2008 is slipping through our fingers, and we’re in nostalgic mood. Well actually, I’m supposed to be writing copy for the Flatpack brochure and will hungrily grab at any distraction that comes along. This is unlikely to be in human form as it seems that I’m the only bugger in the Custard Factory today, so I thought I would shuffle through the last 12 months from a 7inch point-of-view…
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At the last 7inch event we showed a brief clip from 1981 Indonesian horror flick Mystics in Bali, by way of a taster for a full screening at Flatpack in March. The response since has been so striking - ie, numerous people saying ‘what the hell was that?’, ‘you’ve infected my dreams’, etc - that we felt that we should spread the joy a little further. If you like the look of it, the dvd is available from Mondo Macabro. And this Thai advert for Sylvania lightbulbs is a handy primer on East Asian bogeymen:
We moaned at them for not having a website, so it’s only fair that we toast the arrival of Birmingham International Film Society online. Looks nice too. Their last show before the Christmas break is Bahman Ghobadi’s Half Moon, about a Kurdish musician attempting to play a gig in Iraq after 35 years in exile. [spanish trailer]
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.”
We’re not generally in the habit of handing out techy tips on this site, but thought this was useful. Youtube have decided in their wisdom to add a big ugly search box to embedded video. Happily someone has already worked out a way of getting rid of this by adding &showsearch=0 so that your embed text goes from this:
embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/HgSRiJjmnYY&hl” type etc…
to this:
embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/HgSRiJjmnYY&hl&showsearch=0″ type etc…
And your video reverts from fixed to not-broken:
Oh joy, now we just have to go back through all our old youtube clips and add this code.
With thanks to Troy Schneider.
**Update**: They’ve ditched it already. Hooray.
This week a new show opened at the Ikon gallery. Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools gathers some of the reams and reams of video footage which New Zealand artist Lange shot on his visits to schools in Birmingham and Oxfordshire during 1976 and 77. As he went along he screened his work back to the pupils and teachers who he was filming, sparking off a dialogue about documentary and how the kids saw themselves being represented onscreen.
If you happen to make it down there, pop into the Ikon shop and you can pick up a copy of the Landmarks booklet which 7inch produced last year. This is a record of a project we did around another chronicler of Birmingham life, TV documentary maker Philip Donnellan. Although the two never worked together, they had a similar willingness to involve their subjects in the work they were making. (In fact, Donnellan got in trouble at the BBC for inviting some union employees he had filmed into the edit suite at Pebble Mill.) You can also download a pdf of the booklet from the Landmarks project page.
There were two full houses for the climax of our archive tour in Pershore and Worcester this weekend. A blow-by-blow account can be found in the photo diary. A big thank you to all the venues for their support, and to all the nice people who came along. Apologies to those who we had to turn away; if there are any extra screenings in the new year we’ll post the details here.
This little skit by Coventry-based animator Qianqian Liu was cooked up during the recent Digitoons masterclasses run by the Brothers McLeod. It has picked up nigh on 100,000 youtube views already (including the usual flood of considered and illuminating comments) and can also be seen at the Hare and Hounds this Sunday as part of the Housewives’ Choice night.
Our pitiless conquest of the media continued last week with a spot on Midlands Today about the Worcestershire on Film tour. Many thanks to all those who wrote in and pointed out that the footage included a couple of shots of Ludlow; please rest assured that all rogue Shropshire elements have been removed. And if you would like to catch the tour before it ends, can we recommend the screening in Pershore this Saturday 22 November at 2pm? Thanks to an on air plug from the BBC we are expecting a veritable swarm of people for the 7pm show the same day in Worcester - so if you want to avoid disappointment either get in the queue early, or get down to Number 8.
