions his films create.

The first task in responding to the film is to try to categorise it. Despite the use of the term by several critics, I don't think the film is a wu xia, at least not in the sense that I have understood the term. The main characters are not warriors following the code of a dedicated master and displaying 'super skills'. There are opera techniques in the fight scenes, which are choreographed on an epic scale, but not with the romantic intensity that ran through Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Instead, I think that this is melodrama/opera with clear links to European/Indian/Japanese films/theatre.

In terms of melodrama, I've never seen this use of colour in anything else (I saw a digital print and the effect of slightly different contrast and shades might mean the 35mm print looks more familiar). Zhang does it again, I guess. The music was the only problem for me. By the end of the film I'd got used to it, but earlier it just didn't seem to fit.

Above all, the film offered two pleasures I hadn't ever imagined I would see, the return of Gong Li to a Zhang Yimou film and the chance to see Li and Chow Yun-fat together. I could have done without all the thrusting bosoms, but Gong Li's wonderful face drew my attention all the time. If the film isn't really the third film in a trilogy, it might just be a return to Zhang's first trilogy (and indeed his first Gong Li trilogy). The film that Curse of the Golden Flower most reminded me of is Raise the Red Lantern. The Gong Li character is proud, haughty and independent, plotting to achieve some power for herself but finally defeated by the implacable nature of patriarchy in Imperial China, just as she was in the earlier film. No doubt the China watchers in the West and in China itself are working on readings. I did think of the Tiananman Square massacre and I could see the film as a critique of both patriarchy and the internal plotting of the ruling elite. On the other hand, Chow Yun-fat's Emperor has risen up from a relatively lowly position to assume power and he intends to keep it. Perhaps Zhang secretly wants to celebrate this? As usual the posters on the IMDB bulletin boards are claiming the film as 'communist propaganda'. You takes your choice. I want to know why I'm not getting to see the film Zhang made before this, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. UK distribs please note.

Do Mention the War . . . but differently

2007-05-08T22:40:00.000+01:00

This is a postscript to the Ian McEwan/On Chesil Beach/Atonement blog a few weeks ago.

I said I was fed up with the same middle-class characters and their wartime lives, but I am very interested in 1940s Britain, perhaps more about the Home Front than the battlefield these days. If the battles/theatres of operation are less well known, however, I can get very involved.

I was greatly looking forward to Sarah Waters' The Night Watch. I'd found Fingersmith interesting and enjoyable, but not totally gripping. The Night Watch promised to be about the kinds of characters and experiences that intrigue me. I did have problems reading it -- simply finding long periods when I could concentrate. Unfortunately, because of its reverse narrative structure, this meant I didn't really appreciate what she was trying to do in structural terms. However, unlike with the McEwan (and unlike several of Amazon's reviewers) I did find the characters interesting and there were many times when I was both emotionally involved and intellectually challenged to understand the conditions in wartime London. The abortion scene was realistic and moving to the extent that I was looking for the literary equivalent of watching the cinema screen with my hands over my eyes -- unfortunately there is no equivalent of just listening to the soundtrack, so I had to skip a few pages. Waters lists all her research sources and what a fascinating list it is. The highest praise I can think of is to say that the abortion scene shocked me as much as the one in the film version of Alfie (1965) and that the general evocation of London in the 1940s was as vivid as in the contemporary 1940s novels of Nigel Balchin such as A Sort of Traitors (1949) and in particular the film adaptation of The Small Back Room (book 1945). I got hints of Iris Murdoch's Under The Net (1954) (the sequence by the Thames) and of Orwell's 1930s novels such as Coming Up For Air or Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Of course, when I looked at those novels again, the style was completely different, but they all painted the same kinds of pictures in my imagination.

My partner's book club also discussed The Night Watch and someone suggested that it would be the perfect book to read again. I must remember that and go back to it when I can do it justice.

As for other theatres of war, I've just finished Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, a Norwegian thriller with a plot involving an elderly fascist assassin who as a 20 year-old had been in the Norwegian division of the Waffen SS fighting on the Eastern Front in 1943-4. The extent of Norwegian collaboration with the Nazis and the involvement of young fascists in the fighting was a revelation to me and sent me off to learn more about similar units from other countries. I'd known vaguely about this, but not in this kind of detail or with this kind of interpretation (i.e. again a complex and humanist account, suggesting a range of motivations for joining the German army). This also tied in with my growing awareness of the history of fascism and Nazi sympathisers in Sweden courtesy of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander crime thrillers/detective/procedurals. Film adaptations of these novels would be good, but I guess they are more likely to be made for Swedish/Norwegian television. Thinking I must research this, I discovered a link to Slavoj Zizek's website to find a typically infuriating but fascinating critique of Mankell's work.

Draft A Level Film and Media specs for 2008

2007-05-08T21:18:00.000+01:00

What should we all make of the draft specs of the ‘new’ A Levels? The new specs presumably have to be similar enough to what went before to give teachers and students confidence that they will still have currency. On this basis, it's about fitting six existing units into four, the main reason for the re-write being a concern about the amount of testing.

I’m going to assume that A Levels still have a purpose, despite the fact that they were originally devised to be taken by a small percentage of school leavers attempting university entrance. Now they are taken by a large percentage of school leavers in a rather different university recruitment context. Here are some possible objectives for an A Level spec:

1. to provide a test of the specific skills, knowledge and understanding acquired by a potential candidate for a specific university degree, i.e. in this case media, film or cultural studies (or possibly a more vocationally orientated production degree);

2. to provide a more general test of candidate abilities in relation to further study or employment, i.e. intellectual skills, transferable skills, study skills etc.;

3. to contribute to a young persons general educational development and social understanding, i.e. the concept of a ‘well-rounded’ liberal education.

I’m going to look at each spec in broad terms evaluating it in relation to these objectives. I don’t teach any of the existing specs, but I do produce teaching and learning materials and work with teachers and students on specific topics.

WJEC A Level Film
This spec seems to me to be well thought out, clearly structured and overall a coherent curriculum offer. It can claim to cover each of the three objectives. Impressively, it includes a wide range of syllabus material that would prepare students for a film studies degree. It offers a range of assessment activities that allow practical work, independent study, coursework and exams with enough time to develop arguments in essays. Overall the A Level looks as though it will stretch able students whilst providing a fair challenge for all students appropriately recruited.

It includes a range of options to select from and compulsory sections at A2 which will introduce students to a broader perspective on cultural life and contribute to general educational and cultural objectives.

The approach adopted makes use of set topics from which centres and students must choose. Such topic lists are always contentious, especially when they include lists of focus films. I will avoid the temptation to argue against specific inclusions of films or film movements etc. Instead, I simply argue that there is one problem I have with the intellectual basis of the spec. and one with its structure.

I’m not happy with the overall approach to what the spec calls ‘national cinema’. To discuss American and British Cinema in terms of ‘national cinemas’ risks confusion for students. There is something called ‘British Cinema’ and that can be related to ideas about ‘National Cinema’ often discussed previously in terms of different European cinema movements. However, the British film industry is inextricably linked to Hollywood, which is not a ‘national cinema’ as such (in the same way that ‘Bollywood’ is not the national cinema of India as the spec. suggests in the A2 unit, FM4). The spec. does offer students the chance to explore British Cinema as well as American independent cinema, but I think the placing of these studies in the overall structure is problematic. The questions about British and American film are mostly located in AS. I think their complexity suggests that they should be in A2.

The other side of the coin to the British/American debate is the location of ‘other film cultures’ (I want to avoid the term ‘World Cinema’ as used in the spec.) only in A2. In this sense, the spec. fails to take the opportunities to introduce AS students to a more diverse range of films. I think it would be possible to study films from other cultures alongside British/American films at AS. One of my main objectives in cinema-based education each year is to screen non-American films to AS students and engage in work on narrative and genre. Because of the structure of the Film Studies AS/A2, these events are generally restricted to AS Media students, who don’t appear to have major problems dealing with subtitled films. Events using Lola rennt, Tsotsi, Ringu and À la folie pas du tout have been amongst the most successful I have delivered. At the same time, I am faced with audiences of A2 Media students tackling ‘Contemporary British Cinema’ alongside AS Film students grappling with the same concepts. I suggest that, although Film Studies is a well structured spec. overall, the emphasis on British Cinema and ‘other cinemas’ could be looked at again.

I can see there is an argument to focus on British Cinema in AS because of the wish to study representation issues at AS and using a British film might make this more accessible. However, I think it could be argued that representation issues covering, for example, youth, cultural diversity, urban living, crime and punishment, war etc. could be studied using a range of films from Europe, East Asia, Africa etc. as well as a British film. I also note that the Film Studies spec. attempts to engage students in study at AS of historical periods of film production in Britain and North America. Is this actually more accessible than cross-cultural study? I’m certainly not arguing against historical study, but it could be more focused on A2.

AS Film is taken by a larger number of students than A2 Film. I think it is more important to introduce the AS cohort to a more diverse range of films than it is to explore the complexities of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood. I think this may point to the need for more consideration about the relationship between A Level Film and A Level Media Studies. I’m impressed by the way that Film Studies, as an A Level, attempts to keep a breadth of approach which matches the best of Film Studies at HE. However, at AS, I’m less sure what the spec. offers to a student who does not intend to take Film at A2. I have some similar doubts about AS Media, but I recognise that this might be for different reasons. As far as film is concerned, I think AS as an introduction to studying ‘film as film’ (i.e. as distinct from the way films might have been present in earlier school work) should include an emphasis on the diversity of approaches different filmmakers in different cultures take towards telling stories and representing ideas, emotions and cultural experiences.

AQA Media Studies
The requirement to move to four units has had a noticeable effect on the AQA spec. It has lost some of the feel of a ‘text-centred’ spec., which downplayed industry/institution, audience and production work. This is, I think, for the good and it feels like a more modern spec. and one which bears a little more relationship to media studies in HE.

