'Flatpack Festival', Electric Sheep, Feb 2009
'"...collateral..."', Design Week, Feb 2009
'Waller Jeffs', Little White Lies, Jan 2009
'On the level', Plan B, Feb 2007
'A Brief History of...', Vertigo, Jan 2007
For press information, images and interview requests please contact: Stephanie Knox at Margaret_ steph [at] margaretlondon.com
Emma Pettit at Margaret _
emma [at] margaretlondon.com
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40 pages of verbiage, logos and nice pictures, designed by Mr Dave Gaskarth.
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www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk
Flatpack Festival
By Eleanor McKeown
Electric Sheep, February 2009
Do you remember receiving your all-time favourite compilation tape? It's the middle of a never-ending suburban summer and you've just been presented with a freshly biroed track-list: an enticing roll-call of little-known b-sides and bootlegs; an exotic list of unfamiliar names and titles. Looking down at the carefully-considered recommendations, you might not be able to sing along just yet but, instinctively, you know you're going to love it. I'm reminded of this feeling when I meet Pip McKnight and Ian Francis, the organisers of Birmingham's Flatpack Film Festival. Sitting in a cafe near New Street Station, I'm looking through copies of their exquisitely-designed festival programmes, all lovingly put together by their designer, Dave Gaskarth. They read like beautiful fanzines to rare internet shorts and breakthrough animations, to lost figures from cinema past and surreal vaudeville cabaret acts. The choices can be obscure but, like a finely-crafted mixtape, there's an inclusive and infectious enthusiasm: like friends itching to share their latest find with you.
Film graduate Ian and ex-community worker Pip first started out six years ago, putting on local film nights under the name of 7 Inch Cinema. The nights continue across Birmingham, filling pubs with eccentric bedroom animation, music video mash-ups and vintage newsreels. Building on the success of these screenings, they started to make guest appearances at festivals, showcasing their unique cinematic discoveries. Over the past twelve months, gigs have ranged from the esoteric (a weekend of knitting-related shorts at Warwickshire gallery, Compton Verney) to mass shindigs at music festivals, such as Supersonic and Green Man.
Having dipped their toes into the world of festivals (Ian also did a stint at the Birmingham Film Festival), setting up Flatpack seemed the next logical step. The somewhat unusual name came from a desire to show that ‘putting on a film-show or making your own short film is not rocket-science' but, as Ian attests, organising a festival can also be bloody hard work: ‘If this festival were available to buy as a build-it-yourself cultural happening, it would come in the kind of kit that has Swedish instructions and several vital components missing'. Working most of the year as a two-person-band from Birmingham's cultural hub, The Custard Factory, it is clear that Pip and Ian dedicate a huge amount of energy into making Flatpack a success. They certainly achieved their aim with the first two editions of the festival: a wonderfully eclectic blend of film shows and live acts, which attracted audience members from as far away as Israel. However, after the second festival in 2007, Pip and Ian grew fed up with ‘hand -to-mouth funding' and made the ‘big decision' to take a year out. Ian tells me that they concentrated their energies on finding some stability and creating a ‘three-year plan' for the festival. Having secured UK Film Council funding during their break, 2009 sees the return of the festival and what Ian describes as a ‘step up in ambition'.
Although pleased to have safeguarded the festival, Pip and Ian are keen to keep the festival as ‘unschmoozy' as possible. They seem refreshingly adamant about not compromising their vision or falling into the trap of becoming too industry-focused. The tenacity of Flatpack is much-needed at a time when so much festival and cinema programming is dictated by distributors. Ian and Pip want to move beyond the usual festival-going demographic and love the idea of people stumbling across the screenings by accident. They have planned installations in shops throughout the city - a paper-trail of screen-based artworks - that aim to draw in unsuspecting shoppers, workers and tourists.
Given this dissident streak, Pip and Ian are particularly attracted to the eccentric entrepreneurs of early cinema. The patron saint of this year's festival is Waller Jeffs: Birmingham's answer to Mitchell & Kenyon. A cinematic impresario, Jeffs staged a series of film seasons (1901 - 1912) at the city's Curzon Hall, with live sound effects and a menagerie of novelty acts (‘Unthan, the Armless Wonder' and ‘Cyrus and Maud and their Educated Donkey'). Flatpack will kick off at Birmingham's Town Hall with a selection of Jeffs' films, accompanied by a fifteen-piece gypsy folk band, The Destroyers. Throughout our conversation, Pip and Ian speak excitedly about the ‘wild west atmosphere' of early 1900s cinema: a time when everything was new and anything was possible; a time when the audience had no boundaries and would openly react to screenings, rather than sitting in reverential silence.
