A New Sound at the Cinema

The recent success of Anvil! The Story of Anvil has seen the heavy metal band performing live in cinemas across the UK. Gail Tolley looks at a growing trend for events that fuse film, music and performance at the cinema.

Music and film have long been comfortable bedfellows. From the ‘rockumentary’ (The Filth and the Fury, The Doors) to the fictional accounts of the rock and roll lifestyle (Almost Famous, Velvet Goldmine) to the biopic (Control, I’m Not There, The Devil and Daniel Johnston) – the list is endless. And that’s not even touching on the films which have seen bands performing as part of the story, just think of The Yardsticks performance in Blow Up or Nick Cave in Wings of Desire.

But Anvil!, the documentary about the Canadian heavy metal band, has taken this relationship one step further, not only by bringing the band into the cinema to perform after screenings but also by creating an experience that lasts long after the credits roll. The documentary follows the two main members of the group some 25 years after they first tasted success with their influential album Metal on Metal. Yet unlike their contemporaries, such as Metallica and Anthrax, the group never made it big. With a heavy nod to the spoof documentary This is Spinal Tap director Gervasi uses humour to entice the audience into what becomes an emotionally involved trip following the group as they continue to chase their childhood dreams. By the end of the film even those with a complete dislike for heavy metal will find themselves rooting for the band.

What appears to be unique about Anvil! was that the film experience, for many, lasted far beyond the 2 hours of the film. A quick search online shows that the group gained a dedicated following after the film’s release which has lead to them gaining prominent slots at festivals this summer. They’re due to play Download festival and there’s even a petition to get the ageing rockers to play at Glastonbury. Never have an audience been able to make such a difference or felt so involved with a film’s story – a story that still continues to develop. On release of the film the band also played a series of gigs in cinemas after screenings, for those lucky enough to get the opportunity to watch the film and then see the band it was an unusual case of the on and off screen world merging. More than any other film in recent years, Anvil! managed to create a truly interactive film experience as epitomised by the act of bringing live performances into the cinema.

Film events that fuse music, film and performance are an increasingly frequent occurrence at the cinema. At the Edinburgh International Film Festival last year Brighton indie stars British Sea Power performed against a backdrop of specially curated images and at Glasgow Film Festival a selection of local bands came together in a similar event, entitled Shhh! An Evening of (Not So) Silent Movies - playing to accompany films from the silent era. They’re not the only musicians to have been inspired to give live soundtracks to early silent films: front man Black Francis of influential 90s punk-rock group the Pixies, performed a specially composed score for German Expressionist film The Golem at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2008. And in the UK Steven Severin (of Siouxsie and the Banshees), recently created a modern day score for Germaine Dulac’s surrealist work The Seashell and the Clergyman. The Barbican in London have also taken to putting on monthly events of a similar nature.

Such events are almost a return to how cinema would originally have been experienced during the silent era; with audiences watching silent images with a live musical accompaniment. The growth and predominance of sound films has meant that the sense of performance at the cinema seems to have been lost – it’s often only at festivals that audiences feel compelled to clap after the film has finished. Bringing musicians into the cinema can only be a good thing - not only does it introduce new audiences to films from cinema’s early history but it also brings an energy and dynamism to the whole experience of seeing a film. Film (and music) fans hungry for something new won’t be disappointed.

Gail Tolley

“Again” – Why did the Coen brothers develop a taste for Swiss cigarettes?

British American Tobacco Switzerland is the producer of the Parisienne cigarette brand. Although one of its oldest brands, in recent times the company has broadly marketed it as the ‘truly Swiss’ brand and have taken pains to project it as ‘progressive’, dynamic’ and ‘an icon for the Swiss avant-garde spirit’.

This spirit has been projected through a series of advertisements produced exclusively for Swiss cinemas. Since the early 1990s a director noted for his avant-garde reputation has been given (apparently) complete carte blanche to produce a thirty-second commercial that presents their interpretation of the simple strapline “Parisienne people”. The campaign has included work by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Guiseppe Tornatore David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders and Robert Altman. In each case the work produced has contained many of the hallmarks and idiosyncrasies synonymous with these directors. In most cases the actual Parisienne product has barely featured in the finished advert, apart from the required strapline.

