Michael Haneke is one of the dozen or so most important film-makers working in the world, a position that has recently been cemented with his latest National Socialist fable The White Ribbon securing the Palme D’or, the ultimate in art film auteur cachet. Haneke has been likened to ‘Bresson meets Hitchcock’ in terms of his stylistic preferences, thematic preoccupations and the austere tone and mood of his films, given that such a simile invokes two of my all time favourite film directors you’ll not be surprised to hear that I’m a big fan. In preparation for the release and extended run of The White Ribbon at the NFT along side a retrospective of his films including the obligatory Q&A, another coup as Haneke is very busy promoting his film worldwide and working on his new script, I thought I’d check out a few of his early films that I hadn’t seen, specifically the first two entries in his so called glaciation trilogy, The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video, both of which in his trademark sterile, challenging and emotionally assaulting fashion address the alienation of bourgeois society, leading inevitably to emotional then physical violence, in each film a shard of our meagre, empty, vacuous society spiralling into destruction and ruination – just how inviting does that sound eh? But before we have a laugh with his early Austrian work lets tackle his latest work The White Ribbon, a first for Haneke on two fronts, it’s his first historical film and the first shot with a startlingly crisp monochrome black & white stock, at the very least the film is ravishingly beautiful to ingurgitate within.

North Germany, 1913. Through the framing technique of a future narrative voiceover provided by the village schoolmaster a strictly Protestant rural community is brought to life in all its cruel, immutable glory as a series of disturbing events assault the denizens of the village. The doctor is injured as his horse is felled by a cable strung between two trees, the baron’s harvest crop is mutilated by a disaffected farm worker, the barons young son is kidnapped and viciously beaten, all infractions conducted by an unknown assailant or perhaps assailants. Recriminations and accusations begin to maturate in the festering environment as certain inhabitants are denied labour and sustenance, insights into the emotional and physical cruelty that is putrefying behind the closed doors of the village are incrementally revealed – the Pastor psychologically tortures and physically beats his children for the most minor of infractions, the doctor is conducting a sordid sexual relationship with his housekeeper, the villages children are developing and maturing in a purlieu that will inevitably frame and rivet their world views, their ideology in a poisonous concoction of god fearing obedience, rigid intolerance and casual brutality for a coming epoch, a generation that will be further defined by the first world war which is announced as the film draws to its efficacious close.

This was, as you can imagine, on a rainy and overcast London Sunday afternoon two and a half hours of subtitled, black and white hilarity. Seriously though it this was a challenging and thematically dense piece of work as expected, a film that demands repeated viewings which I ‘enjoyed’ but I did find it a little overrated, Haneke’s refusal to provide any sort of traditional neat resolution, of mysteries being solved, of narratives being hermetically sealed to provide some complaisant satisfaction can be frustrating as anyone who’s seen the Chinese puzzle box of voyeurism and surveillance Cache knows. That is not what Haneke is about, he loathes what he sees as such manipulative and cynical filmmaking to assert that all the answers are possible, that life and society are so neat, rational and ordered. The beautiful black & white photography serves I suspect as a metaphor for both the villagers fixed, rigid world view and the usual framing device of a period film, the isolated community of course providing a Petri dish to be observed, studied, considered, dissected. The title refers to the garment that the children are forced to wear after a minor infraction of the communities puritanical values, a symbol of public shame and stigma inflicted on the impressionable adolescents which echo a similar practice with the Star of David some twenty years later when the transgressors, as adults, are in a position to return the cruelty in a terrifyingly amplified fashion. There is some gentle grace and humour, some fissures of decency in Haneke’s vision, the schoolteacher makes hesitant romantic advances toward the shy nanny of the Baron’s children and there are even a couple of laugh out loud lines when he visits his amours father to seek his permission for marriage, however the pervading atmosphere of isolation, paranoia and imperceptible threat is what will haunt you long after the final credits have rolled.

