We’ll be up at Press Play in Newcastle this weekend, taking part in their closing do along with People Like Us and Warp Films. Seeking something playful to fit the bill we encountered the work of Al Jarnow, a self-taught animator who has been plotting his own special path from a Long Island attic for over thirty years. His first commercial gig was a ‘Y For Yak’ film for Sesame Street, and he went on to make over 100 films with the Childrens Television Workshop including this futuristic 1979 riff on Powers of Ten (please excuse the pixelvision):

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.

Birmingham Jazz, who worked with us on the Sunrise score at Flatpack back in March, are presenting another live film treat at the mac in a couple of weeks. The Oyster Princess is a 1919 romp directed by Ernst Lubitsch, better known for his more sophisticated 30s comedies but here taking the mickey out of high society with lashings of slapstick and inventive camerawork. The music comes courtesy of 14-piece Belgian outfit The Flat Earth Society, and tickets are a snip at £7/£5.

[Info and tickets]

A couple of images from our summer travels – Paul Shallcross playing the piano at Green Man and a candle-lit 7inch at Islington Mill in Salford.

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

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.

We’re off up north tomorrow for a little show at Islington Mill in Salford. It’s an old cotton mill which has been converted into various things including artists studios, a gallery, a venue, a self-run art school and a B&B; comparable to our own Custard Factory but with a different ethos. Looking forward to exploring the place and playing some holiday films, including this from local boy Ian Gamester:

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

**Stop press**
Just confirmed that Gruff Rhys and Dyl ‘Goch’ Jones will be at the Green Man Festival this weekend to talk about Separado!, the documentary they made together about Gruff’s long-lost relative. René Griffiths is a poncho-wearing, Welsh-singing troubadour from Patagonia, whose story inspired Rhys to trace the historical links between Wales and the Argentinian badlands where many of his ancestors emigrated in the 19th century. The film is a real charmer which throws spaghetti western, Celtic dance and super 8 into the mix, so if you’re at Green Man get down to the film tent! It’s showing on Friday at 7:30pm, and full info on the 7inch Friday night lineup is here. The festival has sold out but the film is also showing in plenty of other UK cinemas during the next couple of months, and a DVD is in the works.

PS: Regular Birmingham viewers, please note that the film is back at the Electric from 20-24 August.

Birmingham’s love of threatened species and the soon-to-be-demolished has manifested itself again in a flurry of Central Library activity. Last night VIVID in Digbeth unveiled a new multi-screen video installation by Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry, filmed in the guts of the building on empty Sunday afternoons. It’s called Inbindable Volume, and runs until 21 August.

A group have also formed around the notion Project Brutal, aiming to celebrate the library ‘before it’s too late’, and this week Lucy McLauchlan has been painting a bird mural on the side of the building.

[via BiNS]

This might also be a good time to revisit the documentary about the man who designed the thing, John Madin, back when he had the world in the palm of his hand. This film helped inspire the writing of Catherine O’Flynn’s new book The News Where You Are, featuring an architect whose legacy gets demolished. And finally, when/if they do start knocking it down perhaps someone would like to film a sequel to this:

Birmingham timelapse from 7inch cinema on Vimeo.

PS: In anticipation of the big clear-out, there are some good film-books going cheap on the fourth floor at the moment.

The Bioscope is a font of useful information on silent cinema, delving comprehensively into neglected corners while also alert to new developments and events. It’s run by Luke McKernan, Moving Image Curator at the British Museum. Having not visited for ages here are some of the things I caught up with today…

> A tasty-looking silents festival in Berlin which kicks off tomorrow;

> The extended Metropolis is on at the BFI next month, as well as various archive events as part of the Long Live Film season;

>A potted history of football in silent film;
>A Muybridge exhibition coming to the Tate in September;

And most excitingly, news of the Strobotop Lightphase Animator, a hand-held optical gizmo which works along the same lines as Jim Le Fevre’s Phonotrope. The Strobotop was designed by Rufus Butler Seder – he also created the ingenious Scanimation books – and if I don’t restrain myself I’ll end up ordering at least 10 as presents.

The final Hospital Club 100 has just been announced, highlighting established and up-and-coming people across the UK’s creative industries, and we appear to be second in the emerging film category. Sandwiched – as it were – between Emily Blunt and Carey Mulligan. Most surreal. Many thanks if you voted! There’s more info in The Independent.

Stan Morgan worked at BBC Birmingham for over 20 years, a scene hand on the likes of Boys From the Blackstuff and All Creatures Great and Small. After he left he retrained in photography at Wolverhampton University, and then returned to Pebble Mill shortly before the building closed down to capture these behind-the-scenes shots. My abiding memory of the place is that it felt a bit like a polytechnic, so it’s nice to see shots of the Archers studio looking like a shabby 70s seminar room. A selection of the images will be on show next to the cinema at mac, alongside the aforementioned weekend of drama delights.

Stan died last year. His son Stephen took the portrait above and is keeping the photography flame flying. He has a show opening next week at the Wapping Project Bankside in London.

Images by Stan Morgan courtesy of Birmingham Library and Archive Services.