The 2003 entry was directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and demonstrates their characteristic quirkiness. The advert setting is reminiscent of a traditional Vaudevillian theatre. At the beginning of the advert we see a performer in heavy stage make-up, dressed in an antiquated pinstripe suit, bowtie and derby hat on the proscenium stage of the theatre, mid-way through an audition performance of the song “Wait ‘till the sun shines Nellie”. Our view of the performer is that of the show director overseeing the audition.

Shortly after the tumultuous final bars of the song the director, now focusing squarely on the performer, utters the simple response “Again”. At this the pianist can be heard playing the song’s introductory phrase and we are left assuming the performer is required to run through his
audition piece one more time. The piano phrase is accompanied by a static shot of a stage-mounted Vaudeville-style placard delivering the strapline and credit “Parisienne people by Joel & Ethan Coen” in customary theatrical script.

The use of the word “again” can be read in differing ways. In the most immediate sense it is the director giving an instruction for the performer to repeat his performance. It can also be read as an exclamation of the desire to revisit the moment of pleasure and artistic illumination derived from the smoking of the cigarette. This is arguably the central message of the advert; that people, specifically ‘Parisienne people’ such as the show director, achieve a state of heightened
creative contemplation through the smoking of this brand, a state that the discerning smoker can frequent at his or her leisure.

'The fact that the campaign would, outside of the Internet, only be viewed in Swiss cinemas, might have provided sufficient reassurance to the directors that their reputations would not be tarnished.'

To some extent this reading is only semi-serious. The Coens’ cinematic output shows them to have an artistic sense of humour and a penchant for pulling the legs of critics and audiences. Given the hackneyed characters and situation depicted, together with the apparent carte blanche extended to them, one can imagine the filmmakers having fun with the whole notion of selling a product through a process of subtext and implication.

Ultimately from the production company and product manufacturer’s point of view the main reasoning behind the Parisienne advertising campaign is that if film directors of the magnitude of the Coens, Lynch, Wenders and others are prepared to put their name to a brand of cigarette, that brand will on some level be imbued with a degree of cultural capital among the ‘progressive’ and ‘dynamic’ Swiss cinema-going audience. The on-screen directorial credit is at least if not more important than the advert strapline. It is a clear attempt to associate the Parisienne brand with the avant-garde aura possessed by these luminary directors.

One might speculate as to the reasons why these directors would be prepared to be involved with the promotion of such a controversial product. The endorsing of cigarettes by known public figures carries serious risks for those figures, if indeed they are concerned about how their association with the product would be viewed in a wider public context. The fact that the campaign would, outside of the Internet, only be viewed in Swiss cinemas, and only then appended to adult-rated films, might have provided sufficient reassurance to the directors that their reputations would not be tarnished.

The carrot of seemingly complete directorial control over the finished advert would perhaps have been an irresistible lure for some, although quite what would happen if one of these directors made full use of the carte blanche brief and submitted a vehemently anti-smoking advert is unclear. However, the opportunity to create a potentially highly personalised addition to their body of work may for some of the directors, who might otherwise struggle to find capital backing for their films, be motivation enough.

March 11th was National No Smoking Day. Stub it out film fans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jANpEgKp_Ss
http://www.nosmokingday.org.uk

Jez Conolly

My Brother, the Film Star

You know how it is. You go to the DVD rental shop, you make your viewing choice based on some positive reviews that you’ve read, you take the disc home, slap it into the tray, spend five minutes hunting for the remote, eventually find it and press PLAY, start watching the film, get about three-quarters of the way through and then suddenly your brother appears on the screen.

Not fleetingly, not a street scene bystander or a face in the crowd, but stood on a beach, trousers rolled up, an accordion strapped to his chest, belting out a shanty. For several minutes uninterrupted.