The Q&A was unsurprisingly cerebral although Haneke wasn’t quite the completely dour, serious, professor type that you’d expect from his films, heck he even cracked a joke of sorts by complaining that the air conditioning on stage was cold before wryly adding ‘and no, that temperature isn’t coming from my cold, frigid film-making’. So, he has got some sense of humour. In a sense. Anyway, moving on, in a detailed ninety minutes host Geoff Andrew unfurled a detailed analysis of Haneke’s oeuvre, beginning with the aforementioned, Austrian set glaciation trilogy, proceeding on to the wider European phase of Haneke’s career where he started collaborating with some of the leading acting talents in Europe in films such as Code Unknown, The Time Of The Wolf and scathing The Piano Teacher (which incidentally has the best screen performance, male or female, of the past decade by the exquisitely talented Isabelle Huppert) before alighting on the wider mainstream success of award winners Cache and The White Ribbon. The discussions followed his aversion to traditional mainstream film grammar and construction, how he overtly seeks to at least ask questions of what is wrong, what is missing, what is malignant in contemporary life and doesn’t seek to provide any answers which he asserted are not within his purview to provide – it was no surprise that he revealed he almost entered the priesthood when he was 14. An almost exasperated Haneke bemoaned how his entire career contains less violence then one minute of the latest Hollywood blockbuster – an accurate if almost clichéd observation – but you have to consider his mastery of off-screen space and frequent technique of obscuring the horrors in his films that are far more effectively conjured by our own imaginations – the casually brutal murder in Benny’s Video, the child’s beatings in The White Ribbon, the rampages in both versions of Funny Games- stentorian flourishes which culminate in a far more terrifying pursuance than the casual gunplay and pretty fireballs emanating from Hollywood, one can only humorously speculate on just how disgusted his reaction would be to a double bill of the Crank movies. In true film analysis mode Geoff Andrew pointed out that he had only recently realised that all the couples in Haneke’s films are called Georg and Anna (or variations thereof), Haneke explaining that names are unimportant and he doesn’t agree with the artistic notion that a characters name in fiction can in some sense provide a character trait, an indication of their interior monologue and motivations, he plucked those ciphers from a phonebook.

I do recommend seeing any of his films, I’ve not seen the largely overlooked The Castle or 71 Fragmented einer Chronologie des Zufalls (which I understand is his most diffused and fragmented film with no discernable plot to speak of at all) but his other work, if you’re in the right frame of mind for some genuinely challenging, genuinely rewarding viewing then he can’t be bettered. I absolutely adore, if you’ll excuse the expression, how he fucks with convention and expectation to deliver such arresting films, his finessing of the cinematic medium with its components of voyeurism, complicity and subterfuge synchronising with his the themes and obsessions – guilt, dysfunction, violence, isolation – that saturate his work. I have to say that The Seventh Continent is the most depressing film I’ve seen for years, the joyous tale of a bourgeois Austrian couple deciding for no overtly explained or communicated reason to destroy all their possessions and then kill their child, then painfully kill themselves, events rendered more disturbing by the information that Haneke based it on a true story he read about in the papers. Nice. If you’re interested in finding out more then he cannot recommend this article highly enough, it’s amongst the best film writing I’ve read all year and provides a magnificent context for delving into the dysfunctional world of the Austrian auteur.

To the NFT Studio - sorry, BFI Southbank Studio -yesterday, to see Terence Davies’  2008 poem to Liverpool.  Narrated beautifully by the writer-director himself  – alternately funny, moving, angry (never have I heard such venom injected into the phrase “curling irons”) –  it uses archive footage and sweeping landscape shots, classical and classic pop music to devastating effect.

As the credits ended, the Hairy Muse laughed: “I didn’t know I was taking you to see a great, big poem!”

Because a poem it was.  Not just because Davies quotes from Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Eliot, Larkin – and probably loads more writers that I missed – but because his own writing is so prismatic and affecting.  I loved the deft images: “radios brown as Hovis” and the use of what must be texts from the Catholic Church.  And his rapt, intense voice….

Wonderful.  We walked out over Waterloo Bridge afterwards, with new eyes for our own city.  The crowd of cranes around St [pauls and the Square Mile, the tethered river barges.  The people in the wind, with their flash cameras and their scarves.  The uplit Shell Building.  That crazy Eye.

Ah London…

One of the greatest cinematic love affairs of the past half-century has been between British film fans and an angular, accident-prone beanpole of a Frenchman named Monsieur Hulot. The iconic comedy character created by the mime-turned-star and writer-director Jacques Tati has been tickling the funny bones of filmgoers since the release of the movie which introduced him – M. Hulot’s Holiday – in 1953. And it’s a love affair which is being celebrated at this year’s French Film Festival, with a retrospective of all of Jacques Tati’s screen work.

Tati may only have made a handful of films, but they have made a lasting impression on generations of viewers – and it’s not just the popular vote which they’ve earned. His admirers have included Orson Welles, David Lynch, Steven Spielberg and Belleville Rendez-Vous creator Sylvain Chomet who is currently transforming a previously unfilmed Tati script into an animated film.