The ‘organising principle’ in the spec. has now been redefined in terms of ‘technologies’ or ‘platforms’. Students are required to study and to produce texts associated with ‘broadcast’ ‘e-media’ or ‘print’. This enables the spec. to focus more attention on what is happening in terms of changes in both production practice and audience use of the media. However, the actual definition is rather confused. A better definition might be based on institutional differences, such as films, TV series on DVD, games etc. sold for long-term use vs interactive, ‘live’, frequently broadcast and updated programming etc. (in simple language, ‘long-term’ and ‘short-term’ use). The spec does require ‘cross-media’ work which might allow the useful study of something like the music magazine Kerrang!, which exists as a print, web and broadcast (radio and TV) brand.

The spec. now requires production work at both AS and A2. Again, improvement, but I think there is quite a bit to do to consider what this means alongside the Applied A Level. Many students who might look at this A Level, should probably be advised to look at the Applied instead. The production briefs outlined in the spec. look rather confusing and for me display all the worst aspects of A Level assessment. The concept of a £30 million ‘hybrid genre’ movie part-funded by lottery movie is frankly ludicrous and its sad to see the ‘trailer’ brief included again. There doesn’t seem to be any balance between this and the web design and print briefs (more like journalism brief). This needs much more work to be viable.

Overall. I think the spec offers a possible introduction to media studies at HE and a range of student activities which might contribute to general education as well as being attractive to students. The assessment framework is rather weak, I think. Exams are very short. 90 mins was barely long enough for one of three units at AS. But for an A2 exam? OK, students will have 45 mins for one question, but 15 mins for each of three questions relating to an unseen stimulus (this is the MEST3 paper)? Compared to WJEC Film Studies this does not seem to offer the same kind of examination of essay writing skills. It may well be that MEST4 with its Critical Research Paper demanding a 2000 word essay is designed to counter this argument. Perhaps it will, but I wonder about HE recruiters, who are already worried about what students have actually learned in a Media Studies A Level and might want more evidence.

This spec also falls down in comparison with Film Studies in terms of the ‘broader perspective’. There is no listing of preferred study texts in the media studies spec., but also no encouragement to go beyond the ‘mainstream’ media that are easily accessible in the UK. The word ‘global’ or ‘international’ does not figure anywhere in the spec. Len Masterman once mocked me for my habit of searching specs via pdf files for certain words, but this strikes me as important. The Audio-Visual industry is one of the most important generators of wealth and cultural values in all developed economies and especially in Europe. This spec is failing to take the opportunity to introduce students to globalisation debates and cultural diversity. It also misses out on the possibilities of linking to new language teaching initiatives (Indian, Chinese, Spanish media perhaps?) If I were selecting between specs., this would be my main reason for not choosing this one.

OCR Media Studies
Since OCR already had two production units and had already made a move towards ‘new media’ and towards a higher profile for audience and institution work, the changes from six to four units do not look so dramatic. In general terms, although the question of similarity to and relationship with the Applied A Level are much the same as with AQA, the OCR spec seems to me more coherent and more confident in how it handles both the set production briefs and the overall approach to production work.

The assessment schedule with its 2 hour exam for two questions at AS (with 30 minutes viewing/note-taking time) and a similar 2 hour exam for what is effectively two questions (i.e. two linked questions about production work and one about a media debate) at A2 looks much better balanced than AQA’s. The decision to organise options by ‘media industry’ (i.e. film. newspapers, gaming etc.) means that there is a risk that issues of convergence etc. might be missed, but I’m reasonably confident that the detail in the specification, the guidance offered and the way in which different media forms are linked through production tasks will mean this doesn’t happen.

The synoptic unit 4 (G324) in A2 has been described to me as ‘challenging’ and I think it may well prove to be so, but it seems to me to have been well written in terms of topics from which candidates will chose specific media debates. This spec. does offer the opportunity to study ‘Global Media’ or ‘Media and Collective Identity’ as well as other topics, all of which should broaden student experience of media activity.

In summary, I think that this spec. offers the potential for both a good general and subject specific preparation for further study and, with appropriate selections of topics/briefs, a broadening experience. But that selection is important. My concerns about the existing OCR spec has always been that it is possible to make very ‘conservative’ choices of topics in AS and A2 which could lead to a narrow view of the media. Oddly, I think the restriction to four units in the new spec may actually mean that the narrow view is less possible. However, much will depend on the inservice training that teachers receive. I can’t help feeling that the OCR spec looks like being for the more adventurous teacher.

WJEC Media Studies
I’m much less familiar with the existing WJEC spec., so perhaps my comments on the new spec are more objective. I am aware of the reputation of this spec. in its earlier forms and therefore I’m not surprised by how it has turned out. At first glance, it is much simpler in presentation with far less detail in the spec. and less prescribed choice of topics. This does mean that sometimes it feels like a more old-fashioned approach. Again the organising principle is ‘media industries and there is a requirement in the synoptic unit to work on the products of three different industries.

I’m not very impressed with the two units which focus on production. They are quite basic in terms of setting out briefs and seem to focus on quite long/substantial evaluations. They don’t suggest anything silly, but also don’t encourage much adventure.

I do worry that ‘institution’ as a concept seems less clearly present in the AS spec than in the other two, but encouragingly ‘global’ issues do get a mention in A2. Overall, the lack of detailed prescription puts more onus on the teacher. Good teachers should have no problem constructing quality courses. On the other hand, this isn’t a very exciting or challenging spec. It looks a ‘safer’ bet than the AQA but not as challenging as the OCR spec. This is surprising when considered alongside WJEC’s Film Studies, which as indicated above, I think is carefully constructed to introduce (at least potentially) all the main elements of a degree course.

Assessment for this spec. is much more ‘rigorous’ with two 2 and a half hour exams. With three questions per paper, this gives more than 45 mins per question at A2 (AS has an unseen stimulus, but only as a print extract). I did note however, that there seems to be some flexibility in writing evaluations for production work with discursive essays, illustrated reports, PowerPoints and blogs allowed.

Overview summary of all four specs
The specs have very similar structures and similar assessment instruments, but the presentation of specification content, the amount of prescription and the emphasis on certain areas of subject content varies quite considerably. I suspect that the specs will have different appeals for both students and teachers. If I were recruiting students for HE, I would be happiest to take successful students from either WJEC Film or OCR Media, but I would be concerned about students who just scraped though these qualifications as I would wonder what they had really learned. I’ve suggested that WJEC Media looks a safe bet for the average student, but I’m worried about the AQA spec. Will it actually work and from the viewpoint of wanting students to be introduced to a diversity of media texts and practices will it deliver.

Finally, all three of the Media Studies specs have moved closer to the Applied A Level (when will that move from three to two?). I think it’s time the four media specs were looked at together (what is QCA actually doing about this?). There is also the ‘Moving Image Arts’ A Level spec from CCEA in Northern Ireland? So far this has only been piloted in England in three centres, but according to the microsite for the qualification, the draft spec. for the pilot (which is a 4 unit spec) will be modified to allow a wider offer through centres from 2008. So, there will be five specs to consider plus the Creative and Media Specialised Diploma in 2008. (Of course, you could decide to do the BTEC National Diploma -- tried and trusted and no doubt still around if enough people want it!)

Royal coverage

2007-05-03T18:35:00.000+01:00

I'm hoping that Ségolène Royal wins in the French presidential election. I confess that I know little about her, but two things encourage my support. Firstly what I know about Sarkozy makes me feel extremely concerned about another rightwing leader getting into power. I haven't forgotten his description of the youth in les banlieues as 'scum'. Secondly, Blair wants him to win. This tells you everything you need to know really. A Labour Prime Minister wants Sarkozy to win -- no doubt as 'one of us' -- in preference to the Socialist Party candidate.

The point of this rant is simply to mark the observation that we know very little about French politics here in the UK. A very good article by Peter Wilby in the Grauniad on Monday discussed the poor coverage of the French election in the UK press. Wilby's main point is that because UK journalists are so ignorant about France, they find it difficult to report the election, not least because they can't find ways to present the candidates in familar formula stories based on the personality politics that are their daily diet. Wilby reports that the Sunday Express attempted to portray the contest as 'Madame Blair' vs 'Monsieur Maggie', which is not only silly, but completely wrong. Wilby also scores a bullseye with his comment that the 'free market liberals' who masquerade as political commentators in the UK can't understand how the French economy keeps going. "It must be unsustainable", they cry, trying to ignore the fact that decent public transport and a properly-funded health service are things that voters might want. (I'm not suggesting that there aren't problems with high unemployment in France, especially youth unemployment, but the UK critics are simply incapable of understanding what the arguments are.)

As a result of this, the coverage has been limited in the UK press, especially in the tabloids. Without juicy stories about sexual shenanigans and whether the candidates have taken drugs, nobody can think of an angle. Ironically, the Grauniad on Wednesday did raise the question of what had happened to Sarkozy's wife, who has not been seen during the campaign. I also noticed some coverage of Ségolène Royal which simply stated that she is not married to her longtime partner François Hollande, but that the couple have brought up four children, one of whom, 21 year-old Thomas is helping his mother in her campaign. Given that Labour has suffered from the rather wimpish performance of some of its 'Blair babes' and that Blair has treated some of the more experienced women in the party pretty badly, I'm surprised that there isn't much more interest in Ms Royal in the UK (and indeed in Angela Merkel, even if she is a Christian Democrat). Where is our next female socialist leader?

As a postscript, it was intriguing to see that 23 million are reported to have watched the 2 hour presidential debate on French TV. I wonder when a UK politician ever got an audience of 23 million?

China 07

2007-04-12T20:38:00.000+01:00

First chance this week to get to screenings in the China 07 season (10 years since the handover of Hong Kong). At Cornerhouse on Wednesday I watched Judou in the cinema for the first time since the early 90s. Somebody appears to have found the original UK 35mm print lurking in the ICA basement. The projectionist told me that it was 'fragile', but apart from the usual scratches at reel ends it played fine and the colours were just sensational. Judou is one of the most visually spectacular films I've ever seen and one that depends to a large extent on colour grading, especially the reds for which Zhang Yimou is famous. According to various sources, this was one of the last films to use the original Technicolor process. I don't know if this is true, but its rare to see anything like Judou today.

