This creature will be unveiled in Shrewsbury’s Quarry Park this Friday as one of the headline acts at the Shift_Time festival. It’s called Anima Umerus and the man who made it, kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen, has a vision of herds of these things roaming around beaches doing their own thing. They’re wind-powered, and you can see some in action on youtube.
Every festival has a few choice acts/films that don’t come off; the trick is to be thick-skinned and keep your options open. One of those that got away when planning this year’s Flatpack was British Sea Power, who we hoped to have up with their rescore of Robert Flaherty’s windswept documentary Man of Aran. The timing wasn’t quite right, but happily it’s all come together a few months later and BSP will be performing with the film at midnight on 21 August as part of a packed film-tent programme at the Green Man festival. Taking a lead from Flaherty’s film we’ll be showing an assortment of ‘edge-of-the-world’ movies including lunar shorts and cult documentary The Moon and The Sledgehammer (trailer below). More info on the whole thing here.
In the run-up to the launch of the Travelling Picture Show tour next month, I thought I’d start posting some of the featured shorts. This cubicle romance was nominated for an Oscar this year, and you might remember the director Konstantin Bronzit from his brilliant short Au Bout du Monde.
You might remember Bibio from a DJ set at the very first Flatpack, or a magic live spot he did in our tent at Green Man last year (photo below). He’s based in Wolverhampton and makes gorgeous crackly tapelooped West-coasty electronica type stuff. Anyway, he signed to Warp recently and his new stuff is great. There are snippets to listen to on their site and if you like it please do vote for him; he’s up for Radcliffe and Maconie’s Pick n Mix on radio 2 this week.
A couple of weeks ago we had a fab time Making Do at the New Art Gallery in Walsall. Here are some photos…
Images by Naz and Oona. With thanks to Ioannis Ioannou for inviting us. [Flickr]
Digging for good stuff is part of our job description, but we did so much of it in the run-up to Flatpack that I think we blew a fuse which left us good for nothing more than cake-consumption and slack-jawed channel-hopping. For some reason the hunger returned this week, so here’s my current top 5 by way of Friday afternoon distraction…
1) Buster Keaton shorts
Bloody superb box-set of all Keaton’s shorts between 1917 and 1923. Can be got here at the bargain price of £20.
2) Cambodian pop
This was actually flavour of the office last year, yesterday resurrected by our discovery of LA-based surf-rockers and Cambodian covers band Dengue Fever. They play the Scala in London next month, and look out for their road-trip documentary Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. If you want to hear the originals - and believe me, you do - then go download the Cambodian Rocks compilation from WFMU, or a home-made alternative at The Horse Drawn Zeppelin.
3) Birmingham super prix
In anticipation of a guest-turn at the 24 Hour Scalextric being put together by Stans Cafe next month (on which, more next week), we have been delving into the history and hearsay surrounding Birmingham’s brief hey-day as the UK’s only legal city-centre street-race. This youtube clip from 1989 is nice and tense.
4) Glückskugel
Discovered for £7 in Rise, Warwick Arts Centre’s great little record shop (it’s like Fopp never went bust). One of the earliest releases by Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label, a half-hour assortment of proto-techno, quirky mood music and machine noises composed by Bruno Spoerri.
5) Roy Andersson
Currently beating Lukas Moodysson hands-down for the title of Sweden’s Greatest Living Director. Finally I caught up with Songs from the Second Floor, and like pretty much everything else by Andersson it’s ideal viewing for anyone contemplating social meltdown. Strangely enough he has also made a good living out of directing adverts - here’s a selection:
Ok, so a few things have been sneaking up on here that we should draw your attention to…
TRAVELLING PICTURE SHOW
Project page for this summer’s kids tour, following a storming weekend of matinees at the Electric. Dates already booked in Bromsgrove, Brum, Pershore, Shrewsbury, and plenty more to come;
WORCESTERSHIRE ON FILM mk2
Worcester and Bretforton, lock up your granddaughters. Actually, don’t;
MAKING DO
Walsall knees-up on 7th May in tandem with Capsule and featuring Pram, July Skies, and the Winter League. And most imminently;
7INCH no.36
Back to the Hare and Hounds, with a crate of good short stuff and guest DJ Jonny Costello. Includes Jeff Keen’s cut-up comic-book overload MARVO MOVIE (pictured above, from the ace new BFI dvd set), a taster for Jo Hamilton’s tour diary GOWN (ditto, and vimeo’d here) and Lucy McLauchlan’s timelapse mural in TACIT (embedded below). Beyond the jump I’ve pasted this morning’s emailout - to receive these as nature intended, sign up on the left.
Beat13 / Lucy McLauchlan “Tacit” from Beat13 on Vimeo.
Yikes! I just realised there’s only half an hour of March left and not one blog-post this month. Ok, so Flatpack wiped us out. She is an insatiable mistress. But we’ve disentangled ourselves for a while, and are looking forward to the gentler pleasures of 7inch. (Oh dear, that could probably be phrased better.) There is a heap of different stuff coming up in fact, on which more details shortly. In the meantime, here’s a dancing pig…
We were alerted to this bizarre piece of cinema by Vanessa Toulmin when she visited the festival a couple of weeks ago to do a talk. I’ve a feeling she said it was her favourite film ever, and who are we to disagree? It can be found on volume 3 of Lobster Films’ brilliant Retour de Flamme series.
Unfortunately we won’t be able to make this, what with a festival to organise, but you might be interested to know that Mike Figgis is up in Birmingham on 12 March as part of a series of talks called Boilerhouse Voices in the Jewellery Quarter. There’s a very good chance that he’ll be talking about digital film-making and seismic changes in the distribution and consumption of film. Tickets are £15.
During the 1970s Figgis performed at Birmingham Arts Lab as a member of experimental theatre troupe The People Show. The People Show is still going today, and their site has a nice archive of the old shows.
