Fancy helping out at Flatpack? This year’s festival runs from 23-28 March in venues all over Birmingham, and the whole thing wouldn’t be possible without hordes of dedicated volunteers. (See a nice writeup from one of last year’s team here.) Responsibilities will include front-of-house, venue installation, technical support, marketing and bar work, and all volunteers will have the opportunity to make good use of their festival passes. If you’d like to get involved, please drop us a line at info@7inch.org.uk with your contact details before 15th February.
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Written by Louis MacNeice while sat in a house in Birmingham in 1935.
Mike Johnston made a pilgrimage there last week.
It’s very easy to get tunnel-vision when you’re planning a festival. I find myself muttering lists of things to do as I trudge the slushy pavements of Birmingham, narrowly missing lamp-posts while mental spread-sheets blur my vision. Perhaps it’s a good thing then, that we’re off out of here for a couple of days next week. We’re taking part in a really tasty-looking event called Kino Climates in Rotterdam, a gathering of film venues and programmers from all over Europe. We get to sleep on a boat, and Paper Cinema are coming along with us to do their magic cut-out thing. On the way we’re doing a night at the Nova Cinema in Brussels, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. All very exciting, and if possible I will try and leave the mental spread-sheets at home.
PS: If you’re wondering what the heck is going on at Flatpack this year, fear not! Further details will follow very soon.
A bit of advance notice… one of our partners at this year’s event is Sheffield Doc/Fest, who will be hosting an intensive two-day pitch workshop at the Bond in Digbeth right at the beginning of Flatpack (23-24 March). If you have a documentary project which you’re touting about, this could be an excellent chance to develop it and explore different funding avenues alongside other filmmakers and with feedback from two UK commissioners. The course is led by marketplace specialist Christina Burnett (Wide Eye Pictures), costs £30, and is open to filmmakers based in the West Midlands.
To express an interest, email Doc/Fest Marketplace Producer Charlie Phillips via charlie@sidf.co.uk with a one-page proposal for a factual/documentary project (single, series or cross-platform doc) and brief information about yourself. Projects can be at any stage of development, for any platform, as long as it is a factual project. The deadline for applications is Friday 5th March. > http://sheffdocfest.com/view/pitchworkshops
I did a piece for the current issue of Electric Sheep. I’m posting it here not just out of vanity, but also because it’s about a film which we’ll be showing at the festival…
Ian Francis, one half of Birmingham’s 7 Inch Cinema and programmer of the Flatpack Festival, describes the experience of discovering an intriguing short film on a friend’s computer one night.
It starts in blackness, punctuated by single-frame glimpses of a ceiling. There are lights, girders, high windows, and as we descend we see basketball hoops. The gaps between frames diminish until we are spinning rapidly around the gym. When we hit floor level we seem to be surrounded by easels. We slide towards one of them and on it is an image of the gym with another easel at the centre of the frame and so on. We continue to zoom towards and into these images, and our trajectory across the gym becomes increasingly complex. The easels begin to move, converging with each other and with us. All the while a queasy clamour of electronic noise has been building up.
It is tempting to try and work out where the join is between film and photograph, even though it has been made clear from the start that we are watching a series of still images. I began to question whether this gym actually existed. Then I started projecting people into the space, a flash of a figure stood in the corner. Before long the analysis dried up and I let the film take me where it wanted to go; continually changing the pace and improvising new variations within the limited rules and geography that it had set for itself, in the way that the best, most manipulative techno music does. The effect is giddy and sinister at the same time. It’s a simile that often gets applied to cinema, but there can’t be many films that take you this close to the sensation of a rollercoaster ride.
Ten minutes well spent. After the euphoria came the urge to contextualise, to hunt down a back-story, to google. The film is called Spacy, and was made in 1981 by Takashi Ito. Is there a print that we could show? (Yes, Light Cone in Paris have it on 16mm.) And how was it created? (From 700 photographs.) And who is Mr Ito? (A professor at Kyoto University. He made the film as a student.) Already Spacy is becoming domesticated. Do we need context? Will a heavily footnoted essay on its contribution to structuralist cinema – or indeed this article – help us to appreciate its power? Probably not. In an ideal world this is a film that would be delivered Lost Highway fashion, an unlabelled cassette in a brown envelope on your doorstep one morning.
A two-disc anthology of Takashi Ito’s work is released by Image Forum on 18 December. Spacy will be screening at Flatpack Festival in Birmingham, 23-28 March 2010.