Tati’s brilliance as a comedy actor has influenced at least two generations of comedians: John Cleese, Paul Merton and Rowan Atkinson, who described seeing M Hulot’s Holiday as “a defining moment in my life” (and paid homage to it in his 2007 film Mr Bean’s Holiday), are just some of the British comics who owe a clear debt to Tati and his very physical comedy style.

But what is it about Tati that makes him so well-loved – even by viewers who wouldn’t ordinarily go to see a foreign film? The main reason has to be his “everyman” appeal. Tati created easily identifiable types who everyone can recognise from their own experience – the postman who takes himself and his work too seriously in his 1949 film Jour de Fete (could he have been the inspiration for Cliff Clavin, the super-officious mailman in the sitcom Cheers?) and the eager-to-please social misfit M Hulot, who creates chaos out of order and is baffled by the technological trappings of modern life.

M Hulot’s fellow holidaymakers are also brilliantly drawn and would fit in to Fawlty Towers as comfortably as they do the Hotel de la Plage. There’s the veteran soldier who drones on about his wartime experiences, the meek, middle-aged sweety-wifey of a husband who is always several steps behind his banality-spouting spouse (“Oh, there’s another boat … and another … oh!”) during their saunters around the beach, and the workaholic businessman whose holiday is punctuated by frequent trips to the telephone (rather like the Tony Roberts character in Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam).

The humour in Tati’s films is very physical – and therefore universal. Tati said that the way a comic actor used his legs was paramount, and he used his to maximum comedy effect, mixing loping strides with hesitant little shuffles as he tries to ingratiate himself into new people’s company. Physically, M Hulot is every bit as recognisable – even in silhouette – as Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp.

The characteristic Hulot pose is of him tilting forward, with his head at a quizzical angle, his hat tipped over his eyes, his ubiquitous pipe at a right angle to his long nose, his arms bent behind him with his hands resting on his hips. Like Chaplin’s alter ego, he always wears the same kit – trousers that aren’t quite long enough, his Tyrolean-esque hat and stripy socks. He nearly always has his umbrella handy. He walks with a lolling gait, on well-sprung tiptoes and is undoubtedly a French cousin d’un certain Basil Fawlty.

Tati’s background as a mime meant that he was most at home devising visual gags, rather than writing and delivering one-liners or trading witter banter with another actor. Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python team member who became a director, has said: “One of Tati’s great qualities is that his films contain almost no dialogue. I find this particularly brilliant – these divinely French films that create no problem when it comes to subtitling. In terms of dialogue, Monty Python learnt everything from Tati. We owe everything to him.”

Tati’s films feature soundtracks of exaggerated, cartoon-like noises which heighten the effect of the visual comedy – the putt, putt, putt of M Hulot’s old jalopy as it chugs along the road, the be-doing of the restaurant door as the motley crew of hotel guests assembles for lunch, the crashing noise made by our hero’s racquet as he serves in the funniest tennis match in movie history.

The gags which Tati created for his films worked on a number of levels. Many of today’s Tati fans have grown up with M Hulot’s Holiday and have found that their appreciation of it has only increased with time, as they find more and more humour in it.

There’s the obvious, laugh-out-loud slapstick sequences, which appeal enormously to children, but most of the humour lies in the beautifully observed, often whimsical, details which are not flagged up, but are quietly unfolding in a corner of the screen. It pays to see Tati’s films in the cinema as so much happens in the background – and he actively avoided filming close-ups. Orson Welles once said: “There are performers who are only good in full figure. Move in on Tati and he literally disappears.”

Of course, the films also appeal to anyone with a fondness for France and the French way of life. They celebrate the quaint, the eccentric and a lifestyle which Tati saw being replaced by a faster, more consumer and technology-driven one. Jour de Fete and M Hulot’s Holiday are lovely to look at, since they are set in unspoilt rural France, and they move at such a leisurely pace that you can soak up the detail of both the comedy and the setting.

Terry Jones, another Monty Python graduate, has said of Tati: “He was a visual genius. His films, without being silent, all have the qualities, the beauty and the richness of silent film.”

Even by the time he made his third film, Mon Oncle (1958), Tati was beginning to show signs of self-indulgence in his work. His subsequent films – PlayTime (1967),  Trafic (1971) and Parade (1973) – are reviled and revered in equal measure. But Jour de Fete and M Hulot’s Holiday are perfect comedies that showcase Tati’s comedy at its most pure – and most appealing.