I'd skimmed through a VHS copy before the screening in order to prepare some notes for my introduction, but I sat and watched the film all through, mesmerised by its beauty and promising myself a Zhang Yimou feast. I've just bought some DVDs from YesAsia.com The Chinese DVDs of Red Sorghum and Shanghai Triad are terrible with poorly dubbed sound and awful colour (thankfully Apple's DVD player lets me tweak the colour) -- but they are very cheap. The 'digitally remastered' Hong Kong DVD of Raise the Red Lantern is excellent.

It was intriguing to go back and watch one of the early collaborations between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li in the same week that The Curse of the Golden Flower opens in the UK. I'm looking forward to the opening, though I'm a little apprehensive after Gong Li was wasted in Miami Vice last summer.

Today I joined Keith to watch The Arch (Dong fu ren) in Bradford. We both enjoyed the film, but were a little puzzled by the season's notes (presumably written by Mark Cousins). They tried to suggest that this was a film which heralded a new direction for Chinese Cinema in 1970 -- essentially pre-dating the breakthrough of Yellow Earth in 1984 (or "pre-figuring the modernity that was to come"). I'm not sure about this. The Arch is certainly unusual and I'm not sure I've seen many films from Hong Kong/Taiwan of this vintage in order to make comparisons.

The Hong Kong print we saw was in good condition and at first I thought it was going to be a fairly slow romance set in that indeterminate past (the notes say the Ming Dynasty) often featured in Hong Kong Cinema. But as it got going it soon became evident that it was indeed a melodrama with a familiar central figure played by Lisa Lu (an actor with a long list of Hollywood credits), a woman who is driven to desperation by the rules of patriarchy which prevent her from having an emotional/sexual life in middle age (40!). Without reading the notes beforehand we both felt that this was a film with elements of Indian and Japanese cinema and possibly influences from further afield as well. A black and white melodrama in 1970 already feels slightly old-fashioned and the various devices that the notes suggest are 'pre-figuring modernity' are all more associated with 1950s and 60s cinema: freeze frames, use of soft focus/blur and what seemed like optical special effects that would not have been out of place in the 1920s.

The production context of The Arch is difficult to research. (One of the other audience members told us that the dialogue was Mandarin. At least one of the web references I was able to follow claims it as Cantonese. My ear is not reliable and I don't understand either language, but by the sound I would have guessed Cantonese.) It was written and directed by Cecile Tang (Shu Shuen) who, according to IMDB was 29 when she made the film. She then made four more Hong Kong features in the 1970s. The film was produced independently and was apparently photographed by Subrata Mitra, famous as Satyajit Ray's cinematographer in Bengal in the 1960s. This isn't corroborated on IMDB but perhaps explains why some of the shots looked familiar. The editing is attributed to Les Blank, a well known American independent filmmaker with a string of credits as director, cinematographer and editor. Overall, the film appears to be a conventional melodrama presented in a hybrid style. It obviously depends on audiences, but I saw several shots (the departure of the daughter across a lake, for example that could have come from Mizoguchi and the use of visual devices that reminded me of early Kurosawa. I don't think the Yellow Earth connection is valid, but programming the film alongside Judou and Two Stage Sisters as part of the evolution of Chinese melodrama makes sense.

On the beach

2007-04-05T23:39:00.000+01:00

It's been difficult to avoid Ian McEwan's new novella, On Chesil Beach in the last few weeks. An extract in the Grauniad, rave reviews in both the Grauniad and the IoS, McEwan himself on Radio 4's Start the Week and now a serialisation on Book at Bedtime.

My first reaction was to think "I've heard this story before somewhere" and indeed I had. David Leland's film adaptation of Angela Huth's novel, The Land Girls (1998) includes a scene in which a young middle-class woman (a banker's daughter played by Catherine McCormack) gets leave to meet her boyfriend, a young naval officer (played by a then unknown Paul Bettany). Their unhappy night together in 1940 is spent in a hotel in Southampton after they have walked along a shingle beach. OK it isn't specifically Chesil Beach, but since the film is mainly set in Dorset, it may as well be. The Land Girls is one of my favourite films and unjustly ignored, probably because it's actually a good British melodrama with a sad ending. The idea of the shingle beach as a metaphor for an uncomfortable encounter is the crucial point. Of course, the ultimate usage of Chesil Beach as metaphor comes towards the end of Powell & Pressburger's The Small Back Room (1949) when David Farrar has to defuse a new type of German bomb on the beach (this time it is Chesil Beach). Needless to say, he is also in a rocky relationship with the wondrous Kathleen Byron.

Just by coincidence, I've also just read a paper on American Graffiti (US 1973) in a new Routledge book entitled 'America First: Naming the Nation in US Film', edited by Mandy Merck. The paper by Barry Langford discusses the way in which the film explores the white middle-class world of Northern California. The film is set in 1962, but already seems nostalgic for the 1950s. McEwan's novella is also set in 1962, presumably at the precise moment, as several reviewers have pointed out, quoting Philip Larkin, "before the Beatles first LP" when sex was yet to be invented.

I've never really taken to McEwan's writing. I remember a Wednesday Play, The Imitation Game (1980) that I quite enjoyed, probably for the wartime setting, but mostly I've avoided the other films made from his novels. I did read both Atonement and Saturday, but although I could see they were 'well-written', I still found them cold, without characters that moved me. It will be intriguing to see how Atonement works out for mass audiences as a 'big' British movie with Keira Knightley as star later this summer. Since I can't remember anything of the plot, I might well enjoy the film.

I guess I'm probably increasingly bored with the middle-class characters that McEwan seems to prefer. In her Grauniad review of On Chesil Beach, Natasha Walter rebukes McEwan for the political stance towards anti-war protestors taken by the protagonist in Saturday (the couple in On Chesil Beach meet at a CND rally). But she then states that you can't criticise literature on the grounds of the author's politics. Sorry, but I do. I didn't take to the surgeon in Saturday and I'm not attracted to the male character in On Chesil Beach. (I disagree with Walter on several of her general points about McEwan's writing, but overall I admire her approach to reviewing generally -- it's often a relief to see that she's on a Newsnight Review panel.) I'm also a little unsure about the whole notion of what '1962' represents. The critique of American Graffiti as too hermetically sealed is pretty convincing and I guess that in the UK too the social as well as the political world had begun to change by the late 1950s. All those rough working class lads seemed to manage to consummate their marriages and affairs in the novels of Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe and John Braine well before 1962.

BBC4 Roots showing

2007-04-02T21:42:00.001+01:00

I managed to catch most of a BBC4 programme celebrating the 30th anniversary of the screening of the mini-series Roots, based on Alex Haley's book, and I'm glad I did. The programme neatly fitted into the current series of programmes marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade. I didn't watch the series all the way through in 1977. In those days I was rarely in during the evening, being at meetings, at work or the movies. However, I saw enough to know how it worked and I was well aware of it as a cultural phenomenon. What intrigued me most about the BBC4 programme was the use of a clutch of high profile 40 something British actors and writers to tell us about their memories of the programme as young schoolchildren. The likes of Adrian Lester, poet Lemn Sissay and actor/writer Kwame Kwei-Armah all spoke about how the programme had been a revelation since they had not learned enough about the slave trade in the classroom to understand what their own identity meant. Indeed Kwame Kwei-Armah changed his name from the 'slave name' of Ian Roberts, partly because of his experience of watching Roots. This set me to thinking about how much I knew about the experience of slavery and where I had learned this.

We certainly did cover the 'triangular trade' in secondary school history (but not by age 10-11 as the interviewees attested). I think I must have picked up most of my knowledge from popular literature, film and television and certainly a great deal from Jamaican music. I've got to acknowledge that it was coming across Bob Marley and the Wailers in the early 1970s that really got me interested in Jamaican history and led me towards Marcus Garvey and the powerful music of Winston Rodney aka Burning Spear. Sometime before 1977 I must also have got into Walter Rodney the Guyanese historian, probably through meeting Black activists in London.

One thing I certainly learned from the BBC4 programme was the extent of Alex Haley's success as a journalist and writer. I'd forgotten that Haley was the journalist to whom Malcolm X told his story and which produced a book that went on to sell millions of copies as 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X'. I bought that book sometime in the mid 1970s and it had a big impact on my teaching. I remember the fuss over the release of the film Mandingo in 1975 (a melodrama about sex and race championed by Movie magazine), but I don't suppose that even that controversy penetrated far into the popular imagination of the period. That was the achievement of Roots. I wonder how the mini-series would do today? And I wonder too, how much today's students really know about the history of slavery? Do they have time (or the inclination) to look for the literature and the music that tells the personal stories that carry the emotional power of a Roots? More on this please BBC4.

Confusion in the ranks

2007-03-14T22:09:00.000Z

My reaction to Letters from Iwo Jima is one of mild disappointment and confusion. I can see that it is a 'well-made film' and it held my interest for its long running time, but I wanted a clearer sense of what the film was trying to do. Because of its overwhelmingly positive reviews in the US and its apparent popularity in Japan, I guess I have to question my response and attempt to explain it.

I tried to be as objective as possible watching a Clint Eastwood film. In the 1960s and 70s I was a strong Eastwood fan, but I was disgusted by even the concept of Heartbreak Ridge and the only Eastwood films I've paid money to see since are Unforgiven in 1991 and Space Cowboys in 2000. So, I wasn't looking for Eastwood the great American director. Rather, I was intrigued by the Japanese story. We rarely get to see any of the Japanese films about the war in the Pacific in UK cinemas. Based on soldiers' letters and a recent book, the script for the film promised something different.