This sense of drama and interaction crops up throughout the selection for Flatpack 2009, particularly in the children's programme. Based on the Dada idea of ‘Exquisite Corpse' (that's the game of ‘consequences' for the less art-historically minded of us!), there will be a chance for groups of children to make and pass on short segments of film for others to complete. Pip and Ian themselves are particularly looking forward to Paper Cinema, a live-action treat which sees illustrator Nic Rawling moving paper cut-outs in front of a camera, making fairytale films before the viewers' very eyes. After Flatpack, the children's programme will be touring Midlands' schools in an attempt to move beyond the limited pool of children attending art-house cinemas.
Setting is also a vital component of the Flatpack experience and Pip and Ian have devoted a lot of energy to finding exciting new venues for this year's festival. Bringing in local set design students, they are currently decking out a dilapidated warehouse and hoping to commission murals to compliment their street art film strand that includes: the award-winning Megunica, which follows Italian artist Blu; In A Dream, a portrait of a legendary Philadelphian mosaic artist; and Who is Bozo Texino?, a film about railroad graffiti which was an impressive sixteen years in the making.
Pip and Ian evidently have big plans for the festival, hoping not only to raise the cultural profile of Birmingham, which, they say, needs to be better at ‘shouting about its achievements', but also by creating a gathering point for people to experience film in a new and exciting way. And yet, when I ask them directly to sum up Flatpack, it's not easy to get a direct answer. As Ian says: ‘We've had a job explaining what this festival is, even to ourselves at times'. It cannot be summed up in a neat, ‘marketing speak' sentence. The programme is radically eclectic and, simultaneously, pleasingly cohesive. Like the perfect mixtape, the choices jump from era to era and genre to genre, yet perfectly segue into each other. You're not quite sure how or why the selection works, but that is what makes it precisely so magical.
WALLER JEFFS
by Ian Francis
Little White Lies, January 2009
"Our horses did gallop and no mistake, even if they were only coconut-shell hoofbeats... And as for gunfire, what barrage could be worse, or better as the case may be, than two excited kiddies flogging a piece of linoleum with sticks for all they were worth?" - Waller Jeffs
William Goldman's old maxim about the movies - ‘Nobody Knows Anything' - was never more apparent than in the wild west period of the 1900s, before proper cinemas came along and promoters were willing to try pretty much anything to get people through their doors. Whether you were visiting a town hall, a canvas booth at the fairground or an empty shop-unit with brown paper stuck to the windows, film-going was a haphazard multimedia experience; one which might well include bearded ladies, light opera, gun-shots at stage-right or even an exploding projector. Waller Jeffs was the son of a London doctor who made his way into the film business via magic lantern shows, and cut his teeth working for the notorious shyster A.D.Thomas of the Thomas-Edison Animated Picture Company. (Any relation to famous American inventors, entirely invented.) After his boss went bankrupt in 1901, Jeffs embarked on a series of seasons at Birmingham's Curzon Hall which swiftly became a fixture on the city's cultural scene.
‘Catering to every taste except the vulgar' the publicity proclaimed, and from the start he was clearly hell-bent on capturing the respectable end of the market. Copious endorsements from civic dignitaries and clergymen, competitions for ‘juvenile scholars' and free tram tickets with the price of admission were all strategies for luring a middle-class audience from the suburbs, a crowd still wary of the corrupting properties of this new medium. In the absence of a star system the name above the title tended to be that of the promoter, and Jeffs' genial chops could often be seen plastered all over his own posters. He was a familiar face about town too, filming parades and sports events which would then be used to drum up an audience for the next week's show: ‘Come and see yourself on film'. Alongside the first tentative stabs at science-fiction, melodrama and travelogue these ‘local features' would take their place in the two-hour programme, and in cinema's infancy they were often the most popular attraction.
Until a few years ago this was mainly hearsay from old newspaper cuttings, but then in 1994 some builders found three sealed metal barrels in a shop basement in Blackburn. Inside were 800 rolls of nitrate film, original negatives from travelling filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon who were commissioned by showmen around the UK to film local people and events. The Mitchell and Kenyon collection may be old news now, but the films continue to amaze. Across a century, kids stare out at us with thumbs tucked in waistcoats. Glide on a tram along Morecambe front or through the middle of Belfast. Mundane everyday stuff, from another world. Look up the M&K film of Birmingham University on YouTube, and in the opening seconds you'll see a bespectacled top-hatted man walking quickly backwards, trying to get out of shot. This is our man Jeffs, orchestrating the scene.
