Wild Side: evolution goes to the movies
Shrewsbury, 4/5/12 July
This summer see the launch of the Shift_Time festival in venues all over Shrewsbury, and they've asked us to rustle up a selection of films. It's a festival of ideas which uses Darwin's thinking as a starting-point, and the work we've chosen is loosely themed around nature, evolution and mutation...
SATURDAY 4 JULY
Igloo Pavilion, Quarry Park, Shrewsbury
11am : Bugs and Beasts (dir: various, 60 mins) Cert: U
A swarm of animated shorts featuring creatures of all shapes and sizes. Includes resourceful insects (The New Species), singing seals (Lights Out), and Sergei Ryabov’s award-winning The Tiny Fish. Suitable for all ages; part of the Travelling Picture Show tour. Free entry.
2.30pm : Shift_Time shorts (dir: various, 75 mins) Cert: PG
Selection of shorts and artists’ films with a focus on evolution and mutation. There’s surreal animation by Nicole Mitchell and Ben Wheele, the birth of the universe in Jani Ruscica’s Evolutions, and a man from the wilds of Scotland describes his vision of nature in Origin of the Species (Ben Rivers). Then Felix the Cat gets scientific in the 1923 cartoon Felix Doubles for Darwin. Free entry.
4.30pm : Microcosmos (dir: Nuridsany & Pérennou, France 1996, 80 mins) Cert: PG
This unique documentary offers a close-up look at the creatures inhabiting one meadow on a sunny afternoon. Starring a troupe of dancing caterpillars, a very persistent beetle and two snails who can’t keep their feelers off each other. Free entry.
6pm Shift_Time shorts (dir: various, 75 mins) Cert: PG
See above.
8pm: Eyes without a Face
(dir: Georges Franju, France 1960, 90 mins) Cert: 15
As darkness falls over Shrewsbury, Darwinian horror comes to Quarry Park…
Disfigured in a car-crash, a young woman wanders the hallways of her isolated mansion wearing a porcelain white mask. An expert in skin-grafting, her father becomes obsessed with reconstructing her beauty through a series of sinister experiments. This influential chiller features a score by the late Maurice Jarre, and DJs from Birmingham’s speakeasy cinema Outer Sight will be setting the tone beforehand. Free entry.
SUNDAY 5 JULY
Igloo Pavilion, Quarry Park, Shrewsbury
11am: Bugs and Beasts (dir: various, 60 mins) Cert: U recommended
See Saturday for details. Free entry
SUNDAY 12 JULY
Old Market Hall, Market Square, Shrewsbury
2pm: Tabu
(dir: FW Murnau, USA 1931, 83 mins) Cert: PG
The final film by legendary director F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise), a splendid vision of doomed young love made with Scottish documentarian Robert Flaherty and a cast of Polynesian non-actors on the island of Tahiti. £4/£3 concessions.
7.30pm: The Entangled Bank – a night of film and music
(dir: Various) Cert: 15
“Reading The Origin of Species was so dazzling that I lost what little faith I had left.”
- Luis Buñuel
The theories of Charles Darwin have been credited as a key influence on the flourishing of surrealist film and art in the 1920s. Prime exhibits on show at this special closing event are three films made in 1928: Buñuel’s ‘call to murder’ Un Chien Andalou; Man Ray’s L’Etoile de Mer; and Len Lye’s hand-drawn debut Tusalava. We’ll also have pioneering work by Ladislaw Starewicz, Jean Painlevé and Jan Svankmajer, and live cello accompaniment by Bela Emerson. £4/£3 concessions.