The film seems to me to offer three different narratives. The slightest is the overview of the Battle of Iwo Jima, accomplished with some rather unconvincing CGI of the American fleet and its powerful air support. This could have been better explained, I think -- or perhaps it is assumed that the rather specialised American audience and all of the Japanese audience already know the precise strategic importance of Iwo Jima in the defence of Japan. Much of the information about the state of the war is given in the exchanges between the Japanese defenders. I know a fair bit about Japanese history, but I needed more than was offered here.

The second narrative is a familiar 'war is hell, but it's also exciting' combat film story. I confess that I didn't find this to be particularly interesting, but it does create a potential problem in the presentation of the other two stories. A full three hour movie about the battle itself with large scale action sequences would have produced a very different kind of film. The much smaller scale action sequences we do get are related to the third story -- the story about the 'beginnings of the end' of the Japanese prosecution of the war against the Allies (OK, mostly the US). This story is told on a personal level through a small group of characters. Now this was potentially a riveting story and I felt the other two stories got in the way.

We learn something about a handful of characters -- the officer commanding the defence played by Ken Watanabe, two of his junior officers, one an aristocratic Olympic equestrian the other seemingly a representative of the right-wing elements in the Japanese officer class, and two privates. One of these is the second lead played by Ninomiya Kazunari, an example of that East Asian phenomenon known as the pop singer who can be a serious actor. He's certainly very good in the role of the reluctant private surviving the war in an almost magical way -- rather like the Good Soldier Schweik as my companion in the cinema suggested. (This is not a direct comparison, but Saigo, the Japanese private does seem an archetypal figure in the squad.) He is counterposed by Shimizu, the genuine 'good soldier' suspected of being a spy, but actually undergoing punishment for not being sufficiently ruthless as a member of the kempeitai (the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo). These characters are sufficiently different in terms of background and ideology to enable quite a sophisticated analysis of the response to impending failure in the Japanese armed forces. Unfortunately, what we get doesn't go far enough and it is frustrating. I suspect a Japanese audience may get much more because of their greater background knowledge as well as access to colloquial language.

The final question for me is the American attitude to the events in the film. It is noticeable that two of the 'positive' Japanese characters have been to America and can speak English and that the capture of a wounded American soldier is the basis for a sequence demonstrating that the Japanese needed to learn that the Americans were not monsters, but 'human' like the Japanese. Of course, there is a 'real' basis for all of this. Nevertheless, I felt that that the final shot, which if I remember correctly is of the Americans on the beach 'cleaning up' after the battle as the sun goes down, does suggest that the world is a better place for American military power. Again this was almost certainly the case in 1945, but its re-affirmation now is ironic at best. Is this film about the American or the Japanese response to events? To be fair, several American reviews do rehearse arguments about the unusual appearance of an American film about failure/losing the battle -- albeit not an American loss in this instance. Brits are of course quite used to narratives of loss and failure, which we often find more involving.

The film is 'bookended' by contemporary archaeologists discovering the 'Letters from Iwo Jima' never sent home to japan by the commanding officer. This device possibly refers to Saving Private Ryan, but it reminded me more of the South Korean movie Brotherhood (Taegukgi) (2004). In that film the bones of one brother were presented to the other, who at one point fought for the 'other side'. It would have been interesting if Saigo, the 'survivor' of Iwo Jima had gone back to visit the caves he fought in. Overall I found Brotherhood more shocking in its visceral violence and more intriguing/involving as a story. (It was a very big hit in South Korea.)

My main hope is that the success of Letters will prompt Japanese filmmakers to make similar films themselves (or distributors in the UK to obtain rights to existing films about the period). I'm fascinated by national cinemas in which the exploration of relatively recent history is an important cultural project. A few days after Letters from Iwo Jima, I watched The Lives of Others, but that is another story.

Gazing at Venus

2007-01-29T20:13:00.000Z

Peter O'Toole's Oscar nomination pushed Venus into the limelight at the weekend. I was a little surprised to see a clutch of young people at the back of the cinema when we went to see the film on Saturday. Noisy during the ads and trailers the young audience was quiet through the film. I wonder what they made of it? Since the film caused problems for the middle aged and the late middle aged, it can't have been easy for them.

I confess that I enjoyed this film much more than I was expecting. For the first half I laughed (out loud on several occasions) and then just after halfway I began to weep and continued in an emotional state to the end.

The amazing thing is that so many reviewers seem to have problems with the representations of sexuality in this film. Bradshaw refers to "quasi sex", Kermode said they didn't really deal with sex (i.e. compared to The Mother, another Hanif Kureishi/Roger Michel collaboration). The usually reliable Philip French was disgusted and the even more reliable Jonathan Romney in the Independent on Sunday ducked the issue by reviewing something else. Unfortunately, I haven't noticed any reviews by women yet. Let's face it -- this movie is all about sex and for an audience that recognises this, it is intensely erotic. The Peter O'Toole character is an old man with prostate problems, resulting in a catheter and impotence, but he still has sexual desire and circumstance sets up a relationship with a young Yorkshirewoman (terrific performance by Jodie Whittaker) – a working class lass with beauty and some naivete, uncouth but naturally beautiful, vital and healthy. What follows is a classic sexual encounter between two people each with a power over the other, but also with a longing for emotional contact.

I'll let Bradshaw and co into a secret, sex doesn't have to involve penetration or even physical contact. As someone once said, the most potent sexual organ is the brain. Conversations can be sexual, looking (scopophilia -- this is cinema for heavens sake!) can be sexual. In fact, Venus does go a little beyond this and when O'Toole lifts Jessie's long hair and kisses her neck it's devastating. Hanif Kureishi explains the background to all of this in his article in the Guardian's Saturday Review of 26 January. His inspiration was the work of the Japanese novelist Tanizaki Junichiro who wrote extensively about the sexual desire of older men, particularly in the short novel, Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961). Kureishi explains that he read the novella several times and then "wrote round it", taking the central idea as inspiration. Here is Kureishi on Tanizaki and desire:

"Desire is the devil in Tanizaki, a torment you can never escape or fulfil, except temporarily. Yet without it there is inertia, emptiness, routine. On top of this, particularly as people age and there is less novelty available to them, desire is only sustained by others, by jealousy, rivalry, secrecy and human obstacles. Relief is only ever a reprieve, and the characters are forced towards extinction by their never-ending desire. Tanizaki is not an experimentalist himself; he is a straightforward writer, not a modernist. But his characters' lives become experimental once they engage with what they really want, once they realise they cannot escape their sexuality. Self-knowledge is impossible, foolish even; all you can do is try to follow your body."

I think Kureishi is justified in pointing to other Japanese novels and films as dealing with older people's fears and desires in much more interesting ways than many youth-obsessed Western texts. Philip French actually recognises the connection (perhaps accidentally?) but berates Kureishi and Michel for not being like Ozu and offering a 'humane' study of old age like Tokyo Story. Tokyo Story is indeed wonderful, but is only one of many works by Ozu and several other Japanese directors that represent interesting (and sexual) older men (and yes, it tends to be older men and younger women in the ones I have seen). As more of the work of Ozu, Mizoguchi and others slowly becomes available, I hope to find more time to watch it.

Could this film be used with 16-19 year-olds? I'm not sure, but it certainly offers a text against which to assess the centrality of the male gaze. The whole narrative is about looking and being looked at and although the old man looks at the young girl, this isn't just the powerful looking at the the powerless. One scene at the Royal Court shows O'Toole enjoying watching the girl who is staring at the stage, shocked and fascinated by the characters (young women of her own age) engaged in a 'realistic' argument.

One last point on Venus -- the print looked dreadful. I couldn't work out if it was deliberately gloomy and murky or whether it was badly projected (Vue, Leeds Light). I did note that the image was too big for the screen and a subsequent discussion with a projectionist suggested that the Vue screen had an underpowered projector with insufficient illumination for the screen size. I confess that I did think the screen was too big for the cinema -- usually, it is the other way round.

Guru Mani Ratnam

2007-01-19T19:46:00.000Z

What a joy to catch the new Mani Ratnam film in the cinema, only tempered by the thought that this film -- from India's premier director -- didn't get reviewed in the UK press. Partly this was because the distributor probably didn't offer a press screening, but even so, you would expect the reviewers of the broadsheets to look out for Mani's films.

It was enjoyable and it's an important film in terms of the story and the performances from Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwaria Rai, but I have to admit that as a Mani Ratnam film it's slightly disappointing lacking some of the sheer bravura of earlier films. I also thought the songs were less memorable. I've looked at several Indian reviews of the film and I'm with the bulk of them. Mani Ratnam often suffers from being too commercial for the cinephiles and too serious for the popular audience (some of yesterday afternoon's tiny audience left before the end). But this could be construed as demonstrating that it is the audience and the industry who need to catch up. I think that Mani may indeed be the Indian director who makes the film that finally breaks Hindi Cinema in American multiplexes (which would be ironic for a Tamil director).

The importance of the story lies in its approach to the history of Indian capitalism. It draws on the career of Dhirubhai Ambani, founder of Reliance Industries, and offers a picture of how business was conducted before the relatively recent 'liberalisation' of the Indian economy. There is a a discourse of social class running through the film with the central character Gurubhai Desai appealing as a 'villager from Gujerat' for the support of ordinary shareholders rather than the upper middle-class who previously controlled Indian business. My companion at the screening, who has worked in the international petrochemical business, commented that he didn't think such a story could have been told in India until the last few years. Whilst the film works well to expose the corruption and bribery that went on, it also works well as a melodrama of surrogate fathers and sons. There are, however, several plot holes in the melodrama and some characters seem to simply disappear.

There is a detailed entry on the film at Wikipedia and early signs are that it has done very well in India and in North America and Australia. In the UK it ranked 15th on a 44 screen opening with a screen average of over $7,000 (Screen International).

It would be good if someone released Mani Ratnam's earlier work on DVD in the UK. (I was intrigued to see that Time Magazine included Nayakan (1987) on a list of 'all-time' Top 100 films.