OK, you probably don’t know how it is, but this is what happened to me when I first saw Andrew Kötting’s superb 1998 movie Gallivant. I was so taken aback to see John on the screen that I must surely have frantically knuckle-rubbed my eyes with all the cartoon surprise I could muster. Let me get my capsule review of the film out of the way right now:

Why…didn’t …he…tell…me…he…was…in…it?

Actually I shouldn’t really be surprised that he neglected to mention it. This is the man who I learned very recently from a taxi driver – just a random taxi driver mind you – used to schmooze with the likes of Paul Simon in the 60s. If I’m honest I’d long ago packed John’s music and reputation away in a little taped up cardboard box, felt-tip-pen-marked ‘Warning: contains weapons grade folk music – keep out of reach of small animals and potential girlfriends’. Suffice to say I was so bowled over by his performance, and not a little impressed by his association with one of our finest filmmakers, that I wore it like a badge for a few weeks. I told so many friends and colleagues about it that I lost track of who I’d told, and once or twice the tale’s lap of honour was met with “I know, you told me already”. So I stopped telling people. Until now.

Sibling stardom aside I really love Gallivant and recommend that you see it. To ease you into a viewing here’s my real actual review:

The patchwork travelogue journey taken by Andrew Kötting in the making of the film is both transformative and celebratory. Beginning and ending at Bexhill-on-Sea, Kötting, his grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden travel together around the entire 6000 mile coastline of mainland Britain. Throughout their journey they meet a host of likeable, genial and frequently eccentric inhabitants on the fringes of the land, and in the process get to know each other. The need for this belated acquaintance is heightened by the knowledge that both Gladys and Eden have limited life expectancy. Gladys is drawing to the end of her days and Eden has the neurological condition Joubert Syndrome. In filming his family members undertaking this journey Kötting managed to capture an unsentimentalised yet affirming and personal pilgrimage shot through with touching intimacy. Gallivant’s language is the family seaside holiday home movie made manifest; its visual aesthetic is all Super 8 sans synch speech, primary colour picture postcard cut-ups interspersed with black and white jump cuts, flits between video and film, tripod and hand-held, in what one commentator described as an ‘idiot cubism’.

It is the succession of idiosyncratic local people that Kötting encounters in the coastal towns and wilds that gives the film its warmth and democracy. In his featured essay on Kötting for Luxonline, Gareth Evans’ opinion of Gallivant in his profile of the director bears this out: ‘It has a wide ear and eye, both for folk, their ways and for signage, for the scale sweep and the sweet stall. It makes the personal a generous filter into the social. It understands the switchback exchange between the two. Deeply, it belongs.’

Amid the flickbook of found moments Kötting pauses to persuade some of the locals variously to remember the words to the song ‘John Peel’, display their bunions, show off their best gurning face and deliver a whiskery sea shanty while slowly sinking into the sand at Cleethorpes.

Kötting deals in what Evans calls ‘the littoral truths of this island’; rather than use cosy, familiar icons of Nation-On-Sea as his currency of communication (save for occasional shots such as the beach huts at Bexhill that recall Betjeman) he chooses to look the Land in the face and speak as he finds. It would not be unreasonable to wonder why Kötting could not have simply opted for a more straightforward, logistical A to B journey. But this is an odyssey of understanding, a circuit of enlightenment. Only by completing his circumnavigation, by probing the nooks and crannies of the country’s beached margin, can Kötting capture the essence of his homeland and come to know his family and himself.

http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/andrew_kotting/index.html
http://www.myspace.com/johnconolly
http://www.lulu.com/content/2212290

Jez Conolly

The Dying of the Light

When is an hour only twenty five minutes long? When, in the experience of the late cinematographer Nestor Almendros, you’re talking about ‘Magic Hour’, the brief twilight period that he famously captured for Terrence Malick’s 1978 masterpiece Days Of Heaven.

In accounting for this apparent temporal anomaly Almendros described the term as “a euphemism…it is the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets and before it is night. The sky has light, but there is no actual sun. The light is very soft, and there is something magic about it." The logistical difficulties of exploiting such a fleeting moment would prove challenging for any director of photography. Even more so when one considers that Almendros was losing his eyesight at the time of the film’s making. In Almendros’ case there’s something clearly emblematic about his use of ‘Magic Hour’ in the Malick movie, a memorable last-chance-to-see tattooed on the retina as a final beautiful reminder of a world. When one considers his contribution, and those of other visually impaired filmmakers to this most visual of media, the consideration of film is perhaps lent an added dimension.