These films were not received by their contemporary audience in reverent silence but with wisecracks and shouts of recognition, while a compere's narration set the scene. The role of public hall promoters like Jeffs was to create a sense of drama, in his case using musical accompaniment, live sound effects and novelty turns. What film-going experience would not be enlivened by the addition of acts like ‘Unthan, the Armless Wonder', or ‘Cyrus and Maud and their Educated Donkey'?
By the end of the decade, publicity for the shows takes on a more anxious tone. The novelty of seeing everyday or exotic places flickering on the screen had begun to wear thin and audiences were demanding new stories to get their teeth into. With hindsight we can see that the early showmen had their business model the wrong way round, buying films and renting venues when the real money lay in owning your venue and renting your films, guaranteeing a regular turnover of product. The arrival of purpose-built cinemas helped to sound the death-knell and in 1912 Waller Jeffs was forced to cancel his run at Curzon Hall. A few years later he was managing a cinema in Stratford-on-Avon for somebody else, his name no longer above the title.
We put on film events, with a misguided business model which Mr Jeffs himself might have recognised. Daydreaming about his shows helps to make film weird again, conjuring up a parallel cinema where kids are still banging on lino to make gunfire.
Curzonora, a celebration of Waller Jeffs featuring The Destroyers, launches the Flatpack Festival on 11 March at Birmingham Town Hall.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF 7 INCH CINEMA
by Ian Francis
Vertigo, January 2007
Dear Vertigo,
Winter greetings from the second city. I'm sat in a cafe scribbling this, when really I should be writing brochure copy for our next festival. Still, it's nice to have an excuse to wallow in the past now and again...
The seeds for 7 Inch Cinema were sown nearly ten years ago. I was working at a 'proper' film festival when a vanload of lottery-funded a-v equipment arrived which nobody knew how to run. This strange new world of ansi lumins, female XLRs and magic folding screens opened up the possibility of non-cinema screenings, and the freedom to put on a mixture of shorts and music compiled from submissions and diligent web-surfing. On leaving the festival this was the avenue I wanted to pursue, and a group of us started up a regular night at the Rainbow pub under railways arches in Digbeth which quickly picked up a good following. The Birmingham Post called us "scruffy avant-garde". All manner of DVDs started landing on the mat. 7inch events offered a gather point and a test-bed for sketches and experiments that might not otherwise get seen or heard, an alternative to polished shorts made with one eye on a TV career.
As we went along, we realised that all this was nothing new. Cinema had been here a hundred years before, in empty shop-units and on patches of wasteland. Come and see yourself on screen. A film, a conjuring trick, a musical turn. Of course, a pub can be a terrible place to show films. There's a filmmaker sat at the front chewing her fist over the lack of image contrast, while at the back of the room people are merrily blethering away. Don't even think about screening Stan Brakhage. On other nights, though, something seemingly quiet and difficult will stop the whole place in its tracks. The real joy is being sat in the middle of your audience, getting instant responses and frequent requests. (Setting up a filmtent in a field one summer, an eight year-old boy poked his head through the door - obviously a repeat attender from the previous year, 'Are you going to show the one with stick-men having sex?') It often feels like the film are a pretext, a conversational gambit. Look at YouTube - where films and clips offer a social lubricant, a million campfires to gather round. Soothsayers conclude that the programmer's days are numbered now that everyone can devise their own entertainment schedule, but the job of sifting for good stuff and putting it in context has not gone away. There's just a lot more people doing it now.
In the interests of taking 7inch onto a bigger platform and developing this strange hobby into a job, we ended up running our own four-day festival. Flatpack launched in early 2006, and included such delights as the Vladmaster Experience (a roomful of 3-D viewmasters clicking in unison); a tribute to sound artist and goofing-off guru Henry Jacobs; Mitchell and Kenyon films with live klezmer scores; events in various basement bars and warehouses and even a few cinema screenings. In our cheesier marketing moments we would call it 'Film, and then some', or 'A hundred niches for the price of one'; the idea being that everyone has their own obscure defining passion, and that there's no reason why a film festival can't gather together knitters, skateboarders, rail enthusiasts and computer boffins. And get them all doing Heavy Metal karaoke. In some ways we've come full circle, once again chasing after disinterested distributors and wading through funding applications. Weird things continue to plop onto the mat, though, and the magic screen is still going strong. Missing a few of its poppers and layered with the debris of a hundred sticky floors, but fully capable of putting on a good show.
Ian Francis is a film programmer and promoter, and has been running 7 Inch Cinema with partner Pip McKnight since 2003. Find out more about past event and future plans at www.7inch.org.uk. The second Flatpack Festival takes place in Birmingham from 1-4 February 2008, and you can find the programme online at www.flatpackfestival.org.