Awards season

2007-01-17T11:08:00.000Z

The Golden Globes, the run-up to the Oscars – an interesting exercise in how the industry ('the business' according to yesterday's Guardian) is feeling about itself, the whole process is still annoying in terms of what gets recognised and what doesn't.

People I meet on courses or at events often ask me what I think about this or that film and they seem surprised that I haven't seen such an important film. I'm not sure if this is true for everyone who teaches film, but I certainly don't get to the cinema as often as I would like (lack of organisation, probably) and when I do get to a screening, it's often a film I've booked or I'm considering booking for a course. Although I do often see films for work, I do enjoy seeing films just for fun, but then I choose very carefully. The more hype a film receives, the less I am likely to see it, unless something specific in the promotion (or word of mouth) attracts me. In 2006 I saw just over a film a week at the cinema. Here is the list of titles, leaving out multiple screeenings of the films I used on events:

The Departed, Red Road, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, The Host (S. Korea), Shanghai Dreams (China), Ghost World, A History of Violence, Princess Mononoke, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Man Push Cart, The History Boys, American Psycho, Love + Hate, Tsotsi, Three Times (Taiwan), Tickets, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Last Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain, Hi-Lo Country, Volver, Innocent Voices, Kiss Me Deadly, The River (Renoir), The Bad Sleep Well (Kurosawa), Twilight Samurai, An Actor's Revenge (Japan), 36, Down in the Valley, Inside Man, Untold Scandal (S. Korea), Taxi Driver, Confetti, Life is to Whistle (Cuba), The Waiting List (Cuba), Omkara (India), Miami Vice, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Superman Returns, Marie Antoinette, Shaun of the Dead, La Haine, Sweet Sixteen, Crash, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Hidden, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Intimacy, Memories of Murder (S. Korea), My Sassy Girl (South Korea) Nowhere to Hide (S. Korea), Le Doulos, Les Armees des Ombres, Paisa, Dirty Pretty Things, Edward Scissorhands, The Notorious Bettie Page, Walk the Line, A Cock & Bull Story

Out of these, there was only one that wasn't worth the bother – Confetti. From the rest, I can select some possible award winners from this year's releases:

Best debut picture: Red Road for its intensity and roller coaster last third and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada for being the best Peckinpah-style movie since Sam went (would be good if the same director and writer tackled Cormac McCarthy's border stories)

Best re-release: Les Armees des Ombres (see my earlier blog entry)

Most enjoyable: Volver

Most adventurous direction: Children of Men – lots of holes in the story, but a brave and technically skilful rendition of the UK in 20 years time with good performances.

Most unjustly ignored in the UK: The Host – the best action film I've seen, a mammoth blockbuster in East Asia, its shunning by UK audiences is shaming.

Most over-rated film: Hidden – supposedly the favourite film for discussion around the dinner tables of North London. Certainly a well-made film with good performances and a couple of stunning moments, but I sense an emptiness where it purports to be saying something profound.

Best picture: Pan's Labyrinth. A wholly deserved triumph for Guillermo del Toro – perhaps someone will now re-release The Devil's Backbone on 35mm, since it disappeared soon after its first outing.

2007 has started well and A Prairie Home Companion was hugely enjoyable and a fitting send-off for Robert Altman.

Something worth watching on television?

2007-01-03T22:32:00.000Z

I've almost given up on mainstream television. Apart from Match of the Day there isn't much that I'll try hard to watch. The last show that I really looked forward to was Victoria Wood's adaptation of Nella Last's wartime diaries (which didn't disappoint). I did enjoy Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect and I'm looking forward to the second series of Life on Mars, but I'm most interested in the start of Ugly Betty on Channel 4 on Friday.

Ugly Betty has been one of the few new shows to make an impact on ABC in the US in Autumn 2006. It's the first American attempt to create a telenovela. The telenovela is a uniquely Latin American televisual form that has successfully sold around the world (except, so far, in the UK). I've not watched one beyond a few minutes, but I've been aware of their fascination for audiences in countries I've visited. Pitched midway between a serial (i.e. a literary adaptation spread over several episodes) and a continuous serial (i.e. a soap), telenovelas typically run for a couple of years but then the narrative reaches a conclusion. Ugly Betty is based on a Columbian telenovela, Yo soy Betty, la fea, which ran from 1999-2001 with 169 episodes. Fantastically popular in Latin America, the show was remade in Mexico and then by Disney (Touchstone). The US version is listed as 60 mins per episode (less the ad breaks), but IMDB lists both 30 mins and 45 mins for the running time in Mexico. It's a Cinderella story about the 'plain' girl who goes to work for a fashion magazine. Channel 4 is advertising it as a comedy, but I suspect it is much more. It has (in the UK) been discussed in terms of the recent hit film The Devil Wears Prada, but of course its story predates the film.

Betty is played by America Ferrera, who began her career as the lead in Real Women Have Curves, an HBO film that won awards at Sundance in 2002 and launched America's career as one of the new young Latina stars in the US. I've enjoyed using Real Women with students and that's partly why I'm looking forward to the telenovela. The Mexican star Salma Hayek, who has been used (and misused?) by Hollywood appears in the first few episodes of Ugly Betty (at first as an actor in the telenovela that the Suarez family watches at home) and as an executive producer she was instrumental in the casting of America Ferrera (see the abc website for a video chatshow segment of Hayek and Ferrera). There seem to be other Hispanic-Americans also involved in the show and I'm intrigued to see how far Hollywood will go in embracing Hispanic culture for mainstream television. Hayek makes the point about the melodrama of the telenovelas -- can't wait.

I hope the show is a hit in the UK and draws a different demographic mix to Channel 4. The Wikipedia entries on the show are very detailed and useful for any classroom work.

The Departed

2006-12-14T22:28:00.000Z

Finally managed to catch The Departed before it disappeared from the big screen. I'm not sure what I think of it. Having seen and enjoyed Infernal Affairs in the cinema, there was nothing quite as startling in Scorsese's film.

Having read several reviews, I think I'm with J. Hoberman in Village Voice. The Departed is much longer than Infernal Affairs but it doesn't do a great deal more. It is, of course, extremely well-made and very enjoyable as a genre film, but tight and lean it isn't. It also lacks , for me, real interest in characters. I was prompted to think of a movie I love a great deal -- Donnie Brasco (1997) in which Johnny Depp plays the undercover cop and Al Pacino the low grade mafioso who becomes his surrogate father. By packing The Departed with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen, Scorsese seems to be going for depth in the playing, but Nicholson can't for me achieve the force of Pacino and Depp is leagues ahead of Matt Damon, DiCaprio (one of his better performances) and Mark Wahlberg (an odd and well received performance). I worry that it is my own old man's view and also possibly my arthouse snobbery, but no-one in The Departed gets within ten miles of Tony Leung, so cool he is frozen.

I think Marty got caught between two stools with this movie. It should have been shorter, tighter and more generic without big stars or more psychologically profound/more melodramatic (I did like Vera Farmiga, whose part could have been expanded).

So, I enjoyed the film but it could have been more. Rather like Michael Mann with Miami Vice, Scorsese knows so much that when he doesn't blow your socks right off it is a little disappointing. It is probably flying in the face of all reason and most polls, but I found both Gangs of New York and The Aviator to be more exciting in terms of watching a great filmmaker stretch himself.

Digital comparisons

2006-11-29T22:59:00.000Z

First chance last week to compare, on a big cinema screen, a new digital print with its 35mm celluloid version. In 1986 I was lucky to work with the newly restored National Film Archive print of Black Narcissus (1947). We made slides directly from the print on a Steenbeck in the basement of the BFI. I certainly got to know the print well and so I was fascinated to see the digital version. Overall, the digital print is beautiful, clean and bright. But perhaps it is too clean and too bright? I particularly noticed three examples of 'over clarity'. There are many close-ups in the film, especially of Deborah Kerr as Sister Clodagh. Her eyes sparkle with reflected light but it gets a little spooky when the shot is faded out and two sparks of light remain as a kind of afterglow, long after the rest of the image has gone to black. Much more disturbing is the way that the digital print exposes all the matte work so that the imaginary kingdom of Mopu, with its palace perched on a shelf above a vertical drop, looks just like a studio set joined together by flourescent turquoise cement that pulsates gently drawing even more attention to the join. Finally, I noticed that the painted still images of the mountains now look exactly that -- painted images, seemingly with some damage from the ravages of time.

Black Narcissus is one of the most beautiful films ever made (a double Oscar winner for colour cinematography and art direction in 1947) so a process that exposes some its magic is not all good news. On the other hand, it won't deteriorate any further in the near future. The jury is still out on digital.

(The image is from a first generation DVD copy of the film.)

Red Road

2006-11-06T09:57:00.000Z

Kate Dickie (left) and Natalie Press in Red Road (image from Verve Pictures -- see below)

I'm often knocked out by movies, so I shouldn't be surprised by Red Road. One of my evening class students raved about it and I can see what she means. Fortunately, I didn't read anything about it first (although I was well aware of its basic scenario and had followed the triumph at Cannes). I was able to watch the film without any preconceptions and it worked a treat.

Since it is part of a Lars von Trier project, it shares a great deal with the Dogme aesthetic. In fact, perhaps because I haven't seen that many Dogme films, I thought it was very similar in impact to Festen. Apart from having a widescreen aspect ratio, I don't see why it couldn't be a Dogme film.

It so refreshing to see a film which simply introduces a character without explaining everything about them. We have to work it out from what we see and hear – appropriate really for a film about a woman who watches CCTV screens all day long. The pace in the beginning is slow but builds to a terrifying sequence -- built largely on characterisation, camerawork, editing and mise en scene.

I was disappointed by Sight and Sound's review. The reviewer assumes a distanced rather superior stance. She starts from the premise that as a viewer, she knows everything and therefore criticises the film's ending. But the way to approach this movie is to invest in Jackie, the lead character, and feel what she feels. I'm sure most audiences will do this and will react to the ending of the film from within a confused state of relief, exhilaration, anger or whatever other emotion is evoked for them.