Few could deny the impact of the colour palate that John Ford used for The Searchers. And yet it’s unlikely that the man himself could fully appreciate the stunning earth and sky hues so superbly realised by his cinematographer Winton Hoch. Prior to making the film Ford entered hospital for the removal of cataracts. While recuperating after the surgery, he became impatient with the bandages covering his eyes and tore them off earlier than his doctors told him to. As a result Ford suffered a total loss of sight in one eye. Despite this setback there is little critical doubt that The Searchers remains the brightest beacon of Ford’s artistic vision. As such it’s interesting to imagine that this partial loss of sight may have worked in his favour, the colours in his creative mind coming to the fore through his script and art direction collaborations.
Aside from his well-regarded string of B-movies, André De Toth’s prime contribution to film history is his 1953 3D classic House Of Wax. It is one of cinema’s greatest ironies that the maker of arguably the finest example of 50s 3D was completely unable to appreciate the effects produced by the process, owing to the loss of an eye in his childhood. But again, is it possible that the director’s enforced detachment from the effects that he was striving to achieve could have given him a creative advantage? Perhaps there are parallels to be drawn between the product of Ford and De Toth’s labours and the effect that poor sight lent to the works of Claude Monet (cataracts) and Edgar Degas (maculopathy) – would their output have been less outstanding if they had been blessed with 20/20 vision?

It remains to be seen – pardon the pun – whether the work of the blind filmmaker Joe Monks can be credited with any similar qualities. Monks, an independent comics groundbreaker for the past two decades, lost his eyesight in 2002 after a long battle with diabetic retinopathy. Since then he has completed his first feature The Bunker. Monks is quite clear about how the blindness has affected his output: “I think it would be a thousand times more difficult if I had never been able to see…It isn't about being blind and making a film. It's about making the film despite being blind. Every filmmaker has obstacles, I just happen to have one that's unique and a little more difficult to get around than a producer clamping down on spending or scheduling conflicts with the actors. I know it adds a great angle to this story, but what's important isn't a blind guy making a film, it's--hopefully--about a guy making a good film who happens to be blind.”

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Visions-Light-Art-Cinematography-DVD/dp/630583685X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1235135322&sr=8-1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jplEzoN7lD4
http://sightunseenpictures.com/index.htm

Jez Conolly

Dare You Delve Inside the Mind of Film Director Mark Locke?!...

…Those who have would probably say they couldn’t forget the experience, and wouldn’t want to give up the laughs for anything.

Yes, Birmingham has a secret you should definitely know about.

People who saw Locke’s acclaimed 2002 film Crust—pub landlord and failing boxer, plus girlfriend Shaz, take on the world... aided by a lethal seven-foot boxing shrimp—know the man is not afraid to be different, nor does he give a damn for humoring trends. He just wants to make good films, for the people.

While countless young film-makers spent the early ‘90s moaning about ‘breaking-in’, Locke grabbed a camera, took the film world by the balls and shook it ‘til it screamed.
In 2009, long after critics hailed Locke’s early shoestring shorts as cult-classics (including curry house nightmare, Eat In and When I Leave The Sixth Form I’m Getting Straight Into Something Media Related), the man is back with Three Stags, and he hasn’t lost his grip.

Q: Your shorts were unique—unusually touching, hilarious, and occasionally disgusting all at once. What was your attitude when you started and how has it developed since?
A: It’s more or less stayed the same, I just try to make the kind of films I’d personally like to see. Though there’s always a battle between the side of me that comes up with odd ideas and the side that tries to ground them in reality. So the material usually ends up somewhere in the middle, for example three ordinary people and an enlarged crustacean, or vampires running a garden centre.

