Still recovering from our marathon drive home, with stop-off in Morecambe for Lancastrian tapas (?). Beyond the jump is a brief writeup of our Ballerina Ballroom experience…

(more…)

You find us huddled on the foggy ramparts of Berwick-on-Tweed, halfway to the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams; a new film festival in Nairn run by Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins. We could have driven it in a day from Birmingham, but fancied a stop-off at Holy Island to see the spot where Donald Pleasance and Francoise D’Orleac bickered in Cul-de-Sac. Good prep for Polanski’s next film - The Fearless Vampire Killers - which screens on Thursday at the Ballroom, amongst a programme of fillums clearly chosen on the basis of ’sod it, we like it’. What with cake, live scores, reclaimed shabby venues and Norman McLaren, the BBCD looks to be right up 7inch’s street. If we can get online at our caravan park, we might try and send you another postcard.

(…In true postcard style, this is being posted four days later from Inverness library.)

Spent an illuminating if disorientating day in Leicester yesterday, delving through Worcestershire’s past at the Media Archive for Central England. Films included some 1920s ads for local businesses produced by the Grand Cinema in Kidderminster, home-movies of floods in Worcester, news reports on asparagus-growing and carpet-making, and Chris Tarrant interviewing a man with four ferrets down his trousers. Some of this material will make its way into a tour of the county which we’re organising this autumn, and happily we’ll be able to screen archive footage of many of the venues which we’re visiting - including, pictured from the left, the amazing ‘Chinese Gothic’ of Tenbury Halls Pump Rooms, the restored Forge Mill in Redditch and the Priory in Great Malvern. More info on the project and a full itinerary can be found here.

Please be standing for Mr Bruce Conner, artist, founder member of the ‘Rat Bastard Protective Society’ and an inadvertant pioneer of the music video. A man who made speeches entirely composed of dessert names, and handed out badges labelled I Am Bruce Conner. A lot of his film work was assembled from old industrial shorts and B-movie offcuts, and until now we mainly thought of him as the guy that did Mongoloid (pictured, a cut-up classic from 1978 presented as “a documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society.”) Since he died on 7th July further digging has revealed plenty more of interest, particularly an even earlier proto pop-video called Breakaway (1966) featuring Toni Basil (of ‘Mickey’ fame, and she who choreographed ‘Once in a Lifetime’). Although much of his work was made up of other people’s footage Conner was extremely protective of his copyright, and we wouldn’t want to make him posthumously cross by embedding his films here. But you can see Breakaway in pixillated form on Google Video, and read about it at Senses of Cinema.

At the Flummoxed event a couple of weeks ago Trevor Woolery (Lonomi Productions) was dishing out flipbooks and encouraging people to make their own brief films. A surprising number went along with it, and by the end of the night even one of the bouncers was getting an animation tutorial. Trevor has since been slogging away capturing these things, and here are the fruits of his/your labours…

Flummoxed Flipbook Workshop part 1 from Lonomi Productions on Vimeo.

(More on Birmingham’s flipbook heritage here.)

There are a few more in the gallery…

A couple of images from last week’s amazing Nosferatu rescore (with many thanks to Penny McConnell who took them and then had to wade through 4,000 Supersonic photos to find them). There is a handful of silent movies that are well-travelled and often get the live score treatment, and Murnau’s horrorshow is one of them. And yet - as Catherine Bray put it in her nice writeup - it seemed like a whole new film on Sunday. Testament to the skills of (clockwise from top left) Lucy Baines, Laurence Hunt, Hannah Baines, Grandmaster Gareth and Matthew Eaton (not pictured). They’ll be presenting the film again at Warwick Arts Centre in the autumn.

Before we pack our bags for Knitflicks, here are a couple of other knitting-related things that we’ve come across recently…

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (picture above from the Institute for Figuring) - on show at the Southbank in London until 17th August. Crocheting apparently enables you to create forms impossible in 3-D rendering, and the crafts corner of high mathematics is the place to be at the moment;

Knitting at the movies - if you can’t make it out of the house this weekend, Angel Hair’s exhaustive list may give you some ideas on films to rent;

Wool 100% - the debut feature by Japanese filmmaker Mai Tominaga, this tale of a feral girl who knits obsessively is perhaps a little too full-on for Compton Verney. The trailer is worth a look though;

And finally, myself and Mrs 7inch will be playing some records at the next gathering of Stitches and Hos in the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath on Tuesday 29th July. Come and ask for some speed garage, I dare you.

With thanks to Jaygo Bloom at gabba.tv; available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Have been feeling slightly out of touch with the music video world lately, but programming for Supersonic is always a good opportunity to catch up with this stuff. Winging its way to us via special delivery at this moment (hopefully to arrive in time for Saturday) is a dvd of new Cornelius animations, amazing stop-motion and cgi work by a filmmaker called Koichiro Tsujikawa. Cornelius are already well known for their visuals, but this guy takes the biscuit - particularly his slow-building and insanely-detailed Brueghel-meets-model-railway number for Like a Rolling Stone. (The Sensuous dvd is released in September by Cherry Red.) Other stuff we’re excited to be showing… a couple of videos by San Francisco outfit Encyclopedia Pictura including their recent Bjork extravaganza (though not in old-school 3D unfortunately); crazy dead fish antics from Warp; and Matt Stokes’ distillation/recreation of the classic Northern Soul night out in Long After Tonight. Plus on Sunday Matthew Eaton and Grandmaster Gareth will be performing their new score to Murnau’s Nosferatu.

Going back to music videos — if you have any interest in the form, Antville Videos is still the best place to go on the web. On the whole it’s just people posting promos, dissing them, bigging them up. But there’s also some interesting industry chat in there too, like this thread on the shrinking-budget phenomenon. They also alerted us to an article on Michel Gondry’s 25 favourite-est music videos. And in the process of fetching those links let me know that Bruce Conner had died. Oh shit. Obituary corner coming soon…