The IMDB User Comments and Bulletin Boards are interesting. Several users seem upset by the explicit nature of some sex scenes. That's understandable, but not the comments that the two leads are unattractive. They are both excellent and believable. There is also some discussion of Glasgow as a location. I don't know Glasgow that well, but it always strikes me as both invigorating and desperate, a fun place and a fearsome place. It's a great city and the film uses the setting very well. I'd urge anyone to see this film. Well done Andrea Arnold, cast and crew and well done Verve (see website for images and production notes) for getting the film out on 38 prints in the UK. Things are looking up for real British films.

Holidays and Bollywood

2006-10-25T12:10:00.000+01:00

2006 has offered a boost to the marketeers of Bollywood films in the UK -- and provided film and media students with a good example of how film distribution works. The Muslim festival of Eid ul-Fitr celebrates the end of Ramadan, which because it is part of the lunar calendar occurs approx. 11 days earlier each year of the Gregorian calendar. In 2006 Eid was celebrated on 23/24 October in the UK. This coincided with the Hindu festival of Diwali, which also moves in relation to the Gregorian calendar, but always occurs at roughly the same time of year. This year it started on October 21 and lasted for several days.

The coincidence of the two festivals meant that both of the two major UK Asian communities were looking for family celebrations at the same time. The Bollywood distributors held back major releases so that there was nothing playing in Bradford last week, in order to concentrate on the holidays this week when they opened two big films, the romance Jaan-e-maan and the action film Don (a remake of a 1978 Amitabh film with Shahrukh Khan in the lead). An interesting short piece in the Guardian G2 on Monday October 23 by Saima Raza describes how Bradford Asian families now see the Eid festivities as the perfect time to go to the movies.

I went into Bradford yesterday and it was buzzing on an afternoon with changeable weather. Since it's half-term as well, Cineworld was packed and I gave up trying to get a ticket, going to see Zinedine Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait instead. Since the Hollywood offer is pretty dire at the moment (with the exception of The Departed), the two Bollywood films could take up to five screens out of fourteen at various times of the day. It will be interesting to see how the two films fare in the weeks Box Office Top 15.

Not Cashing In

2006-10-08T22:55:00.000+01:00

I enjoyed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line very much. It had some of the best sound of any Hollywood films that I've seen /heard -- the opening sequence at the prison was sensational. I've long been a Reese Witherspoon fan -- Election was a revelation -- and I was equally impressed by Joaquin Phoenix. It was only a few weeks afterwards when I reflected on the BBC4 documentaries on Cash that I started to have some doubts, not about the quality of the film but about the story. Johhny's daughter from his first marriage, Rosanne, was critical of the film and what she thought was a misrepresentation of her mother, Vivian. Rosanne's sister Kathy was also critical, feeling that the film gave the impression that her mother had been a drag on Johnny's career.

This had an impact for me because although I've always liked John R. Cash as a performer, I've always been a bigger fan of Rosanne. After his death in 2003, I bought some albums from the Cash back catalogue and got into him again, but my passion for Rosanne's music from the 1980s had cooled a little. Then I discovered how easy it was to digitise my vinyl LPs. Suddenly I was back into Rosanne's music in a big way (and that of one time husband Rodney Crowell, who produced a lot of her best work). I then debated whether I should acquire her latest album, Black Cadillac. I knew it was written at a time when she was reflecting on the death of not only her father and stepmother June Carter in 2003, but also her mother in 2005 and her step sister. Could I cope with an album completely focused on the death of loved ones? In the end, I was convinced by the reviews and I got the album. What an astonishing piece of work. Deeply moving, but not at all maudlin. It has some of the best melodies and lyrics I've heard for a while and sounds as good as 'Seven Year Ache' or 'King's Record Shop', my favourite 80s albums. Perhaps I'll consider the 90s albums next.

Zinedine Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait

2006-09-23T15:07:00.000+01:00

This is 90 minutes (of course) of sheer hell when I saw it - even for my football (if Burnley counts) consultant who I took with me - so boring, at times, that a collective gnawing of arms seemed tempting to suggest. However, it was interesting in its attempt to profile an iconic modern footballer (its release almost as fantastically timed as his head-butt to generate useful publicity).

The film-makers have art/arthouse credentials, and there is an intense focus on his every move, following throughout the match (Real Madrid/Villareal). He obliges the directors by being sent off near the end - but even this has a strangely passive quality that infects all the action, since he gets randomly involved in someone else's argument.

It's coming round to The Cornerhouse on 29th September. I'm definitely going to send any of my students who are thinking of doing the Sport and the Media research option (OCR, similar to AQA's Independent Study) - not because I don't like them (!) but because I think it has enormous potential for discussion as far as sport and celebrity is concerned. Having seen Sam Taylor-Wood's portrait of Beckham in National Gallery (a really, far superior analysis of sports celebrities AND our relationship to them), the Zidane film is limited in its own 'intelligence' but something they can use as a case study.

I notice on imdb that it's compared to 'Football as Never before' about George Best - I wonder whether there are any other useful companion pieces this new film could be put with?

Digital update

2006-09-21T22:06:00.000+01:00

Seems I was a little unfair re the heat output of these projectors -- turns out it was the ventilation system in the box that was at fault. Having completed two screening events using the projector, I can see that there are some 'running in' problems. The projectionists are taking some time to come to terms with the machine. Each film, which arrives on its own disk drive, needs to be loaded and can't be activated without a separate security key -- the return of the 'dongle' that used to bedevil desktop computer users!

Actually loading and preparing the projection script for a new film takes a fair amount of time. More or less 'real time' for a feature on on 'HD' and more than 'real time' for a JPEG2000 film. There is not so much physical work for the projectionist compared to 'making up' a 35mm print. Once the loading begins, it is more or less automatic, but it does mean that late arriving digital prints could be a problem. As someone who has often been faced with a print arriving on the morning when I have an event starting at 10.30, this is not good news. At least with a 35mm print, you could get something onto the screen in the next hour or so, but the digital print has to be fully loaded. It's these 'little things' that are really important when it comes to actually using the prints. On the other hand, once loaded it is ready to go whenever you need it.

The Digital Projection Box

2006-09-12T22:13:00.000+01:00

Squeezed into a projection box last week to get my first look at one of the JPEG2000 digital projectors installed in cinemas as part of the UK Film Council's Digital Screens Network.

What a monster! If your idea of digital media is an iPod or a tiny digital camcorder, you are going to be shocked. It's big and squat and worst of all exudes enormous amounts of heat, requiring its own ventilation system. (I understand there are two different models, so this might have been the bigger of the two.)

What used to be a 35mm film in several large metal canisters is now a small black box housing a hard drive. A film 'print' is now 60-70 Gb of digital data (i.e. about ten times more data than a DVD). It still needs to be 'prepared' by the projectionist for screening, so perhaps they won't be made redundant quite as quickly as we feared.

I couldn't stay to watch the print, but it seemed to cope alright with my laptop presentation. As I left, the projectionist commented on the one advantage digital prints clearly offer – every screening is potentially the same. There shouldn't be any scratches, visible reel changes etc. I'm sure this is a good thing but I'm already nostalgic for those old scratchy prints when, on a third or fourth viewing, you could look forward to spotting the scratches.

Watching the detectives

2006-09-12T01:18:00.000+01:00

Several years ago I enjoyed a fantasy in which English Literature disappeared from school curricula and was replaced by something much more inclusive. When I saw some of the suggestions in the English Orders (I'm talking about 2000?), I could see the possibilities of different kinds of work, investigating genre fictions across media. I thought it might be fun to study Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins as authors and explore both their influence on crime fiction and the adaptations of their work in films and on the stage.

Fat chance, eh? The thought police seem to be on the prowl again, attempting to restrict what KS4 students read. If Film and Media students can study Pirates of the Caribbean and sitcoms, why can't literature students study crime fiction or science fiction? John Mullan has recently had a couple of interesting Guardian pieces exploring Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close as part of the Guardian's Book Club. It's OK to do things like this at degree or postgraduate level -- why not at 14 or 17?

Studying genres in literature would enable students to learn more about narrative structure, about typing and about social context. (I think I've learned a lot about different milieu from reading crime fiction.) I suspect that the range of reading students do at school is narrower than it needs to be.

The other great advantage of genre fiction is that it can be universal. I've enjoyed crime novels written in many languages. Having read most of the wonderful Henning Mankel novels from Sweden, I enjoyed the Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo's The Devil's Star this summer. A good translator allows access for readers of popular cultures across the world and I think I could argue that this is as important as introducing students to foreign language cinema. And why stop at crime? A good dose of vintage 1950s P.K. Dick would be good for most students.

Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna: New Bollywood?

2006-09-05T21:32:00.000+01:00

I love Bollywood, but I’m a real starter when it comes to knowing about the films, so it would be great to hear people’s responses to Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. (Director: Karan Johar). I remember Lagaan seemed to promise the first Indian cross-over success, but KANK is far more modern. Not your typical Bollywood product, it's set in New York and deals with divorce and infidelity. The characters drink and there is a definite lack of the trademark Bollywood music and dancing, given the ‘hero’ is an injured football pro. Any musical numbers are modernised and often set in discos.

I’d made a mental note to discuss it with my students who are Bollywood fans, but saw (Screen International 1/09/06) that is has had the biggest box office opening in territories other than India, for a Bollywood film. It has some of the brightest stars of Bollywood, such as Shah Rukh Khan, not for the first time tackling a quite unsympathetic hero. The film is pretty tortuous - there’s loads more dialogue than usual – and some of it pretty dreadful!

I’m not sure how far it represents a true Bollywood film for the global market though – although it seems it might be targeted at younger viewers. It certainly is different from Johar’s 2004 film Veer Zaara (which had three out of the four leads) which was far more traditional, particularly in gender representations.

I’d love to know how it fits in with other, earlier Bollywood or how younger people (i.e. students) have responded to it? Or any other films that people think make ‘westernised’ Bollywood, for the global market? (I’m thinking particularly about A2 Film and Media options re World Cinema, and for teaching institution, generally?)