Music videos seem to have been a natural progression from your shorts. What was the big break that made you think ‘great, no more crap jobs!’?
There wasn’t one, and there’s always a chance that a crap job might have to be an option because even with music videos - I think of them as pretty personal things and I’m not gonna chase big gigs for money if I’m not into the music. However I recently became a Dad so watch this space for my Girls Aloud video.

People may say ‘Mark who…Locke?’, even though you’ve just finished two new Misty’s Big Adventure videos and before that directed infamous anti-folk hero Jeffrey Lewis’s Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror. Where have you been since 2002’s Crust?
Crust sent me into a bit of a spin 'cos the final thing didn’t totally feel like my movie. I’m still proud I had the balls to try it as a first feature but the vibe of it is a bit Full Monty with big shrimp whereas I was after more of a Jim Jarmusch film with big shrimp kinda feel. So I was in no rush to make another three million quid movie and I was also enjoying doing music videos for bands I loved for a while. But I kept writing new stuff and eventually stuck my head above the parapet to get something made, just on a lower budget and on my own terms, like my shorts.

How did you get to know Kevin McNally (of both Crust and Pirates of the Caribbean fame)?
He came in and he was great. He’s a great guy. He had his Pirates beard at our premiere as he was just off to do the first one, and he snogged my next door neighbour Jill with it.

You’re known universally for comedy. What other M.L. media projects people might not be aware of?
I recently did an UNKLE video, which surprised a few people—but it had the required moodiness and just won a best music video award, so I’m allowed to call it my award-winning UNKLE video now. Plus my two new Misty’s videos aren’t comedy either, in fact you might even get choked up over them if you’re in any way sensitive.

You begin shooting Three Stags this summer. What can fans of your previous work expect? How will the world react to the second-feature coming of Mark Locke... is it ready for the shake down?
Well there’s no bonkers idea for a start, since some stuff I wanna do is low concept and 100% reality-based. It’s about a non-macho guy trying to navigate his way through three different stag weekends in one summer, and has what could be my favourite movie tagline ever – ‘five men, one big pussy’. But it’s not gonna be some cheesy Britcom, it’s in the spirit of films like Swingers and Sideways and other good American Indies that are low key with a lot of heart. Although I’ll try and deliver on the tits and debagging front too, obviously.

Three Stags begins pre-production in the spring. To see a selection of Mark’s films visit www.fortmarkfilms.com.

Interview by Chris Pink

The Road to nowhere?

There’s an empty place setting at this year’s awards nominee banquet. Missing from the Slumdog/Winslet/Ledger group hug is John Hillcoat’s take on the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel The Road.
The film was originally slated for a November 2008 release, easily putting it into the Oscars running and tipped by many as a serious contender, but has instead remained firmly ‘in post production’ on IMDB and currently still has no firm release date in 2009. While the no-show can be partly put down to the financial turmoil at Weinstein who decided to put all their eggs in one basket and back The Reader as their best shot at commercial and awards success this time around, there are arguably some underlying wider cultural reasons why now is not the time for a movie about the collapse of Western Civilisation as we know it.

At a time when people in the US and around the world are pinning their hopes on the Obama Advent to lead them back from the brink of oblivion, nervy producers are going to be disinclined to push something that offers a glimpse of a possible future world where all of the feared financial, political and environmental collapses have already happened. Or maybe they just feel that the pre-millennial tension and post 9/11 sobriety ‘Armageddon Dollar’ has finally been exhausted. Whatever the case, it’s hard not to feel that a film with such outstanding potential and credentials – Viggo Mortenson working with Hillcoat who’s coming off the back of the much-lauded The Proposition to ride the McCarthy No Country For Old Men book-to-film bounce – is a casualty of downturn-inspired jitters because of the horrors that it presents.

It’s interesting to reflect upon the relationship between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the hugely successful cycle of horror movies produced by Universal Studios at the time. The intention behind these films, and horror fiction and film before and after the Universal cycle, was to bring people back from the brink through a form of engaged escapism. Audiences’ fears were embodied by the fantastical monsters that confronted them on screen and the creatures’ eventual death or destruction encapsulated the desire to see an end to those fears. However some commentators have suggested that part of the success of the 1930s Universal horrors was based on American audiences’ association of the monsters with ‘aliens’ in their midst and their long-held but misconceived belief that immigration lay at the heart of their country’s predicament. Certainly the likes of Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Mummy could be viewed as frightening embodiments of otherness from the Old Country.

