Thanks to having our heads in a festival-planning hole, other Birmingham film-related stuff has passed us by over the last few weeks. Here’s a brief post to help rectify that…

FILM DASH
Thursday 11 March at the Electric
The second edition of this 48 hour film challenge just wrapped up, and the results will be on show at the Electric tonight from 7pm.

WM FILMMAKERS FOR HAITI
Saturday 13 March at the Edge, Cheapside in Digbeth
Fundraiser featuring shorts, promos and DJs.

FILM RATS
Thursday 18 March at the Sunflower Lounge
Regular evening of films and performance, now transplanted from Selly Oak to a new venue in town.

Submissions are also still open for the Shorts on Walls event at Flatpack – get your animations to AFWM by 18th March.

There was a programme on radio 4 this morning about memories of Fort Dunlop, that impressive slab of a building you see from the M6 coming into Birmingham. More info here, and it’ll be on iPlayer for a week.

We’ve also been enjoying a series of postcards posted by Joyfeed, sent by his grandparents after they left the Fort to go and work for Dunlop in Japan.

Apparently this was somebody’s AS level art project:

[via @AnimateProjects]

The usual pre-Flatpack tumbleweed on this blog. Just posted a brief summary of what you can expect in the festival over here – full details online in a fortnight.

Happy noo year. Been watching quite a few films about movie-going recently, and came across this three-minuter which the Coens made for the 2007 Cannes film festival:

Sort of reminded me of ‘The Day of the Premiere of Close Up’, with Nanni Moretti losing sleep over the box-office reception for a Kiarostami film. (On youtube, but only in Italian I’m afraid.) And on a similar tack, in this article Mark Cousins talks about showing ‘The Red Balloon’ to hordes of kids in northern Iraq when filming his documentary The First Movie.

Here are some of the images created on Alex Mackenzie’s rayogram workshops while he was in the UK recently, including a few made at VIVID on 15th November. (No sound.)

While you’re consuming your bodyweight in minced pies and mulled wine over the next few days perhaps raise a glass to Birmingham’s Electric cinema, celebrating its centenary on Sunday and almost definitely the oldest cinema in the UK. Earlier this month the current owner Tom Lawes staged a whistle-stop tour of the building’s last hundred years, from its early days as a news theatre (with punters including George Bernard Shaw) via soft porn intrigue in the 70s and 80s to the carrot-cake-and-Tarkovsky era in the 90s and finally its somewhat more upmarket current guise.

I first encountered it as an arthouse fleapit, and cherished memories of being on the dole in Birmingham are all wrapped up with drizzly Tuesday afternoons watching double-bills along with three or four other punters. Its survival seemed to defy the laws of capitalism. But then as the centenary event made clear, 47 Station Street has led a remarkably enduring, chameleon-like existence as it shapeshifted from Electric to Select to Tatler to Jacey to Classic to Tivoli and back to the Electric, while all around it bigger, sexier cinemas have bitten the dust.

This shot is from the 30s Tatler period (not Prohibition-era Chicago, believe it or not), when the cinema shot its own newsreels. We got a tantalising glimpse of original footage from their launch event, and an insight into the building’s creepier side thanks to a letter from an employee who worked there in the 50s. At that time there was a mortuary next door, and he was told that during the war the basement had been used as a store for dead bodies. He also recalls attempting to wake a punter at the end of the night and finding that he had shot himself. “My happiest years, and I hope the cinema always is there.”

I am pretty crap at best-movie lists and end-of-decade summaries but if you got me in an armlock and forced an answer out of me, I would have to admit that Terrence Malick’s The New World is my favourite film of the last ten years; one of those transporting experiences which come around very rarely. None of the writeups I’ve read since have done it any justice, but John Patterson – one of our finest film writers – nailed it on Friday.

Endless film-hunting for Flatpack at the moment, and this was a nice smack in the face this afternoon. (Gracias to Cartoon Brew.)

As usual at this time of year our blogging and listings have tailed off horribly. If we weren’t so distracted we’d be telling you about stuff like the Endless Supply film screening in Digbeth tomorrow, or maybe even our own gig on Sunday.

A couple of blurrycam shots from last night’s Wooden Lightbox performance by Alex MacKenzie at Vivid. During their flying visit we were able to introduce Alex and his partner Clare to the joys of the Bartons Arms, and on their return to Vancouver they’ll be informing the local elders that any self-respecting World-class City™ must have a German christmas market and ferris wheel. (Though I think they probably do free concerts better over there.) In the meantime you can catch the show in London, Bristol, Glasgow or Oban. Recommended.

We’re very proud of our shiny new sign, specially made for us by the lovely Holly Fuller. Here it is in pride of place at the office, and in action at the recent Travelling Picture Show gala.