Media Exam Results, August 2006

2006-09-03T23:03:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure why, but it has been more difficult to find the whole range of media results this year. They weren't listed in all the papers. I eventually tracked them down on the website of the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ).

I've aggregated all the listed exam results and come up with a figure of around 136,000. This includes GCSE, AS/A2 and GNVQ Intermediate/VCE. These are all the film and media qualifications which report in August. It doesn't include the vocational qualifications from BTEC (National Diplomas etc.) and City & Guilds which might take the total up to 140,000 plus. We'll include a full analysis in itp next month, but here are a few 'headline' findings:

GCSE Media is forging ahead with a massive increase this year of more than 20% up to 57,521 from 45,685

AS (film and media) is up by around 4% from 41,309 to 43,018

A Level (film and media) is up by nearly 10% from 28,261 to 30,964

The increase at A Level follows on from a big AS increase last year. Perhaps the surge at GCSE will have some impact on AS next year?

The gender splits are interesting. The general commentaries don't seem to notice that Media Studies has been one of the new subjects that has attracted young women in large numbers. At GCSE the gender split is roughly even, but at AS and A Level, the female entries are clearly ahead of male entries. At 16, more girls than boys opt for AS. As a consequence the percentage of "all male entries for AS" taking Film and Media is actually higher than the percentage of girls (4%) -- even though the number of girls taking Film and Media is actually higher. At A Level, the figures suggest that overall the number of boys progressing to A2 is less than for girls. In Film and Media, girls maintain their 3.9% of the total A2 entry, but for boys it drops to 3.8%.

Any surprises in these figures?

Sexual violence

2006-08-31T15:21:00.000+01:00

An interesting reply to Nick's letter to Ofcom, but the announcement yesterday that the UK government is going to legislate against downloaders of representations of 'sexual violence' is also worrying. (See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/5297600.stm)

I don't like the idea (or the practice) of any kinds of violent acts towards men, women, children or animals, whether for sexual motives or any other and like most people, I'm sure, I feel for the mother who lost her daughter because of the actions of a violent man. However, as any media student ought to know, deciding on the meaning of media representations of any actions is a complex business. Who is going to do it? There are plenty of people who engage in consensual acts of simulated sexual violence and some who actually get pleasure from receiving pain (and who therefore need others to adminster it). Are they going to be imprisoned for exploring their fetish? It is going to be difficult to distinguish real from simulated violence. I just hope that legislation isn't passed on the basis that it is too difficult to distinguish between consensual and forced 'sexual violence'.

On the whole, I think the BBFC now does a pretty good job in classifying films and responding to public tastes. However, I'm a little baffled by the decision to make The Notorious Bettie Page an 18 Certificate film. Mary Harron's film is not what some audiences expected and it might be criticised for leaving out some aspects of the Bettie Page story, but what she did decide to present is not likely to corrupt anyone in my view. I guess it must be because the subject matter includes fetish material and that this must be kept away from 16-17 year-olds? If the movie does anything (and I think it manages quite a few ideas) it satirises American society's attitudes towards sex in the 1950s. Perhaps we will need something similar if the criminalisation of sexual activity is extended in the UK?

Governments, especially this one, are prone to create new legislative powers without thinking very long or very clearly. I hope they get this one right.

Tom and Jerry

2006-08-28T17:38:00.000+01:00

One of the most disturbing events this summer was Time-Warner's agreement to cut smoking out of 'children's' cartoons after Ofcom requested them to do so, apparently after one parent's complaint. I can't find any info on Ofcom's site regarding this ludicrous decision; Tom apparently rolls a cigarette in order to impress a 'dame'. No doubt the parent's nipper(s) was so impressed by this that they will go on to become a smoker: the 'effects' theory is alive and having an undue influence on policy still (my guess is Tom's ploy failed and so if the 'effects' theory is correct the child would not have become a smoker).

I think this amounts to an Orwellian rewriting of history and am going to complain to Ofcom.

Suez, the media and its aftermath

2006-07-22T12:32:00.000+01:00

I can just about remember Suez, but only as a few images in a Sunday newspaper as I was only a small child at the time. I guess that for my parents it was a very worrying time as they knew that my brother would be called up for National Service in the next couple of years (he was actually in one of the last intakes of National Service in 1958 and went to Aden which, fortunately, did not become violent until 1962/3). My cousin was a few years older and he was in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising of 1953-4. In 1956 virtually every family in the UK would know somebody who had been close to danger in the 1939-45 war, either at home or overseas, or in any of the subsequent conflicts to which UK National Servicemen were sent such as Palestine, Indian Partition, Korea, Malaya etc. One of my other childhood memories is of the man next door, who I never saw but knew would never recover from his experiences in a Japanese POW camp.

I mention these memories simply because they emphasise the difference between 1956 and 2006, in terms of a general direct connection/experience with war and access to media representations. I'm not sure how my parents discussed how they felt (and they always kept any overtly 'political' views to themselves) but they were certainly not exposed to the kinds of 'personalised' human interest stories delivered as 'news' that we get today. Perhaps the major example of this was the 'streaming' list of missing people running underneath the main image of Sky News during the tsunami disaster in 2004/5 (which is covered in more detail in The Media Student's Book, 4th edition). Sky were criticised for much of their coverage, but the general use of 'personal statements' by people faced with the terrible news of the loss of loved ones is now so common that perhaps it is acceptable to most of the audience?

The other big difference between 1956 and 2006 is the role of the press, including the range of titles available and the impact they have on readers. Suez was a crazy act of folly which was nevertheless supported by the Times and the Telegraph. The principal objectors were the Manchester Guardian and the Observer (now both controlled by the Scott Trust, but then separate entities). The Guardian celebrated its principled stand with several articles in July, but I was struck by a letter which appeared in response to a reference to the death of the News Chronicle. This Liberal paper was our daily paper up until its demise in 1960 when it was taken over by the Daily Mail. We were forced to switch to the Daily Express (we already took the Sunday Express). I was miffed mainly because I lost a daily dose of the I-Spy column then very popular with children.

In retrospect, I wonder what damage I sustained by seven years of Empire Loyalism from Lord Beaverbrook. Would I have had a better popular education if the News Chronicle had survived? With the demise of the Daily Herald (after it had changed its name to The Sun and then been sold Rupert Murdoch in 1964) the UK lost a middle market paper with anything other than a right wing perspective. Media studies often queries whether the press has a significant affect on public opinion, but it's an interesting question. How would the Falklands and the Gulf War have gone down without the Sun and with two leftish papers in the middle market to contradict the Mail and Express?

Brokeback Mountain and the Twilight Western Part 2

2006-07-09T22:15:00.000+01:00

People often make very interesting points in discussion, but if you are leading the group in a teaching context it is often difficult to remember all the points that are being made. I'm glad this weekend that I did remember a very interesting observation. This was the suggestion that the decline of traditional cowboy employment prospects post 1945 was similar in effect to the decline in mining communities in the UK (and much of the rest of Western Europe) in the last thirty years. A distinct working-class community with a particular way of life and a rich culture felt cast by the wayside. I wonder how a film about two gay miners coming to terms with modernity would have gone down?

Media Education Association is born

2006-06-18T19:33:00.000+01:00

On Saturday June 17 2006 the Media Education Association was formed at an inaugural meeting in London. All the people present, comprising delegates from regional meetings and members of the original steering group, agreed a Draft Constitution and the appointment of an Executive Committee to organise membership and plan the initial activities of the Association. Those present at the meeting (and presumably the other delegates who couldn't be there) make up the initial 'Executive Council'.

Congratulations to everyone involved. Information about MEA is available from the MediaEducation Association blog listed under the links opposite. A dedicated website is one of the first tasks for the Association's communications team.

Media Education Association Update

2006-05-29T16:09:00.000+01:00

The regional meetings designed to enable consultation on the proposed Media Education Association took place over the last two weeks. Each meeting was asked to produce two delegates to take part in a final planning meeting on June 17. This meeting should formally set up the association and 'take over' from the Steering Group. The new association should be up and running from September 2006.

I chaired the meeting in Manchester which had 19 people present and a further 8 apologies. The meeting had to be business-like to get through the agenda, but there was plenty of enthusiasm and a fair amount of discussion. Two delegates were chosen. The group agreed to meet again in July at FACT in Liverpool to hear what happened on June 17 in London and plan for further developments in the North West.

The Bradford meeting chaired by Nick Lacey had slightly fewer people, but still enough to make progress and they are meeting again on July 11.

If you live in the North West or Yorkshire, leave a comment here and I'll email you details of what is happening. If you live elsewhere, go to this link to see the details of the May regional meetings with contact dates.

It looks like something may really be happening, so thanks to all of those who have volunteered to work on this venture.

Bradford Riots

2006-05-14T23:40:00.000+01:00

It's over a week since the local elections and since Channel 4's broadcast of The Bradford Riots. I'm surprised that there has been relatively little mention in the national press of the local results in Bradford, where Labour actually did well, taking seats from the Tories and reducing the BNP's seats. In Keighley, Labour won all three seats, including one for an Asian woman – a significant success, I think.

The Bradford Riots is a 'realist drama' based on the events in July 2001 when a National Front march was proposed for Bradford and Asian youths took to the streets to defend their territory. The independent production company stated that they could not get permission to restage the events in Bradford so the film looks a little bizarre to the locals with key scenes shot in parts of Liverpool.

Some of the national critics have complained that the central character is not 'typical' because he is a university student. But from what people tell me the story sticks pretty closely to 'real' events. It was researched, written and directed by Neil Biswas. He is, I think, from the Bangladeshi community in Whitechapel, the location for his first feature, Second Generation in 2003. He does a good job and the film is well worth watching. At the end, I was moved and angry on behalf of the family at the centre of the drama. But that was mostly because I knew the story was 'true' - by which I mean that what happened to the characters actually did happen to real people.

