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.

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)

After our Mobile Cinema event last month we were alerted to a lovely project in the south-west. A few years ago a rusty Bedford cinema van was retrieved from a field in Devon and has been carefully restored to tour the region showing archive films.

A fleet of seven of these were commissioned by Tony Benn when he was at the Ministry of Technology in the 60s. That perspex cockpit would originally have housed the 16mm projector, beaming the image onto a screen on the van’s back door for up to 28 punters at a time. Now it seats 22, and uses HD digital projection and 7.1 Dolby sound. We want one!

Cinemas on wheels have a long pedigree in the UK, from fairground bioscopes in the 1900s right up to Highlands juggernaut The Screen Machine. Taking their lead from the kino trains they’ve often had a political purpose, whether it be the workers agit prop of Cinema Action or ‘Touring Talkies’ bringing Labour propaganda to the masses, pictured below. (Sample slogan: ‘WOMEN VOTE LABOUR – FOR THE CHILDRENS SAKE’)

A few more up-to-date examples:
- Video activists Undercurrents have got into the mobile cinema game with a refitted caravan:
- A group in Market Harborough decided against a fixed building and are trying to raise the money to renovate a portable unit;
- Flicks in the Sticks recently celebrated ten years of bringing movies to village halls across Shropshire and Herefordshire.
- and Volvo are bank-rolling a touring drive-in.

Supposedly it’s our quiet time, but there’s loads going on. Including…

> 7INCH no.38 – Old-school gaming special
Hare and Hounds, Sunday 27 June

> IT CAME FROM PEBBLE MILL – 70s drama extravaganza
MAC, 2-4 July

> GREEN MAN FESTIVAL – big-top fun
Glanusk Park, 20-22 August

Plus other possible August gigs at the Big Chill and in Manchester shaping up, more on which shortly, and I’m making a slight return to academia to give a paper on ‘cinema’s ongoing love affair with its own demise’, in Leicester in July. And remarkably enough we’ve been nominated for the Hospital 100, an annual run-down on creative Britain’s ones to watch. Make our mums proud, and chuck us your vote!

Yesterday I drove to London to pick up two hefty black boxes which contain The Mobile Cinema, starring at the Hare and Hounds this Tuesday. The word ‘Mobile’ is used quite loosely here. Although Romana Schmalisch, the artist who created it, has carted this contraption around Europe I imagine she risked life and hernia to do so.

The inspiration for The Mobile Cinema came from The New Moscow, a 1938 urban planning comedy made by Aleksandr Medvedkin. It tells the tale of an idealistic young designer who treks into the capital from Siberia to present his utopian model for a new city, a table-top diorama with intricate moving parts which have a tendency to malfunction at the wrong moment. Earlier Medvedkin had been involved in the kino-train movement, when revolutionary ideals were transported across the USSR using trains converted into cinemas and film production units, and all of this history and plenty more besides has been stirred into the mix of Schmalisch’s performance.

The Mobile Cinema can also be seen throughout June in Nottingham, Norwich and all over Scotland.

Bendito Machine III from Zumbakamera on Vimeo.

Aztec shadow-puppets discover television. No.3 of a proposed 10-part series. Whatever would Lotte Reiniger think? See also: The Fantastic World of Fantástico Morales – ‘a man with a strange nasal fluid powers’.
www.benditomachine.com

If you’ve ever been to a Birmingham Opera production in a warehouse or burnt-out ice-rink and wondered how they got such a thing off the ground, spend an hour listening to Graham Vick and it all starts to make a bit more sense. This is quite a special man. Sharp-eyed, passionate, with a very clear idea of what he wants to do and say while remaining bracingly honest about the doubts and contradictions of being an opera-director. He clearly loves his job, and his enthusiasm is hard to resist. ‘I want you to be part of what I believe’ was one of the many lines that stood out from his lunchtime talk at the Barber Institute today. By blogging my scribbled notes below I probably run the risk of making him sound like a luvvie or a demagogue, but he is a long way from either. (more…)

Trailer for a new documentary about composer Raymond Scott by his son, Stan Warnow. Sensoria Festival in Sheffield are premiering the film next Tuesday, with Warnow talking to Martyn Ware (Heaven 17) afterwards.

Alongside Tim Burton, Kate Beckinsale and Shekhar Kapur there’s a chair on this year’s Cannes jury reserved for Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi – but no one’s likely to be offended if he doesn’t show up. The Cannes invitation was extended as a gesture of solidarity towards Panahi, who has been under arrest since 1st March. It isn’t fully clear what he’s been charged with, but some reports have mentioned allegations that he was making an anti-government film in his home. Over the next few days there are scores of screenings of Panahi’s films going on around the world, and as a small Birmingham contribution we’re putting on his 2006 World Cup docudrama Offside at Maison Mayci in Moseley on Wednesday. (It’ll probably be busy, so show up a little before 7 if you want to see it.) Elsewhere in the UK, there are screenings on Tuesday at the Star and Shadow in Newcastle and the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. Here are a few links for further info:

Free Panahi facebook page and twitter feed;
iranhumanrights.org report on his condition;
Huffington Post writeup

This is the same Jafar Panahi who was held in handcuffs and leg-irons by US immigration officials at JFK airport in 2001. Who’d be an Iranian filmmaker?

Today we went for a curry in the Big Bulls Head with artist and animator Ian Emes. He is best known for creating the visuals for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon tour, but his jumbled CV also includes Oscar-nominated short Goodie Two Shoes, Comic Strip film The Yob with Keith Allen and most recently kids TV series Bookaboo. Ian grew up in Erdington and studied at Birmingham College of Art where he was turned on to the likes of Oskar Fischinger. It was matinee encounters with Flash Gordon at the Odeon Kingstanding – one of the stars of our recent bus tour – which turned him into a filmmaker. Look out for a selection of his work as part of a 70s show at Ikon Gallery this summer.