* The Totally Tati retrospective is on at the Glasgow Film Theatre and the Edinburgh Filmhouse now. The BFI’s new box set of five Tati films is out now.

I went to a place in space-time yesterday that was lovely, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The spatial co-ordinates were familiar ones in London & Birmingham and other parts of the UK but we shifted down the timeline to the 1940s watching films in the BC collection held by the BFI.

So it’s a world that’s very familiar, a place that you’ve heard about and seen pictures of, but never actually been to. My parents and grandparents saw it first hand but I never will – and neither do I wish to – not to be churlish, but I do believe in progress, although that doesn’t mean I think we should forget or lose everything from the past. Looking at treasures like these helps us see what’s on offer, how things used to be done not so long ago and consider bringing some of them back to life in a 21st Century context. I’d love to call that being a “progressive revivalist” but because of connotations that both words have acquired, that makes me sound like a religious sex nut, which I’m not, so let’s not go there.

The viewing experience was strange. Al and I were shut up in a small room with a Steenbeck film player – we were given a quick introduction to how to set up the 35mm film and the key controls for playing, rewinding, changing volume and getting the picture “in the rack” (a bit like twiddling the vertical hold button on your old TV set)

We had to call the technician back after my first pathetic attempt to do it on my own which resulted in several feet of film lashing free because I’d basically put the reel on upside-down. I had visions of the room filling up with unleashed celluloid, and a hilarious cartoon entitled “The man who trashed the British Council Film Archive” but I managed to switch it off before calling for assistance and no harm was done except to my pride. Al was in charge of loading film up for the rest of the day.

We started with The Lincolnshire Poacher – a little animation set to the folk song of the same name. Just how this piece, celebrating the catching of a hare in the moonlight and other general outlawish behaviour fits in with something like The English Criminal Justice System escaped me. I suppose it’s a picture of the British (or at least the English) as pragmatic anti-heroes pluckily outwitting the rest of the world… perhaps… What grabbed my attention more though was the rhythmically pulsing white lines on the left hand side off the moving image. It was the soundtrack. There’s no separate magnetic recording here, just a bit of the film given over to an optical analog representation of the soundtrack which is read by a sound head and presumably very slightly out of synch to account for the distance the film travels through the projection equipment before it gets froom the light source to the sound head. Fantastic.

The whole day became a reminder of the impact of digital technologies. Who knows or cares about how sound is packaged up in a video file now? But with these films you can see it, actually see the recorded changes in sound. Like being able to go down into the groove of a record and see the undulating landscape over which the needle travels. Analog approaches to the problem of reproducing sound somehow seem much more clever than digital ones, perversely enough, because they are actually easier to see.

And so the theme that emerged as we watched was how far we have built our current society and culture on abstract representations. Everywhere in these films we saw men (and women during wartime) making stuff, making useful things out of natural materials.

“Men Who Work”, about the Austin plant at Longbridge in Birmingham, shows the peak of industrialisation that doesn’t rely on the use of plastics – everything is wood and leather and metal and glass and the focus is almost entirely on the manufacturing process – the only management task shown here is the accounting function. And even then we see women manipulating huge typewriter/cash-register/calculating machines to produce a spreadsheet of wages for the week and the production line stuffing pound notes, half-crowns and sixpences into little pay packets for the workers to pick up at the end of the week. At this time, there were 19,000 people employed at Longbridge and the total payroll cheque is shown at just over £85,000 (so an average of less than £5 per person per week).

Writing now brings up the frustration of this project. Ideally, I’d want to illustrate each of these ts by showing you the frame that’s sitting in my memory, but that would require a great deal of other work. The digitisation of all of this material is important so that we can share not just these films as social objects but also individual shots and story lines for us to talk about and discuss our reactions.

Also watched in this session were:
“Women in Wartime” about the WVS before it became the WRVS. “Little Ships of England” showing wartime work in an unnamed shipyard in the West Country. “Learning for Life” about the pre-Education Act state school system, “Papworth Village Settlement” which has nothing to do with heart disease as I’d originally thought but turns out to be about a TB colony in Cambridgeshire with lots of insights into community and attitudes to illness and work. “City Bound” and “London 1942″ show how London kept calm and carried on in the early days of the war. “For all Eternity” is a soporific trip around the cathedrals of England and we finished off with “Ulster” which combined tourist information with some oblique references to the loyalty of the province, no doubt something that would be very interesting to those with a better grasp of Irish history and politics than I.