It's very difficult for realist television drama to do more than that, but the day before I went to see Jean-Pierre Melville's L'armée des ombres (Army in the Shadows) What a movie! I love Melville and this a digital restoration by a French archive of a 1969 film. The colours are muted and the film is relatively slowly paced over 145 mins. But Melville is in complete control. I wish I could think of easy ways to introduce this kind of filmmaking to younger audiences. There are no car chases and little direct conflict in this story about the French resistance, mostly based on Joseph Kessel's novel, but also on Melville's own wartime experience. The action as such comprises an escape from custody, a reluctant execution, another escape from a firing squad and a 'mercy' assassination. Between these dramatic highs are long periods of tension building,with marvellous performances by the likes of Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret.

Melville is an expressionist rather than a 'realist', but I was convinced of the 'reality' of the situations that faced the resistance fighters. I particularly enjoyed Lino Ventura's flight back to France from London. Prepared to jump from an RAF plane with his parachute harness over his overcoat and suit, our hero has his glasses firmly taped to his forehead with elastoplast. It's those touches of humanity that make this a great film.

Media Education Association

2006-05-02T11:54:00.000+01:00

The proposed 'Media Education Association' (a provisional name) is now at the 'lift-off' stage with a series of regional consultative meetings being held in the last two weeks of May. The meetings are at 'twilight time' after school in various locations. Go here to download a pdf with all the information.

As one of the original working group, I'm chairing the regional meeting in Manchester at Cornerhouse on 24 May and Nick Lacey is chairing a Bradford meeting on 15 May. There are ten more around England and Wales, so there will be one within travelling distance for many of you. The aim of these meetings is to discuss the work done so far in setting up a 'paper organisation' and to widen participation and take in new ideas. So far, it has been a handful of media educators, mostly outside classroom teaching, who have done the leg-work. Now we want the proposed teacher-members to take over and drive the Association forward through recruitment and development of policy. We hope therefore that the regional meetings will each produce two representatives who will be able to attend a London meeting on June 17 which will formally set up a committee to found the Association. (These two 'representatives' are not already decided, anyone can put themselves forward.)

If you are really keen to get involved, get to your nearest local meeting and make your voice heard. We do have some funding to pay travelling expenses for delegates to the London meeting and to get the Association started, but after that it will be up to the members to grow it.

If you can't make the meetings, please make sure you have registered your interest by going to the weblink here. This is an exciting initiative and I hope it sees a new generation of committed media teachers working together to move media education forward.

Vocational Media Courses

2006-04-27T15:46:00.000+01:00

Preparing for an event discussing vocational media course in schools and colleges, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the 'market pressure' for new courses and the way they are exploiting government policy towards 14-19 education. Last summer I was alerted to the threat of DiDA -- ICT courses at Level 2 that include digital media production. Is anybody in a position to say how these are working in schools and if media teachers are involved?

Now comes a suite of'iMedia' qualifications from OCR offering more digital media production qualifications at Levels 2 and 3 as part of ICT provision . Where Edexcel goes, OCR must follow, it seems. It was disturbing to see a reference to 'media education' in relation to these new qualifications. 'Media techniques' yes, but they do not cover any media education key concepts. iMedia website.

Finally, I've been reading about 'Vocational Advantage', an idea for supporting centres wanting to develop vocational courses in schools at KS4 coming from Edexcel in partnership with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). Media is one of the first areas to be supported. See flyer here.

Edexcel is owned by Pearson Education and seems to be getting ever more entrepreneurial. DiDA involves selling a lot of Macromedia packages at huge discount to schools. Par for the course I guess these days. It's time to look closely at what is going on.

Looking Over Brokeback Mountain

2006-04-14T11:48:00.000+01:00

I'm intrigued by the success of Brokeback Mountain. In fact, it has to some extent restored my faith in audiences. Several of the people I have discussed the film with are not fans of the Western and were surprised when I suggested that Ang Lee's triumph was to so skilfully make use of the conventions of the Western genre – and specifically those of what some have termed the 'Twilight Western'. This term can be used to describe either Westerns set in the dying days of the 'Old West' (i.e. 1890-1910) or in the post-1945 period when the Western lifestyle began to feel more and more out of tune with contemporary America. In the main, Twilight Westerns have been produced by Hollywood (and independents) since the late 1960s, although earlier examples include The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray 1952) and Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962).

I've been running an evening class with the title 'Looking Over Brokeback Mountain' at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford for the last few weeks. So far we've watched The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) and extracts from a range of films including Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) Johnny Guitar (Nick Ray, 1953), Hud (Martin Ritt, 1962), Junior Bonner (Peckinpah, 1972), Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985) and The Ballad of Little Jo (Maggie Greenwald, 1993).

We've discussed gender in the Western in both the traditional 'mythologised West' and the more realist 'Twilight West' and this week we look at a little-seen Twilight Western, Stephen Frears' 1998 film, The Hi-Lo Country. I wonder how it will look in 2006 after the success of Brokeback? Billy Crudup and Woody Harrelson play the two young men, but this time they fall out over Patricia Arquette.

The course has also prompted me to read Annie Proulx's short story collection and I've enjoyed all the stories so far – I'm saving up the Brokeback story for the last week of the course.

Digital Projection

2006-04-14T09:27:00.000+01:00

Although I haven't yet (to my knowledge) seen a digital print as screened under the UK Film Council's current scheme for improving access to 'specialised films', I have seen demos and they looked impressive. This week the Film Council announced that 50 projectors had been installed in UK cinemas as part of phase 1 and that 190 more are scheduled for phase 2 starting May 2006. I know one is being installed at Pictureville in Bradford so I look forward to seeing what it can do. Anybody got any feedback on digital screenings at their local cinemas?

The Film Council press statement (as reported in Screen International 13/4/06) suggests that the predicted problems were evident in Phase 1, but that they are being overcome. The biggest problem is that distributors need to make both digital and analogue prints during the long transition period. 25 films have had digital prints made in the UK so far. The second issue is compatability of equipment and prints. The Film Council concedes that some fitted projectors need upgrading to what is now being touted as an industry standard – JPEG2000 (see the Digital Cinema website ).

Is youth culture dead?

2006-04-04T00:23:00.000+01:00

Interesting post by Mark Ravenhill in today's Grauniad: "I am down with the kids". His argument is that youth no longer can control its own popular culture with parents downloading The Arctic Monkeys and playing the latest videogames. Ravenhill, who has been doing interviews for his 'teen' play Citizenship, thinks that there is nothing for youth to 'own' anymore. Bizarrely he suggests that what youth needs is a form of National Service – not to give them a "short sharp shock", but to provide them with a chance to get together and discover things that their parents wouldn't like – to become rebellious again. He argues there is little chance of that in middle-class youth culture and points to the colonisation of black culture by white kids looking for something that their parents won't understand.

Ravenhill is on to something, but I'm not quite sure what. He makes me think of an article by Joe Eszterhas in Rolling Stone in the 1970s in which he argued that the 'baby boomers' of the late 1940s would control popular culture for the next 40 years until they died out – not just because they were such a populous generation, but because of the conjuncture of changes in society, in the economy and in popular culture that took place in the 1960s. Eszterhas has been proved correct in many ways – witness the extraordinary amount of coverage of the recent tour by Bob Dylan. As the age profile of Europe in particular shifts upwards, we might see a split in popular culture with the 30 and 40-somethings looking to stay 'young' and embracing 'youth culture' as something still appropriate for them, whilst 50 and 60-somethings stick with what's left of the 'Counter Culture' and its heroes.

New Media Studies A Levels

2006-04-02T23:06:00.000+01:00

It's not that often that I change my mind during arguments/debates. I tend to spend a long time developing new ideas or attitudes, so I was intrigued by the debate about 'coursework' and 'practical work' for A Level Media Studies on the OCR Exam Board mailing list for media teachers. It is being driven by a wide range of positions, often (but not always) cogently argued. I find myself agreeing with both those who want to expand coursework (my own general position) and those who are worried about too much 'production work' and not enough core theory. There is still time to join in the debate by registering and visiting the mailing list (see link).

Spike Lee: Inside Man

2006-04-02T22:20:00.000+01:00

Spike Lee certainly upsets people. I can understand the charges of misogyny and even the complaints of those who can't cope with any kind of expressionism or melodrama. I can agree that he is an uneven filmmaker, but surely it's obvious that he's one of the most important filmmakers in Hollywood? Not to Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. I've never come across a reviewer so annoying as Bradshaw. He's obviously intelligent and perceptive and seems to have seen a wide range of films, but he has no sense of judgment. One star for Inside Man and dismissal of 25th Hour. Nuff said!

Inside Man is terrific entertainment. The cast is to die for – I think I could cope with anything that put Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster in the front line and supported them with Chiwetel Ejiofor, rapidly becoming a Hollywood regular. I was also impressed with Clive Owen – thankfully not to be wasted on Bond films.

Is Inside Man more than 'just' an 'entertainment'? It struck me during the film that it seems to draw heavily on the treatment of suspects at Guantanamo. The plot means that a large group of hostages in a bank heist are dressed in 'coveralls'. The police are unable to distinguish the 'witnesses' from the 'crooks' and ship them off in a bus. Given jokes about Bin Laden and a Sikh witness' complaint at being addressed as an 'arab' and the references start to pile up. Added to this Spike has chosen as opening and closing music the song 'Chaiyya Chaiyya' written by the maestro A. R. Rahman for Mani Ratnam's Dil Se. Dil Se features Sharukh Khan as a journalist who falls in love with a 'freedom fighter' from Assam. To add further significance, the version of the song that closes the film includes the Coventry rapper Panjabi MC delivering lines in a distinctive West Midlands accent. If you've seen the Revolution Films production of The Road to Guantanamo about the Tipton Three it doesn't take too much to make the connection.

I've no idea whether this is what Spike intended, but it worked for me. Panjabi MC is the third UK creative talent on the roster. Chiwetel manages something approaching an American accent, but Clive Owen, like the rapper, is distinctively British – weirdly noone comments on this.