The movie which gave the band their name, a lurid omnibus chiller with Boris Karloff nearing the end of his career…

…And Shane Embury from Napalm Death has hand-picked one of his favourite video nasties, Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. Expect shonky dubbing and spectacular gore.

If you haven’t been visiting the events section of this site you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s nothing going on in 7inchland. Far from it. Tomorrow we hit the road for the Green Man festival once again, supplying kids matinees to the bleary-eyed masses and teaming up with Ghost Box on the Friday night. (See Julian House’s splendid flyer, above).

The following Saturday night we’re showing films for the opulent Lost Picture Show at Shambala, and then it’s full steam ahead for the Black Country. From 1-4 September we’ll be helping to bring Home of Metal’s summer to a close with the Metal on Film weekender. Tickets are now on sale at the Light House, and there’s a taster of some of the shorts on the Flatpack blog. In the meantime we’ll also be overhauling both our websites, laying some foundations for Flatpack 6, and planning for a special event on freelancing at the end of September – drop us a line if you’re interested in taking part.

At the top is pianist Paul Shallcross, who drove all the way from Brecon to accompany the inspired vandalism and acrobatics of Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton. Below is his appreciative audience. Watching all these rapt young faces taking so much pleasure from something nearly a century old, I wondered if we could get Michael Gove to make silent comedy compulsory for all five year-olds. I was also reminded of a 1954 book called Children and Films: A Study of Boys and Girls in the Cinema, by Mary Field. The effect of cinema on young audiences was a hot topic at the time, and Field travelled around the country using infra-red photography to capture children’s reactions to particular sequences of film. The two images below are of matinee audiences in Barnstaple and Chippenham, both enjoying a moment of ‘Anticipated fun’.

With thanks to Pete James, and Janet Brisland.

It’s basically a potted history of civilisation, filmed in a Bagpuss style in their back-yard over several months. We’ll be showing the full film at the Hare and Hounds next Sunday.

This 1999 animation by Jonathan Hodgson is showing at next week’s Footnotes event, part of a clutch of shorts adapted from poems or short stories. It’s based on a Charles Bukowski tale and features the melt-making tones of Mr Peter Blegvad.

Alongside the public TV commissions Jarnow continued to make his own work, informed by a deep fascination with maths and geometry, and like the best experimental films each one follows an idea to its natural conclusion. Celestial Navigation begins by charting the movement of sunlight across his attic wall, and winds up on Salisbury Plain exploring the shadows cast by Stonehenge. Shorelines creates visual music with hundreds of seashells, and Cubits is a head-spinning fugue for lovers of logic built around one rotating cube:

We’ll be showing some contemporary work in a similar vein as well as a couple of earlier films that helped to pave the way, including the mixed-media sketches of Robert Breer, and there’ll also be a flipbook competition on the night with a chance to win a fabbo dvd of Jarnow’s work recently put together by US label Numero Group.

PS: There’s also 10 minutes of the Separado Q&A at Green Man up on youtube.

CREAM/EGG (Short Film) from Ian Gamester on Vimeo.