Certificate – tbc; 99mins

Released – 16^th October 2009 [BFI London Film Festival]; 12^th February 2010 (UK)

Directed – Tom Ford

Written – Tom Ford (screenplay), Chistopher Isherwood (novel)

Starring – Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode

Awards – (Colin Firth) Outstanding Performance Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2010; (Colin Firth) Volpi Cup, (Tom Ford) Queer Lion, Venice Film Festival 2009

Vehemently steeped in the sixties – sublimely curated by the set design team of TV’s Mad Men – Tom Ford’s directorial debut is an adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name. A Single Man triumphantly portrays the isolation felt by George Falconer, (Firth) a middle-aged man living alone and ambling towards his silver years, in the aftermath of his partners’ tragic death.

Ford’s perfectly executed debut swathes with not only heart-warming and comic beat, but accomplishes Falconer’s brief moments of joy and attachment with people and his surroundings amongst the anomalous, almost ‘washed up’ perception he has of his life. This is managed simply through the parity of colour saturation throughout the film; for the large part, the colour appears dreary and insipid, yet when Falconer is drawn towards the youthful beauty of his late partner, Jim (Goode) in flashbacks, or of his student Kenneth Potter (Hoult) the colour literally imbues the screen.

The way in which Falconer visualises both Jim and Kenneth – which can in an almost roles-reversed effect, be mistaken as a Laura Mulvey-coined “male gaze” – is one that tries to establish Falconer as psychologically powerful over his young objects of desire, yet it simply unearths how ardently lucid and needy he is of their attention.

Firth’s performance is stellar and undoubtedly deserving of more than just Outstanding Performance and Volpi Cup at film festivals, whilst Hoult has hung up his drug-addled life of the disaffected youth in Skins and has held up a respectable enough grasp of the American accent. Moore’s limited though comic screentime is unfortunate, but is not discerning as it feels absolutely necessary to drive the film forward.

Ford’s efforts here do not go unnoticed. In fact, one could be forgiven for expecting A Single Man to have been his own personal story, when in fact it is one that evidently struck so close to Isherwood. Whilst, in 2009, we can watch, in awe and unflinching, the frank, sympathetic and moving portrayal of a gay protagonist, one wonders how controversial the novel would have been at its publication in 1964.

Inevitably, A Single Man in an unexpected precious and thoughtful delight from the man who led Gucci to a multi-billion dollar valuation. His eye for style and perfection has been duly noted and with a limited US release this December, he will perhaps be destined to raise an Oscar next year.

Lloyd and I spent Wednesday deep in the basement of the BFI, watching various British Council films. Most of them were from the 40s; most of them were, in one way or another, rather wonderful. We’re going down there again this Friday, and will be writing about it all in more detail over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here’s some initial on-video thoughts about what we’ve seen so far – brought to you in authentic FORTIESvision! And I’ve also tried to catch the rather wonderful Steenback machine we were watching the films on.

Film of London and Londoners from 1927.

• BFI: Merger proposed for flagship film bodies
• Screendaily.com: UKFC and BFI merger proposed
• Variety: U.K. looks to merge UKFC, BFI
• Bigger Picture Research: Some thoughts on the UKFC and BFI merger
• BFIwatch: UKFC and BFI merger proposed

British Film Minister Siôn Simon made the announcement August 20, 2009.

Mondays.

Most associate them with work, a return to a grind or another numbing expanse until the next two-preceding-Monday-days get here. I’m lucky. I associated this Monday with catharsis.

***

I’d like to give you all the elements that make an event: the initial idea; the months of planning; the meetings on meetings and emails on emails; and I’d especially like to give you the backstage meetings, handshakes and interesting asides that arise in being backstage but that would ruin the mystery and this review now wouldn’t it?

***

After welcoming everyone backstage and front, we all took our seats in the – without hyperbole – well-crafted, elegant, wooden Hall One of King’s Place in King’s Cross. The Guardian’s home seemed fitting since on the furthest right of the stage sat Philip French, The Guardian’s film critic.

To the left of him sat John Mole, Nick Drake, Kaleem Sheikh, Jay Visva Deva, Terence Davies and Lucy Tregear.

I was surprised at how much each speaker could fit in to their ten minutes and surprised that my enjoyment didn’t wane.