The truth is that good horror satisfies through the sublimation of whatever fears each individual audience member brings into the cinema with them, a point that William Freidkin has often made to disavow himself of any subjectivity in relation to the way The Exorcist was and continues to be received. One can only hope that audiences will eventually have a chance to judge for themselves in the case of The Road. The concern is that the current downtime is being used to up the cannibal-holocaust ‘fear of the Other’ quotient and dilute the serious potency of the message. If this is the case we can look forward to a post-Easter/pre-Summer burial for the movie – if we’re lucky, straight-to-DVD hell beckons – and guaranteed invisibility come the 2010 round of gongs. The static placeholder screen at http://www.theroad-movie.com is kind of pointing to this.

In the mean time you could always read the book.

Jez Conolly

I Went to the Movies and All I Remember Were the Filthy Rats

While settling down to watch Revolutionary Road at my local cinema last week, the customary roll of ads flicked by until one particular thirty second spot nearly made me drop my popcorn – and lose my lunch.

The ad, by pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, uses a dead rat being pulled out of man’s mouth to allude to the dangers of counterfeit drugs – informing us that rat poison is just one of the many dangerous substances found in drugs bought online.
Mmmm, thanks.

Reminiscent of the banned X.Cite chewing gum ad of a few years back in which another furry fellow emerges from a man’s cakehole (this time a scruffy looking dog) – and which was pulled due to a flood of viewer complaints – the Pfizer spot uses the same innocuous opening few seconds to lull us into a false sense of security before hurling its stomach-churning ‘money shot’ straight into the audiences snack laden laps.

Now, to be fair shock advertising of this sort isn’t new and does occasionally have its merits.
Perhaps, like me, you were brought up on all those horrific public information films of the 70s and 80s in which cute kids would come to a sticky end in all manner of nasty ways such as electrocution, railway disasters and cycle crashes and so became somewhat inured to shock tactics in advertising. More recent campaigns by the likes of Barnardos, Think! Road Safety and Benetton have also come mighty close to bad taste in their use of shock to inform, but once in a while an ad comes along that makes you think as well as simply remember.

But jeez c’mon, a stinky rat… out of a man’s mouth… while I’m eating my jelly beans!!?

What happened to those nice, cuddly adverts for the local curry house or carpet showroom I so fondly remember from my youth? Those blink-and-you’ll-miss-them idents all shaky and out of focus as if directed by an inebriated, one-eyed, second hand car salesman. Pearl & Dean, Kiaora and Muzak.

The pre-feature ad in cinemas should gently ease the audience towards the main event, not club you over the head, strip you naked and pour hot coals down your trousers (difficult I know if you’ve been stripped naked, but you get the point). Whether it be gobby rats, 13 year old junkies or suicidal transvestites, I have paid my six quid to be entertained thankyou (albeit in a rather sombre way considering Revolutionary Road’s subject matter) and do not take kindly to having my conscience prodded (and stomach churned) while knowing full well that you Mr. Adman know I have no choice other than to sit and watch.

Please. A light beverage suggestion here, some confectionary advice there – a gentle neon strobe effect with a polite notice to discard my waste on the way out. This is the extent of the mental exercise that should be exerted on me while I sit in my ridiculously overpriced velour contoured seat. The cinema-going experience has been likened to that of being in the womb and I’ll be damned if some ad exec is going to soil my cocooned existence with his (well it has to be a he doesn’t it?) filthy product, no matter how nobly and justly dressed up.

So please, let’s keep the rodents out of my local picture house.
Unless it’s a re-run of Ratatouille.

Check out the ‘offending’ advert:
http://www.prisymls.com/blog/tag/rat-poison

How they used to do it in the good old days:
http://tinyurl.com/c422hf

Gabriel Solomons