We lost two brilliant Japanese filmmakers within two days last month, one of them far too soon.

Kihachiro Kawamoto (born 11 January 1925, died 23 August 2010) made atmospheric puppet films. He was inspired by Eastern European animation and apprenticed with Jiri Trnka in the 60s, but his work was heavily immersed in the culture and mythology of his home country. One of my favourites is The Demon, a chilling five-minute short from 1972 based on an ancient folk-tale (below). A selection of Kawamoto’s work toured the UK in 2008, and if it doesn’t return it’s well worth hunting down one of the short film collections on DVD – either from Kino or the slightly more extensive Japanese release.

Satoshi Kon (born 12 October 1963, died 24 August 2010) was one of Japan’s most distinctive anime directors, steering well clear of the genre’s cliches to create elaborate but very personal films including Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers. He tended to jump between gritty Tokyo reality and bizarre dream worlds, most notably in Paprika – one of the best things we showed at Flatpack no.2 – and was making robot fantasy The Dream Machine when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May, aged only 46. He wrote a candid and very moving letter shortly before he died, published posthumously by his family.

It was very sad to hear of Alan Plater’s passing last week. A writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue whose theatre and TV career spanned over 40 years, and a lovely man by all accounts. I first discovered him as a kid because my dad was obsessed with The Beiderbecke Affair, and A Very British Coup is also well worth digging up on DVD. If you’ve got an hour to spare there’s an extensive interview with him at the British Library’s Theatre Archive project.

Alan Plater had a long association with BBC Birmingham, and you can see two of the films he wrote for them at mac this weekend. The first, Land Of Green Ginger, is a 1973 Play For Today which used an evocative Hull street name for its title. It was the first time Plater had been given free rein to to write a film set in his hometown, and includes choice lines like “Bugger shopping. I was only going for a bag of sugar and a bit of scandal.” The second was made over thirty years later and has another distinctive title: The Last Will and Testament of Billy Two Sheds. It stars Likely Lad and Beiderbecke collaborator James Bolam, and was filmed on Birmingham allotments. The producers of both films, David Rose and Will Trotter, will be present at the screenings.

Alan Plater (15 April 1935 – 25 June 2010)

Of course this is part of a much wider meltdown for print media. In a big sprawling place like Birmingham it can be hard work getting the word out on your gig or exhibition, and it may well get harder if all the arts and listings writers vanish. Plenty of people attempt to fill the gap with DIY listings sites, blogs and mailouts, but although it’s more expensive and worse for the environment and really bloody hard to sustain I do think if this information is going to break out and reach new audiences then a printed listings mag is part of the answer. One with an attitude. Area, which launched before the summer, may be it. To cover all the city’s little scenes and pockets a publication should reflect the jumble of networks and voices that you can find online. Birmingham has a tradition of this – go hunt down 1900s back-issues of The Owl in the library, where arguments about the Boer war sit alongside writeups of the local variety shows, or opinionated 70s zines like Broadside… I know it’s the 21st century, but paper rocks! Here endeth the scrambled Friday afternoon rant.

Oliver Postgate died yesterday, aged 83, leaving behind an amazing body of work and a hell of a life. There are plenty of old kids TV programme which we nostalge over but which bore us rigid after 10 minutes on dvd. Thanks to the artistry and story-telling and fun that went into them, Clangers and Bagpuss and Ivor will always be a class apart. We look forward to foisting them on future generations for many years to come, and the marvels which he and Peter Firmin achieved in a converted pig-sty should be compulsory viewing for any filmmaker bemoaning their lack of funding.

Less familiar and equally of note (in a more grown-up, messy way) was Postgate’s own story; his crackpot inventions, his conscientious objection during the war, his tumultuous family life, and an abiding sense of inadequacy which he used as a motor for his work and talked about with candour on Desert Island Discs last year. It’s a bugger to track down, but do read his memoirs Seeing Things if you get a chance. Here’s a brief snippet, from a revelation that visited him during a hospital stay in 1978:

“What hit me then was a realisation that this joy in life that drives through all things is the life that drives all things. I felt the huge engine, the driving, rolling river of life and death, of happiness and sadness, a river of which my dark fumbling life was only a tiny part, a leaf on the rapids, yet, in my realisation of it, I was part of the river itself, both a part of it and it a part of me.”

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.

A quick doff of the cap to the amazing Bo Diddley, who died on Monday aged 79. Aquarium Drunkard has a couple of MP3s (we recommend ‘Who Do You Love’, loud) and Dave the Spazz is doing a tribute show tomorrow on the reliably ace WFMU. Or click on the picture above for Bo’s 1973 encounter with a gunslinging heckler.

Although it’s a couple of weeks late, we felt we should mark the passing of one of British horror’s finest purveyors of the heaving bodice. Hazel Court was born in Sutton Coldfield in 1926 (though this Independent obit seems to think it was Birmingham), and after getting a break at the Rep went on to various post-war melodramas before making her name on the Hammer films. Her finest hour was having her throat ripped out by a falcon in the glorious Masque of the Red Death, a film which London folk can see tonight at the Curzon Soho being introduced by Roger Corman. Afer that she concentrated on having kids and being a sculptor and died aged 82 on 15 April 2008.

(While on the subject, I have to confess to a certain morbid love of trawling the Independent’s obituary section. Amazing who you find there. ‘You’ll never guess who’s dead’, as they say in rural Ireland.)