John Mole began proceedings with readings of his own poetry and recollections of his own film encounters. John’s always entertainingly warm and welcoming – I chuckled softly to find out that where he grew up they used to play films on a continuous run so that if you came in late you can carry on watching and catch the minutes you missed. He followed that up with his poem ‘This is Where We Came In’ – a run at the ambiguity of movie-dates. Endearing though it was, I wish I could have heard a more emotionally, physically tense version that wasn’t so many names dropped but fingers felt. His ten minutes were a welcome personal start to what would be both educational and almost overwhelming in its scope next.

Philip French gave ten minutes of what he saw as the history of poetry in film. His early definition veered away from poetic cinematography and toward actual text but, even after that, he managed to make example after example of exemplary films wherein poetry is used. He asked Lucy Tregear to read a few of the poems from the films he talked about and her readings were alternately funny and frank.Lucy would continue to read poetry for many of the speakers throughout the night.

I was honestly blown-away by the depth of Philip French’s knowledge. His style too helped – he seemed to be rolling this off the tongue. In his Northern-England inflected voice was a real sense of appreciating the intertwining of the two forms, much like the examples he gave. A deserved huge round of applause from the near 200 audience gave Philip’s ten minutes its end.

Next saw Nick Drake discuss his Best Australian Film award-winning film, ‘Romulus, My Father’.  Nick Drake isn’t the ghost of or the conspiracy location of the now very dead folk-singer but instead a lovely writer I’ve worked with many times.He also teaches where I work making me a little bias but having heard him read poetry before, seen him talk on film now and having just talked to the man – I know Nick knows his stuff. I have tried for the past hour to obtain his film through torrents and libraries but fear I may have to settle on the original book because his description of how he as a poet wrote the film script was so gut-wrenching that I now really want to see ‘Romulus, My Father’.

Next Jay Visva Deva and Kaleem Sheikh showed us film clips, played us songs and talked in depth about how in the times before Bollywood and now in contemporary Bollywood poetry is indistinguishable from Indian cinema. Poets have been drafted in to write the songs of films since the beginning of Indian cinema – I was interested to hear that some of the first filmmaking took place in India in the late 1800s. These clips – including Barsaat [Rain] and Mother India of which I’d seen – plus Kaleem’s reverential knowledge were enough to encourage me to later ask Kaleem if he had ever written or composed any poetry for screen. “He has done more than that, young Gwalchmai. He is a singer.” Jay smiled out, sipping his wine.
“A singer? Will you sing us something Kaleem?”

He did. I have never had the good fortune to hear Urdu poetry sung in person before. I often consider myself a fortunate man. Monday was no exception.But back to the event and not what came after – for those things are for those that were there.

Next Terence Davies came into the spotlight and told us ‘I remember , at the age of ten, opening my text book at the teacher’s request and turning to a poem that would later be the first of many poems I fell in love with. This was it…’ He then read, but didn’t read. He had no text in front of him but dramatically recited, word-for-word ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyse. Terence Davies has a somehow seductive voice. Perhaps it was this quality that caused the entire audience to clap so loud and some to stand when he’d finished with the flourish ‘…and it’s that simple when making poetry in film’.

I then had to leave in order to do manager things but thereafter a Q&A took place for 20 minutes.

The feedback we got told us the Q&A needed to be longer. I wish I hadn’t missed it.

***

I know my review is bias.

I know it seems like I might write no bad thing about it because I organised it but, you’ll know, if you’ve ever been ‘the manager’, you know what goes wrong and how badly it goes wrong. You know what the atmosphere is like because you’re still a little nervous about whether or not it’s any good as you sit at the back gauging the audience’s responses. This time I think everyone enjoyed it – I know that I did even though I was nervous.

If I had to pick favourites it would be Nick Drake’s underplayed account of how he as a poet approached transforming the original novel of Romulus, My Father [which in its own right is an eulogy] into a script and Philip French’s in-depth talk. Both seemed to give me a little of the man and a little of their processes.

***

That Monday night – once all was done – saw catharsis cover 30 minutes, 4 glasses of wine and one ale. After the busiest three weeks of my life, I think I may have deserved them and thankfully only had to pay for one.

The British Council’s film making golden age lasted from the 30s to 1946, when its production capabilities were transferred to the newly created Central Office of Information. It had – as previously noted – a very clear sense of mission, as this comment from a 1969 internal summary of its film making activities shows:

During the war the Council embarked on the sponsorship of documentary films – some 90 in all – designed to illustrate and explain some of the cultural, scientific and educational experiences of the British people and to enable those in other countries to form some idea of their way of life.

