A last-minute reminder that there is a 48-hour film challenge going on in Birmingham this weekend, if you happen to have three days spare. At 6pm tomorrow you get your brief, and by 6pm on Sunday you need to have planned, shot and edited your film. More details on the Film Dash blog.
Yet another thing we forgot to mention in our listings; this is an exhibition which runs until 9 November at the University of Birmingham. It’s part of a wider project where artists and writers from across Europe share their experience of the transition from dictatorship to democracy. There is also a series of Wednesday night screenings at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth to complement the show, starting tomorrow (Weds 15 Oct) at 7pm with The Lives of Others.
A belated heads-up; tomorrow (Sat 30th August) sees the second edition of Outer Sight exploding from every orifice of The Edge in Digbeth. Obscure fillums in a slightly obscure place, and well worth seeking out. This sophomore outing (sorry, have been reading Variety reviews) features plenty of warped family entertainment, lethal cocktails, 3D viewing booths and guest musical turns from Mr Simon and Mrs 7inch – who will turn into a proper DJ soon if we’re not careful. The fun starts at 9pm, let google be your guide…
Still recovering from our marathon drive home, with stop-off in Morecambe for Lancastrian tapas (?). Beyond the jump is a brief writeup of our Ballerina Ballroom experience…
You find us huddled on the foggy ramparts of Berwick-on-Tweed, halfway to the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams; a new film festival in Nairn run by Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins. We could have driven it in a day from Birmingham, but fancied a stop-off at Holy Island to see the spot where Donald Pleasance and Francoise Dorleac bickered in Cul-de-Sac. Good prep for Polanski’s next film – The Fearless Vampire Killers – which screens on Thursday at the Ballroom, amongst a programme of fillums clearly chosen on the basis of ’sod it, we like it’. What with cake, live scores, reclaimed shabby venues and Norman McLaren, the BBCD looks to be right up 7inch’s street. If we can get online at our caravan park, we might try and send you another postcard.
(…In true postcard style, this is being posted four days later from Inverness library.)
A couple of images from last week’s amazing Nosferatu rescore (with many thanks to Penny McConnell who took them and then had to wade through 4,000 Supersonic photos to find them). There is a handful of silent movies that are well-travelled and often get the live score treatment, and Murnau’s horrorshow is one of them. And yet – as Catherine Bray put it in her nice writeup – it seemed like a whole new film on Sunday. Testament to the skills of (clockwise from top left) Lucy Baines, Laurence Hunt, Hannah Baines, Grandmaster Gareth and Matthew Eaton (not pictured). They’ll be presenting the film again at Warwick Arts Centre in the autumn.
One of the speakers at this weekend’s Supersonic festival is Mark Pilkington, who edits Strange Attractor – the occult periodical and font of ‘exquisite high strangeness’. We’ve not actually laid our hands on a copy yet but it looks well good. Mark is also responsible for the Pestival event and various sound-making activities including a live score to Russian satire The New Babylon at ICA last month. Below is a short piece made by Julian House for a recent Strange Attractor event.
Though it’s a bit embarassing to be promoting this (honestly), you can if you choose blow an hour of your Wednesday evening this week hearing Ian Francis of 7 Inch Cinema talk about his favourite things at the Ikon gallery. I was pathetically chuffed to be invited to do this, being an inveterate list-maker and a big Desert Island Discs fan (especially now they’ve got rid of Sue Lawley). But once confronted with the long-awaited opportunity to bang on about stuff you like, it’s actually a bit of a headache whittling it down. I’ve gone for the slightly flippant/ random approach; and as always the David Shrigley postcard above my desk is a useful confidence-booster when preparing for public speaking…
Just booked tickets for our birthday treat, a Tuesday afternoon jaunt to London to wave down the Telectroscope and then on to see Guy Maddin’s fantabulous new documentary My Winnipeg, narrated live by the man himself. Regular viewers will know that mention of Mr Maddin’s work can get us all of a-flutter, in particular his shorts The Heart of the World and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon – we even devoted an event to them once. We’re also very fond of his book From the Atelier Tovar, a collection of journal entries and film treatments full of over-heated prose and candid accounts of his creative, financial and libidinous tribulations. Anyway, BFI Southbank are hosting a full Maddin retrospective throughout July and My Winnipeg will be perambulating the UK over the summer.