These films were designed to reach very speicific audiences; and those audiences come out very clearly in the 1946 reports on British Council films. First of all, there were the specialists. Key among these were doctors and other medical staff. An unnamed British Council operative records an Eastern European showing of Accident Service:

This film was shown to a medical audience of approximately 200 persons at the Chief Military Hospital in Belgrade on Sunday 3rd February. A running-commentary was given in Serbo-Croat by Dr. Milos Simovic. Very great interest was taken in this film and a second showing will probably be asked for.

These medical films seem to have been part of a very specific communications effort that combined propaganda with education. Writing in 1947, then BFI Director Oliver Bell comments approvingly that the British Council has helped create a trend in medical films, while a 1950 Treasury assessment notes that these films are:

[valuable demonstrations of] the technique of surgical operations for limited audiences of specialists. The extension of anaesthesia in Italy, for example, with the consequential dependence of this specialisation upon British methods and equipment, would not have been possible without the aid of films…

Such formal engagement was not limited to medicine. British Council films achieved broader educational goals; here’s a town planning example. Writing in 1946, Margaret Travis – Assistant Secretary of the National Film Society of Canada – comments that Development of the English Town is:

[a] good film of historical and topical interest. Used on many programmes in conjunction with the American film The City for showings to civic and town planning groups. Also with New Towns For Old.

Farmer’s Boy was also much enjoyed. Jerusalem’s Functional Officer (he of the enthusiastic penguins) noted that:

This film has been appreciated by agricultural teachers and pupils as well as by the general public. I consider this somewhat of an achivement! More please.

while the Council’s Accra representative had no doubt of its educational usefulness:

A very good film, of great interest to the people of West Africa, where agriculture is a major question. Is calculated to encourage a return to the land, much needed here.

Of course, not all the films were for specialists. Many reached much wider audiences. Here’s a notably polyglot example from D. H. Adams, who thoroughly enjoyed showing Cambridge in Kabul:

This film is an absolute winner: it has been very much appreciated by all types of mentality, Afghans, Turks, Egyptians, Greeks, Czechs, English & Americans. The little talks by the dons are good and particularly that of the Provost of Kings. Personally I always delight in showing this film but naturally I am somewhat prejudiced!

Belgrade seemed to be a good place to show films; the representative there describes audiences of 150 people. And such film goers would have been treated to more than just documentaries. When shown in the Middle East, Local Government benefitted from ‘having an authority on the subject answer questions afterwards’; in Nairobi, Market Town was also accompanied by a talk (and shown twice!).

But not all viewers were enthusiastic, or even engaged. Here’s the previously enthusiastic Adams of Kabul, running into problems with a game of cards while showing Distillation:

The business with the playing cards seems quite unnecessary: the thing is perfectly clear without that. Presumably the film has not been produced for morons! As far as Afghans are concerned it introduces an unfathomable mystery into the whole thing as they have never seen playing cards – I had to waste a lot of time subsequently trying to teach them ‘Snap’ which they thought silly anyhow.

British Council representatives from South America to China complained about the lack of local language versions, while the irrepressible Major Cathcart Bruce of Malta submitted multiple rants about sound:

As I have repeatedly emphasised in reporting on other films, the background music is much too loud, in many cases spoiling the spoken commentary. This applies to this film under review. Why oh Why! cannot the musical background be toned down to pianissimo when the Commentator speaks? This is the opinion of many of our members, and spoiled an otherwise good film. News reels never give us this trouble.

Taken generally, however, these complaints were outweighed by the positive impact the films had. They seemed to delight audiences from Tashkent to Tijuana; and they seemed to very successfully communicate Britishness to a very wide range of people indeed.

Archive
BFI partners with Blinkbox to broadcast classic British films online New Media Age

JISC Report: Digitisation of special collections: Mapping, assessment, prioritisation

“How are we to know that digitisation is serving the needs of the Higher Education community and is sustainable in the long-term?”
Resource Shelf

Consultations
Digital Engagement is Everyone’s Job Dextrous web
Let’s talk about Government Consultations and Write To Reply. Blog+video Jadu

Google Wave
Google Wave Use Cases: Education RWW
Google Wave and News Jeff Jarvis

Journalism
Are there too many journalism degrees? Discuss. Online Journalism Blog
Homeless but not hopeless: intern for Elle’s advice column gets $150 a month for expenses. Guardian
Court ruling ‘clarifies law on user-generated content’ Hold the Front Page

Local news reporting
Links, post its and tweetdoc for #cabinet discussion on government and #hyperlocal news Talk About Local
Report on the hyperlocal news discussion at Cabinet DCMS meeting
MPs accuse councils of producing ‘propaganda’ newspapers Guardian

Mapping
BBC: Crime, health and environment. Awards offered for map data mash-ups
Ordnance Survey Geovation Awards £10k, £5k competition details

Open Educational Resources
Yale adds ten more open courses via CC BY-NC-SA
JISC Podcast: Open Access – Harvard’s Success Story with Robert Darnton
The value of OERs is the contribution to the Commons. Talis education interview

It happens every year, no not just the London Film Festival, my incapacity to book any of the films I want to see in time.

Faced with a wall of film titles – spoilt for choice – by the time I have navigated the fullsome LFF online listings, read reviews, organised my diary, and the film press promotions has permeated my consciousness, it’s all over in a flash.

There are still some film tickets available so book now. Unfortunately the  flms I would like to see featured below are sold out but can be seen during mainstream release.

Directed by Lee Daniels and backed by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, Precious is already making waves in critical press. Possibly indicative of a new era of poignant Amercican film makinng post-9/11, signified by the capacity to for inward looking and which explore social issues in more realistic and broadly representative ways.

Personally I tired some time ago of  Hollywood’s preoccupation with black men with guns, glossy beautiful people living in mansion homes in tidy well swept streets.  I have exclusively watched US science-fiction, animation and fantasy so this one really has made me reconsider my aproach to American cinema.

Precious deals with parental abuse, racial stereo-typing, illiteracy, health and body image, and teen pregnacy, phew! It stars newly discovered talent Gabourey Sidibe alongside roles by played music stars Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz, and won the 2009 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

Metropia is an altogether more paranoid and sinister vision.  This is cutting-edge animation, a sci-fi film noir representing a futuristic European dystopia. Roger, a young swedish man, is increasingly supsicious of his corporation dominated world and the strange voices he hears inside his head. Starring the voices of Vincent Gallow and Juliette Lewis, metropia is nominated for the BFI London Film Festival Sutherland Trophy.

For all you music culturalists Burning Down the House : The Story of CBGB - a documentary film combining archive footage, photographs and interviews about the legendary rock club launched in New York’s Bowery in 1973 until its demise in 2006 (RIP!)

CBGB’s is credited as being the spirtual birthplace of punk and new wave. Live gigs where played there by revolutionary artists including Television, New York Dolls, The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and Patti Smith.

If CBGB were a television I would chuck it out the window!

Archive
BFI partners with Blinkbox to broadcast classic British films online New Media Age

Consultations
Digital Engagement is Everyone’s Job Dextrous web
Let’s talk about Government Consultations and Write To Reply. Blog+video Jadu

Google Wave
Google Wave Use Cases: Education RWW
Google Wave and News Jeff Jarvis

Journalism
Are there too many journalism degrees? Discuss. Online Journalism Blog
Homeless but not hopeless: intern for Elle’s advice column gets $150 a month for expenses. Guardian
Court ruling ‘clarifies law on user-generated content’ Hold the Front Page

Local news reporting
Links, post its and tweetdoc for #cabinet discussion on government and #hyperlocal news Talk About Local
Report on the hyperlocal news discussion at Cabinet DCMS meeting
MPs accuse councils of producing ‘propaganda’ newspapers Guardian

Mapping
BBC: Crime, health and environment. Awards offered for map data mash-ups
Ordnance Survey Geovation Awards £10k, £5k competition details

Open Educational Resources
Yale adds ten more open courses via CC BY-NC-SA
JISC Podcast: Open Access – Harvard’s Success Story with Robert Darnton
The value of OERs is the contribution to the Commons. Talis education interview

French filmmaker Jacques Audiard receives the honour of the London Film Festival jury for A Prophet, as the LFF grants a best film award for the first time in its history.

Original, arty, and captivating… such are the words that best describe A Prophet. The festival’s jury certainly made a great choice with this film. A Prophet is a brilliant work of fiction with an incredible realistic touch.

The film came out in theaters last august in France. It will be out in UK theaters on January 15th and on 12th February in the US.

Haneke was in London a week ago to present White Ribbon at the London Film Festival. And he’s now back at BFI!

The British Film Institute is conducting a full restrospective of his work in the next 2 weeks. All his films are worth a watch. White Ribbon is part of the program but, to discover him, his original 1997 Funny Games is a must along with: Benny’s video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Change, and Hidden.

The retrospective will culminate with a conference with Haneke, on November 22nd. Be there or be square!